I always find it fascinating to hear stories like that and immediately feeling bad that my first thought is: what is the likelihood of this being an identity theft comlared with likelihood that after surviving two atomic bombs one lives up to 93 years?
Yep, a lot of superheroes were created by radiation. Dropping atomic bombs actually strengthens the enemy. That’s the real reason why they stopped doing it.
Also bear in mind that I literally say that I feel bad to even contemplate that possibility. It just feels wrong to doubt a person who tells you such tragedy.
But perhaps that's how everybody felt and might be the reason why one could actually pull off such a fake story
Did you even read the article though? I doubt his wife and child wouldn't have recognized if their father had died and someone else had assumed his identity
How haunting. I can't imagine having seen/survived one atomic bomb and then to see the same flash in Nagasaki. He must have thought the U.S. was going to sweep all of Japan. I think I'd head to the mountains.
I trust one recognises that a huge difference between a post WW2 and a Threads post Ww3 situation is that in the former the United States is at its peak and regearing its industry to rebuild Japan and Europe while in the latter the US is also a nuclear wasteland...
There seems to be this great dellusion being spread that it would not be such a big deal to not make people dissent.
You can notice it in how people reason about 'war time manufacturing' and the like in the event of a Great war. Like there would be any factories running at all. Or logistics to support brigade manouvers. Or state sized organizations.
Yeah, the sheer difference in scale (both power and quantity of bombs) between the two makes it not particularly useful to compare the outcomes. Hopefully no-one loses sight of that.
It’s been posted on HN before, but if this topic interests you, John Hersey’s famous reporting on the aftermath at Hiroshima (entitled “Hiroshima”) is worth reading. It’s essentially a short book, but the accounts laid out in the story make the impersonal tragedy into something that’s tangible. It should be required reading.
There is currently an additional special exhibition on there as well, containing first-hand accounts from survivors who were high school students at the time.
Just went there two weeks ago. The main exhibit was horrifying. The special exhibit you mention was even worse if that's possible. These kids just living their lives as written in their diaries and then the unthinkable happened to them.
Yes. A lot of students were on outside working crews creating firebreaks, so the survivor accounts tended to be along the lines of "I was sick that day, I never saw my friends again".
Would you mind talking about it a little? What you saw, how you felt, how you feel now—anything.
Like with the Holocaust memorial and the Berlin Wall, these are things that have deeply affected me to see in person and comprehend what they represent, but I came away from a better person for it in the long-term—even if it broke me mentally at the time to be there and face it.
Nuclear weapons really disturb me on a whole other level I've yet to really comprehend, especially the idea that countries continue to build them. I worry about my own mental well-being with that, but feel that it's important to understand these things better and get beyond words on a printed page or digitised celluloid. Yes, these things are scary, we should be scared of them, they do scare me, just like the still-raw history of Berlin scared me. I think we run from the idea of feeling fear too often and choose to ignore it. People forget what these things do. People forget what people do to other people. We shouldn't be allowed to forget.
I visited Hiroshima about ten years ago while on vacation with my wife. The museum presents accounts of the day and artifacts from the bombing very plainly, which by their very nature means it's horrifying. I've always had some "normal" level of fear of nuclear war. The first decade of my life was in the UK during the last decade of the cold war, so I think that planted that seed. I don't think visiting Hiroshima increased that fear about nuclear weapons though. My overwhelming memory of the day is just deep sadness that we have the capacity to do something like that to each other. I do also remember feeling some glimmer of hope coming out of the museum as there was information about the current anti-nuclear weapons movement and, apart from the Genbaku Dome, you would never know that Hiroshima was the site of a nuclear bombing based on the city today. So maybe it's possible to recover from anything.
Before that visit I felt that I could detach myself emotionally from the reality of an event like that and make justifications for the continued existence of nuclear weapons for "bigger picture" reason. Now I find it impossible to make those kind of arguments. So I think I grew up a little that day and became more empathetic to others at an individual level.
Not GP but what made me empathize the most was they didn't just have like architectural artifacts with the damage. They had written things like letters or journals. They had extremely personal accounts, some with photos, of what happened to people. The stories of extremely young children (8 years old or younger) trying to care for their parents before the parents succumbed to injuries. Kids becoming orphaned. Parents being unable to find their children. The physical results, like people's nails growing extremely oddly and totally black, skin no longer looking healthy in obscene ways.
It was honestly a bit like _being there_. Everything they have at that museum, if you have even a relatively vivid imagination, easily placed me in my mind's eye, like I was in Hiroshima for the aftermath.
