You’ve seen Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, right? I haven’t, but there’s apparently a scene at the Nevada Test Site that shows Indiana surviving a nuclear blast by hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator. Some Japanese people are upset that Spielberg would include what they construe to be gratuitous depiction of atomic weapons and disregard for their aftereffects, as Indiana is right as rain after a quick spray-and-scrub, while many Japanese families are still dealing with the long term effects of radiation exposure, sixty plus years after the bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I guess it’s still buzzing around the Japanese blogosphere, a little over a month after the film was released here. From a Japan Today article:
Film critic Ken Terawaki criticized Spielberg for including scenes of a nuclear blast ”just for fun” at a time when the world is struggling to do away with nuclear weapons as ”a common enemy of humanity.”
As I mentioned, I haven’t yet seen the film. However, I think it’s an easy conclusion to reach in saying that Japanese people would collectively be the group of people most sensitive to depiction of nuclear weapons in the world, and however inconsequential the bomb is to the actual story line, I imagine no other group has the same reaction.
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