The attacks of United States of America with the atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki on 6th and 9th of august 1945 represent one of the greatest tragedies in human history. Somewhere between 150,000 and 246,000 lives were lost, and those numbers only increase if we add all the countless victims of radiation poisoning that passed away in later years. These two attacks have greatly impacted both the survivors and the entirety of Japan, being the source of many personal and national traumatic feelings. Today, 80 years have passed since the nuclear holocaust with which the second world war was ended, and the number of living survivors of the attacks has greatly decreased. An emotional distance has been created to the events of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the new generations simply do not possess personal memories of these events. In this way the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki move from memories into history. This process is visible in the medium of movies as well which was used ever since the end of war and the end of American occupation of Japan as a tool to combat both personal and national traumas created by the American attack. Out of a real tragedy, a genre of atomic cinema was born. The goal of this thesis is to present crucial works of the atomic cinema from the end of war era until the modern age and at the same time to show the changes in the ways creators of such movies approached this problematic theme, the relation to the attacks, to the role of America in the attacks and to those afflicted by it.
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