Even with all this said, I'm still mostly speechless about everything I saw and read there.
I really recommend if you ever get to Japan to make some time to visit Hiroshima. Not even just for the memorial. It's actually quite a beautiful city.
(Why not? It's Japan's memorial to its war dead. All of them. Including the convicted war criminals. Visiting the shrine is seen, especially by Chinese and Koreans, as an endorsement of the war crimes. Every now and again a Japanese celebrity gets "cancelled" over this.)
There’s also a second reporting, from years later, on what some of the survivors have become.
It tells about the lifelong vaguely defined health impacts those exposed to the bomb had to live with, and how they tried to rebuild their lives after having truly lost everything and, for some of them, everyone.
What an awful experience. I can't imagine going through something like that and remaining silent about it for decades.
If you want to read a novel from the perspective of someone experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima (based on historical records) I highly recommend Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
Absolutely. I guess it's more fair for me to say I can't imagine what it's like to go through something so traumatic that I wouldn't talk about it for decades. Lucky to not have personally experienced anything like that
Reading this is truly harrowing. It makes me also realize how truly deplorable Putin is for constantly threatening to recreate such a situation for his own personal gain. Seems to me that people like him haven't read this persons account of what it was like.
Still wounded and heavily bandaged, Yamaguchi returned to work on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed.
That is the greatest example of Japanese work ethic and the harsh expectations people can be put under.
> It makes me also realize how truly deplorable Putin is for constantly threatening to recreate such a situation for his own personal gain.
I don't think Putin is doing this for his own personal gain. I think the majority of Russian leaders in Putin's place would probably have taken a similar course of action. Maybe not threatening nuclear war, but definitely having a similar Ukraine policy.
Was anyone else bothered by how Oppenheimer declined to show even a single scene of the devastation that was caused by dropping nuclear weapons on Japan?
I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.
It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.
No, it didn't bother me; Oppenheimer himself never saw the devastation, he only could imagine it. It seems suiting for what the film was doing, to focus on his inner emotional state.
Yes, and I'm sure the director had that perspective too - that it would have been weird to show a cutaway scene across the world. I suppose just the lack of depicting any human consequences of the bombing was what irked me, I think it could have been done creatively if he wanted to.
I for one was not bothered — the film up to that point had exclusively portrayed Oppenheimer‘s subjective experience in life. To showcase the footage you’re talking about would have meant showing events Oppenheimer did not see, but was certainly able to imagine enough that they affected him deeply — which is what WAS depicted in place of the footage.
While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.
That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.
I can understand the artistic choice to portray everything from Oppenheimer's mind / point of view and to not actually show the devastation, but like you I was bothered by how it was done with the bomb drop and also the complete lack of portraying the Nazi threat. Oppenheimer lived the entire war at home and never actually saw the bomb dropped. But it seemed disingenuous to me to show the power of his imagination when contemplating the universe so powerfully at the beginning of the film, then never portray his comprehension of the Nazi threat or the devastation his weapon would have caused. The closest they got was him imagining it in the room with the crowd, but that hardly did it justice in my opinion. That was critical context in many of the scientists' decisions: 27,000 people were dying PER DAY during World War 2 (on average). How you can portray the story of the atomic bomb without that setting (not to mention emphasizing the fear that the Axis would get the bomb first) is kind of beyond me.
> Besides, Japan might ask for reparations one day.
For the 72 other Japanese cities thoroughly levelled just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, or just for the two cities each destroyed by a single bomb?
Regardless of what the film showed or not there's no shortage of public domain material showing the destruction in Japan and side by side comparisons of the firebombing of Tokyo against the ruins of Hiroshima.
It's hard to see the argument that this one film would make or break a reparations claim.
The claim rests on the simple to understand principle that purposely targeting civilians (entire cities of civilians) for destruction is a war crime. Should the American Empire falter one day, the claim will be made with just cause.
Just because things are one way today, does not meant forever will be.
Atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is the pinnacle event that solidified the US being a nuclear super power. Its willful use of nuclear weapons on civilians is one of the main ways the US projected power in the last century. The movie not showing how the sausage was made, is because Hollywood has a tendency to show propaganda movies. US good, world bad.
This movie had a huge reach.
"Economist / YouGov Poll, which found that 32% of U.S. adult citizens say they had seen "Barbie" and 24% had seen "Oppenheimer."
A nuclear conflict with Russia, is what is on the table.
