The Shadows of Jokes

You may have heard the "Barbenheimer" phenomenon has finally reached Japan. People on Japanese Twitter--I'm sorry, "X"--have been angry. Looking at some tweets (we're still calling them tweets, right?) yesterday, I saw that indeed many Japanese people are expressing disgust. One guy argued that Japan could show just as much insensitivity to other countries with its humour. That's certainly true. There's an "American" shop near a train station here that almost exclusively sells racist depictions of black Americans.

Another Japanese user pointed out that some of the people who are the loudest advocates of political correctness in the U.S. have embraced the Barbenheimer meme. How did something like Barbenheimer happen under the nose of an increasingly politically correct American media? Well, I'd argue insensitivity is only one part of it, and a smaller part than many might imagine. The story goes back to a rivalry between the two films coming from Oppenheimer's director, Christopher Nolan, formally being a luminary at Warner Brothers, the studio that released Barbie. The fact that Warner Brothers was releasing a potential blockbuster opposite a serious dramatic, yet epic, film like Universal's Oppenheimer seemed potentially like a direct attack on Nolan by his former studio.

The real life drama spilled over to create public interest in both films, augmented by the absurdity in the contrast of the films' subject matters. Barbenheimer wasn't exactly created by insensitivity. Mashing together Barbie and Super Mario Brothers, for example, wouldn't have been as funny. Barbenheimer was a successful joke because people know atom bombs are no laughing matter.

But the U.S. has its own history of nuclear terror quite different from Japan's. In the U.S., the threat of nuclear attacks between the U.S.S.R. and the U.S. was a central part of the Cold War. Nuclear bombs were (and still are) a terrible threat that could be realised at any moment. Humour sprang from this anxiety more than contemplation of the real effects of the bomb and you can see it in things like the Fallout video game franchise or in the title of Stanley Kubrick's Dr. Strangelove or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. For decades, the U.S. and Japan were culturally remote from each other so few really imagined the actual impact of the real atomic bombs that were dropped on hundreds of thousands of real civilians. Now we're seeing how the internet is changing that, even for a country as culturally isolationist as Japan.

It's a myth that irony and sarcasm are foreign concepts in Japan. But there are a lot of humourless people who use the castigation of ironic humour as a wedge, politically or professionally. So jokes about death and suicide, in particular, do happen, but they're much edgier than in the U.S. (see an anime like Sayonara Zetsubo Sensei). But jokes about the atomic bomb are another matter entirely, a step much further beyond the pale. People might point to the use of nuclear weapons in Godzilla but it should be remembered the first Godzilla was a straight horror movie. Kurosawa Akira made a movie in 1955 called I Live in Fear (the original Japanese title translates to "Record of a Living Being") about an old man psychologically dominated by his fear of a nuclear attack. Kurosawa returned to directly addressing the topic in 1991 with the film Rhapsody in August (八月の狂詩曲) starring Richard Gere, a notably somber if conciliatory film.

On a subliminal level, a lot of Japanese art, particularly in anime, depicts massive explosions that wipe out cities. Sometimes even in a tongue in cheek manner, as in the famous DAICON IV animation. But it is rare you'll hear anyone speak lightly of the atomic bombs. Few people may be left alive with firsthand memories of the attacks but there are plenty of people whose parents and grandparents were alive at the time. There are plenty of people who lost close relatives in both attacks.

A couple months ago, a junior high school student actually asked me how I felt about the atomic bombs being dropped on Japan. I was very surprised and I praised the boy for his courage in even asking an American such a question. I thought about it and the first thing that came to my mind was William S. Burroughs satirising "The Star Spangled Banner" with the line, "Bombs bursting in air over Hiroshima gave proof through the night that our flag was already there." I told the student I thought the attacks were a terrible mistake.

I hope Oppenheimer is eventually released in Japan (it currently has no release date). I'm noticing a growing number of young people here who want to talk about World War II and the changes the country underwent afterwards. Miyazaki Hayao, I think, knew he was touching a vital nerve with his new movie. Let's hope people can contemplate these things bravely and honestly.