Not only size, but also demographics. The value would be getting the non-Arthouse crowd out to see the movie.
ETA: @anon61221983
There are several from the Japanese perspective off the top of my head:
Black Sun
Barefoot Gen
A Postman from Nagasaki
Horoshima mon Amore
The less said about the POV of the bombings at Tokyo’s Yasukne Shrine Peace Museum, the better.
The Soviets WERE prepared to invade Hokkaido prior to the surrender. But the Japanese were already getting pasted by the Soviets in China prior to that.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria facilitated both Mao’s victory and The Korean War.
Driven home for me by Grave of the Fireflies. I’ll never watch that one again. As much as the atomic bombs can be debated as war crimes, the conventional firebombings should be included in the same breath.
It’s always been weird and arbitrary as to which weapons of war are considered too barbaric to use, and which ones aren’t. Shooting people with “dumdum” bullets? Illegal. Burning your enemies alive with flamethrowers and napalm? No problem. Gassing enemy soldiers (even with tear gas that American cops legally use to put down protesters, or even some kind of relatively humane “knockout” gas) is highly illegal. Stabbing folks in the gut with a pointy object? Well that’s just tradition! Blinding enemy soldiers with laser pointers? Illegal. But dropping cluster munitions on a neighborhood where kids are likely to encounter one? No problem. Etc.
I highly recommend Racing the Enemy, which was (likely) the first book written about the endgame from someone with access to Soviet records and who spoke fluent English, Japanese, and Russian.
Bestante ves me quemo pero nunca pago pagaste . Pay up reparations
That reminds me, I never did get around to seeing the American side one. The one told on the Japanese side was really good, IMO.
They sort of did this in We Were Soldiers. There were scenes with the NVA and the movie had focus on them as people, showing parallels to the US soldiers. It also showed the people back home in the US. It really is one of the better war movies, IMO, with how it tries to show multiple facets of war.
Ooof. Don’t even get me STARTED on Interstellar.
My understanding is that the first atomic bombs were developed with the primary intention of dropping them on Germany, and it was only the collapse of Nazi Germany in the spring of 1945 that led to the shift in focus to Japan.
That’s true. When the Germans surrendered many of the scientists at Los Alamos thought they would stop workin on the bomb but it continued on in earnest. The Department of War had made up their mind to make this bomb by then.
Oppenheimer 2: Tokyo Drift?
Had the British been able to put all their pre-Manhattan work on isotope separation into manufacture it would have definitely been dropped on Berlin. But the lack of available industrial capacity and the continued German air raids on the UK meant it could not be done here. For a while, building everything in Canada was proposed; but in 1940, the UK threw the bomb, along with plastic explosives, proximity fuses and high-power radar into a briefcase and took it to America:
My wife is Japanese, so we won’t be going to see this film.
She’s got an interesting perspective on the Pacific War, like it’s something horrible which happened to Japan by accident, and they got blamed afterwards because the western allies won and wrote the history books.
The Japanese have been able to write plenty of history and other perspectives on the war and the bomb. As well as Barefoot Gen, mentioned above, the massive 3-volume Showa, Japan 1926-1953, by Shigeru Mizuki, presents the experience of a boy growing up into a man in that era.
As for the human cost of war, my mother-in-law has no family photos from before the early 1950s, simply because everything was destroyed in the Tokyo bombing in 1945, and after the war they were too poor to buy a camera. Everyone survived, though. Most of the family had been sent to the countryside, where they foraged for berries to supplement their rations. She’s still keen on hedgerow fruit today.
Apparently the development and deployment of the B-29 cost more than the Manhattan Project.
The stupid fucking bomb sight cost as much as the Manhattan Project:
It didn’t work, wasn’t secret, the English and Germans had similar and it didn’t delude them into believing they could bomb accurately. The myth of American precision bombing has killed millions of innocent civilians. At least the indiscriminate fire bombing of Tokyo and nuking Hiroshima and Nagasaki were honest mass murder.