Perhaps, if US citizens were exposed to graphic brutality of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might sway political opinion. And for example influence the next election.
>So the Tokyo firebombing alone is sufficient then?
Is it sufficient for you? It might not be for some people.
However, all plausible deniability is lost, that you're not targeting civilians when you nuclear bomb their city.
If Putin deployed nuclear weapons on Kiev tomorrow, with the goal of ending the war faster, it would be a war crime. I hope we agree.
You haven't advanced the odd assertion made here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40713250 that some outside force prevented the director from depicting scenes of nuclear devastation.
There are films, some from US directors, that already make such depictions.
You'd make a far better case if you made more concrete claims that could be backed up, eg: that the director in question made a number of past films and wanted to make future films that had US DoD support with access to real military equipment (this is a thing) that would otherwise be unobtainable | cost vast sums of money .. and the rider that comes with such cooperation is an agreement not to depict US military in particular ways.
This reparations line isn't particularly convincing.
They weren't targeted purposefully for killing civilians. Where did you get that from?
The Target Committee nominated five targets: Kokura (now Kitakyushu), the site of one of Japan's largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; and Kyoto, a major industrial center.
I've yet to see Oppenheimer—but if what I've heard about the little effort put into attempting to speak Dutch is true, I can't say it surprises me. Apparently there's also a lot of other factual inaccuracies—this admittedly put me right off.
There comes a point where a director has to ask themselves if they're making entertainment for cash or poignant art. If the language was handled that sloppily, maybe that's the answer. It would be very easy to make a colossal fuck-up in presenting the horror of reality or be seen as cashing in on something absolutely grotesque.
The film was made for entertainment. It doesn't teach morality or answers hard existential questions. It's a comics inspired by reality, in my opinion.
"Pure evil" is the only way I can describe what human beings do to each other.
There's goodness too in the world, but reading this and other experiences of war, genocide, slavery, terror, crime et al—human beings can be unspeakably ugly in their actions.
Reminds me of when the full-scale invasion started in Ukraine, I was in Kharkiv, and I met several people for whom "this was not their first war". The neighbour's family was from Nagorno-Karabakh, and had just fled the Armenia-Azerbaijan war that started a year earlier, the taxi driver was a Syrian refugee, and Kharkiv has many people from the Donbass region where the war started years before.
People who have experienced one extremely unlikely event are more likely to experience it again, see Poisson clumping (although I know this type of event is not independently random). Ernest Hemingway and his wife survived two plane crashes a day apart.
That isn’t true, and isn’t what poisson clumping is caused by. Totally random independent events clump together entirely by chance: having experienced one doesn’t increase or reduce the probability of it occurring again.
I've had this discussion with a professional mathematician. As unintuitive as it does sound, actually random independent events are more likely to follow after it has happened.
You as misinterpreting their reply. The fact that the Poisson distribution falls off exponentially is because the longer you wait, the more likely that the very next event has already happened. Once an event happens, that specific event cannot happen again so the probability is low after long distances and/or time intervals.
This effect only shows up when you are looking at the probabilities of individual events- when you look at the aggregate results after a long time, they are totally random, and no more likely to occur next to one another. The exponential nature of the Poisson distribution does not cause any clumping.
If you survive a plane crash, you are still no more likely to survive another plane crash than a regular person, unless you do something else that makes it no longer independent, and therefore no longer following the same Poisson distribution as everyone else (e.g. you fly a lot).
However, assuming standard behavior, if you do get in a plane crash, you are more likely to get in your very next plane crash in the next year, than in year 10. However, a person never in a plane crash is also equally more likely to get in their first plane crash in the next year than 10 years out. And you are still just as likely to get in a plane crash in year 10, just not your next one.
Poisson clumping is just a result of human bias-sort of like an optical illusion. We incorrectly expect random things to be evenly spaced. Music players with random shuffle for example, will often seem to play the same song over and over, and will only feel 'random' when they are modified to be non-random such that they avoid playing the same song within some time interval.
The similarities in repetitions are indeed present, but not only in wars. No one forced this person to go to work after such an event, but apparently, he is truly an exceptional worker, and the Mitsubishi managers were incredibly fortunate. He was already on his 9th day back at work, covered in bandages, after a nuclear explosion. (Of course, I think he wanted to share his experience as soon as possible to help others, given it was wartime.)
After the start of the war in Ukraine, companies divided into three categories:
Good ones: They paid 3+ months' salaries in advance, covered the relocation costs for the entire family, and other expenses. For startups, these were donation-investments of $100k like in Awesonic (YC).
