NHK online news has featured this video so we who are far from the place could still share the experience, and remember the bitterness of having to experience nuclear bombing.

All we are saying, is give peace a chance - John Lennon

I went to watch Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull the first day it was shown, one of the few movies that I watched in a theater in Japan mostly because I thought action movies should be watched in the big screen. It was disappointing. The plot was shallow and I had the feeling that the whole movie was constructed just to make it easy to insert computer-generated scenes wherever it was convenient.

The disappointment started at an early scene in the movie when Indiana Jones, in trying to escape a nuclear test explosion, hid in a lead-lined refrigerator, was blasted at least a mile away and still survived the whole episode with a little more than scratches here and there. The next scene has him being scrubbed by men in masks for traces of radiation. I wonder, I asked myself while watching the movie, what the Japanese inside the theater were thinking while watching these scenes.

Japan is the only country that suffered the consequences of a real atomic bomb explosion when these were dropped in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during the closing stages of World War II. Naturally, many Japanese, especially those from the older generation, feel strongly about these horrific weapons of mass destruction. (About 70,000 people died in the immediate aftermath of the Hiroshima bombing alone, and more than 200,000 would be dead due to long-term effects of the Hiroshima bomb by the end of 1950).

Indeed, many Japanese didn’t like the scene, as can be read from many postings in various bulletin boards and blogs on the Internet. Film critic Ken Terawaki, while criticizing “American movies which solves everything through violence and military force”, says this about the latest Indiana Jones:

公開中の『インディ・ジョーンズ　クリスタル・スカルの王国』にも呆れてしまいます。核兵器を実際に使用する核実験が、笑いやスリルを呼ぶエピソードとして使われるのです。これは許し難い暴挙だと、わたしは思います。世界中の人々が力を合わせてクラスター爆弾さえ禁止兵器にしようとしているときに、それよりはるかに残虐な兵器である核爆弾を無神経に娯楽映画のタネにするなんて、乱暴極まる態度です。

The currently showing Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is also shocking. The nuclear test scene where a real nuclear bomb was used was created for laughter and thrill. I think this is an unforgivable violence. At a time when people of the world are pooling their energies to ban even just the cluster bomb, the insensitive use of the even more brutal nuclear bomb in a movie for entertainment is extremely reckless behavior.

While I realize that the movie was intended to be entertaining, I find the nuclear blast scene totally unbelievable and unnecessary and gives the wrong impression especially to the younger people about the nature of these weapons. Nuclear weapons should be horrifying not entertaining.