The Expatriate

Joseph Kurihara had faith in America. It didn't have faith in him.

- ANDREW AOYAMA

Joseph Kurihara watched the furniture pile higher and higher on the streets of Terminal Island. Tables and chairs, mattresses and bed frames, refrigerators and radio consoles had been dragged into alleyways and arranged in haphazard stacks. It was February 25, 1942, two and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the U.S. Navy had given the island’s residents 48 hours to pack up and leave.

An industrial stretch of land in the Port of Los Angeles, Terminal Island was home to a string of canneries, a Japanese American fishing community of about 3,500, and, crucially, a naval base. A week earlier, President Franklin D. Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066, authorizing are now common themes. In the 2011 reboot of Planet of the Apes, the inversion of apes and humans happens not because of nuclear war but because of a faulty pharmaceutical experiment. The 2008 reimagining of The Day the Earth Stood Still has Klaatu warning earthlings about ecocide rather than an atomic menace.

The 2023 film Oppenheimer, about the father of the atomic bomb, made nearly $1 billion at the box office and won the Oscar for Best Picture. But Oppenheimer is a talky period piece, an exploration of a man and his mind, with only a flash-forward warning about doomsday tacked on to the ending. No panel of luminaries debated nuclear issues in prime time because of Oppenheimer. This year’s Mission: Impossible features a Fail Safe callback, but it deploys nukes to raise the stakes for Tom Cruise’s heroism, not to question the value of their existence or portray the carnage they create.

The director Kathryn Bigelow will soon release a movie, set in the present, about a surprise missile attack on the United States. Bigelow, who also directed the realistic military dramas Zero Dark Thirty and