Ordinary ones: They paid nothing extra but provided some money for relocation until the next salary.
Bad ones: They paid nothing, no advance payment and demanded reports for working hours from bomb shelters during bombings.
I think such coincidences are not accidental, and this case with Tsutomu falls into either the 2nd or 3rd category. It's unclear how these coincidences would play out in peaceful life without war, but no one knew them except the management of the company where he worked.
95 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 164 ms ] threadBut perhaps that's how everybody felt and might be the reason why one could actually pull off such a fake story
An elderly survivor of one bomb carrying out identity theft in order to claim to have survived both bombs is another thing entirely.
But, but, but, I've seen the movie "Threads (1984)" so now I'm an expert and it's not possible.
Also how come all the children in the area can still speak, in "Threads" children mutate and can't speak like a reverse Spiderman.
This seems like Doomer-denial fake news, the movie Threads (1984) was the real one.
You can notice it in how people reason about 'war time manufacturing' and the like in the event of a Great war. Like there would be any factories running at all. Or logistics to support brigade manouvers. Or state sized organizations.
Like with the Holocaust memorial and the Berlin Wall, these are things that have deeply affected me to see in person and comprehend what they represent, but I came away from a better person for it in the long-term—even if it broke me mentally at the time to be there and face it.
Nuclear weapons really disturb me on a whole other level I've yet to really comprehend, especially the idea that countries continue to build them. I worry about my own mental well-being with that, but feel that it's important to understand these things better and get beyond words on a printed page or digitised celluloid. Yes, these things are scary, we should be scared of them, they do scare me, just like the still-raw history of Berlin scared me. I think we run from the idea of feeling fear too often and choose to ignore it. People forget what these things do. People forget what people do to other people. We shouldn't be allowed to forget.
Before that visit I felt that I could detach myself emotionally from the reality of an event like that and make justifications for the continued existence of nuclear weapons for "bigger picture" reason. Now I find it impossible to make those kind of arguments. So I think I grew up a little that day and became more empathetic to others at an individual level.
It was honestly a bit like _being there_. Everything they have at that museum, if you have even a relatively vivid imagination, easily placed me in my mind's eye, like I was in Hiroshima for the aftermath.
Even with all this said, I'm still mostly speechless about everything I saw and read there.
I really recommend if you ever get to Japan to make some time to visit Hiroshima. Not even just for the memorial. It's actually quite a beautiful city.
(Why not? It's Japan's memorial to its war dead. All of them. Including the convicted war criminals. Visiting the shrine is seen, especially by Chinese and Koreans, as an endorsement of the war crimes. Every now and again a Japanese celebrity gets "cancelled" over this.)
It tells about the lifelong vaguely defined health impacts those exposed to the bomb had to live with, and how they tried to rebuild their lives after having truly lost everything and, for some of them, everyone.
No biography.com for you, New Zealand.
Welcome to Aotearoa, where history is doomed to be repeated!
That said also geoblocked here in Australia.
Although I’d gladly welcome our Kiwi friends into the EU.
But that still wouldn’t explain why the webpage isn’t available in New Zealand.
"Let's have a dot com and block large parts of the world from accessing it"
What a short and sad story.
If you want to read a novel from the perspective of someone experiencing the bombing of Hiroshima (based on historical records) I highly recommend Black Rain by Masuji Ibuse
Still wounded and heavily bandaged, Yamaguchi returned to work on August 9, the day Nagasaki was bombed.
That is the greatest example of Japanese work ethic and the harsh expectations people can be put under.
I don't think Putin is doing this for his own personal gain. I think the majority of Russian leaders in Putin's place would probably have taken a similar course of action. Maybe not threatening nuclear war, but definitely having a similar Ukraine policy.
I otherwise liked the film, but I thought it was wrong to hide it from viewers. The bombing was the central plot point of the whole film. It would have been different if it was a new director, or surprise hit or something, but Nolan knew it would be seen by many millions of people.
It could have been shown without losing any narration context at all, in the scene where the protagonist is shown slides of the destruction scenes, and the camera only shows him looking away. The director didn't need to force the audience to look away too.
While I understand wanting that outside perspective included within Oppenheimer to more fully reflect the actual historic events, I recognize that Oppenheimer was a film telling the story of one man’s internal perspective on events, and so including scenes like you suggest would have diluted and weakened that central premise and through line.
That being said: I am biased in that I do not expect artistic works to reflect a complete reality, but just the reality they choose to explore — I can certainly understand different points of view, especially with regard to such a monumental and tragic real life event.
For the 72 other Japanese cities thoroughly levelled just as Hiroshima and Nagasaki were, or just for the two cities each destroyed by a single bomb?
Regardless of what the film showed or not there's no shortage of public domain material showing the destruction in Japan and side by side comparisons of the firebombing of Tokyo against the ruins of Hiroshima.
It's hard to see the argument that this one film would make or break a reparations claim.
Coupled with 71 other cities (besides H&N) that were largely civilian targets that seems more than enough.
Okay, the question posed above remains, what does that have to do with Hiroshima | Nagasaki, and the (non) depictions within a recent film?
This movie had a huge reach.
"Economist / YouGov Poll, which found that 32% of U.S. adult citizens say they had seen "Barbie" and 24% had seen "Oppenheimer."
A nuclear conflict with Russia, is what is on the table.
Perhaps, if US citizens were exposed to graphic brutality of what happened in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it might sway political opinion. And for example influence the next election.
>So the Tokyo firebombing alone is sufficient then?
Is it sufficient for you? It might not be for some people.
However, all plausible deniability is lost, that you're not targeting civilians when you nuclear bomb their city.
If Putin deployed nuclear weapons on Kiev tomorrow, with the goal of ending the war faster, it would be a war crime. I hope we agree.
There are films, some from US directors, that already make such depictions.
You'd make a far better case if you made more concrete claims that could be backed up, eg: that the director in question made a number of past films and wanted to make future films that had US DoD support with access to real military equipment (this is a thing) that would otherwise be unobtainable | cost vast sums of money .. and the rider that comes with such cooperation is an agreement not to depict US military in particular ways.
This reparations line isn't particularly convincing.
The Target Committee nominated five targets: Kokura (now Kitakyushu), the site of one of Japan's largest munitions plants; Hiroshima, an embarkation port and industrial center that was the site of a major military headquarters; Yokohama, an urban center for aircraft manufacture, machine tools, docks, electrical equipment and oil refineries; Niigata, a port with industrial facilities including steel and aluminum plants and an oil refinery; and Kyoto, a major industrial center.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Chongqing
Few parties ended up with really clean hands in WW2.
There comes a point where a director has to ask themselves if they're making entertainment for cash or poignant art. If the language was handled that sloppily, maybe that's the answer. It would be very easy to make a colossal fuck-up in presenting the horror of reality or be seen as cashing in on something absolutely grotesque.
There's goodness too in the world, but reading this and other experiences of war, genocide, slavery, terror, crime et al—human beings can be unspeakably ugly in their actions.
Currently affecting Australian and New Zealand readers.
People who have experienced one extremely unlikely event are more likely to experience it again, see Poisson clumping (although I know this type of event is not independently random). Ernest Hemingway and his wife survived two plane crashes a day apart.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yaroslav_Hunka_scandal
https://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/411018/poisson-dis...
This effect only shows up when you are looking at the probabilities of individual events- when you look at the aggregate results after a long time, they are totally random, and no more likely to occur next to one another. The exponential nature of the Poisson distribution does not cause any clumping.
If you survive a plane crash, you are still no more likely to survive another plane crash than a regular person, unless you do something else that makes it no longer independent, and therefore no longer following the same Poisson distribution as everyone else (e.g. you fly a lot).
However, assuming standard behavior, if you do get in a plane crash, you are more likely to get in your very next plane crash in the next year, than in year 10. However, a person never in a plane crash is also equally more likely to get in their first plane crash in the next year than 10 years out. And you are still just as likely to get in a plane crash in year 10, just not your next one.
Poisson clumping is just a result of human bias-sort of like an optical illusion. We incorrectly expect random things to be evenly spaced. Music players with random shuffle for example, will often seem to play the same song over and over, and will only feel 'random' when they are modified to be non-random such that they avoid playing the same song within some time interval.
After the start of the war in Ukraine, companies divided into three categories:
Good ones: They paid 3+ months' salaries in advance, covered the relocation costs for the entire family, and other expenses. For startups, these were donation-investments of $100k like in Awesonic (YC).
Ordinary ones: They paid nothing extra but provided some money for relocation until the next salary.
Bad ones: They paid nothing, no advance payment and demanded reports for working hours from bomb shelters during bombings.
I think such coincidences are not accidental, and this case with Tsutomu falls into either the 2nd or 3rd category. It's unclear how these coincidences would play out in peaceful life without war, but no one knew them except the management of the company where he worked.
Are you still in Kharkiv?