JAPAN — Barbenheimer, a social media trend pairing two blockbuster movies Barbie and Oppenheimer together, is fuelling a backlash in Japan.

Internet memes linking the Barbie film's main character to atomic bomb-related imagery has sparked outrage in the nuclear-scarred nation, the only country to have ever experienced a nuclear attack. 

Japanese social media users have slammed the Barbenheimer trend for being “insensitive”, with some posting memes of the Sept 11 attacks on the United States' World Trade Center in retaliation.

WHAT IS BARBENHEIMER?

Barbenheimer is a portmanteau of “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer” and is a nickname coined by fans to celebrate the buzz around the two films, which were released in US theatres on the same day on July 21.

The Barbie movie is a fantasy-comedy based on the iconic toy doll, while Oppenheimer is a biographical thriller about the physicist who invented the atomic bombs that were unleashed on Japan during World War II.

Memes combining the two Hollywood movies have been trending on X, formerly known as Twitter.

In one image, Barbie is depicted with a mushroom cloud bouffant. In another, Barbie is perched on J Robert Oppenheimer's shoulder against the backdrop of what appears to be a nuclear explosion.

Japanese social media users took offence at the trend, claiming that it made light of or seemed to glorify the nuclear bombings that devastated the country. Furthermore, Barbenheimer began trending in mid-July, just a few weeks before the 78th anniversary of the atomic attacks. 

Japanese online users were provoked even further when the official Barbie US Twitter account positively interacted with some fan posts about Barbenheimer.

The Warner Bros Film Group in the US has since made a public apology.

Pushing back with their own hashtag #NoBarbenheimer, some Japanese online users have created memes of their own by juxtaposing Barbie-esque elements onto images of 9/11 to drive their message home.

In a top tweet, user “Dorothy” shared a doctored Barbie movie poster in which the character has been subbed out for the famous image of the World Trade Center’s Twin Towers in a cloud of smoke.

“What do you Americans who use this tag to make jokes about the atomic bomb feel when they see this image? What you guys are doing is exactly the same as this. Shame on you,” the user wrote.

A Change.org petition demanding that the studios behind the two films ban the use of the “Barbenheimer” hashtag as well as any imagery that “make fun of” the atomic bombing was also launched. 

Voices of Hiroshima & Nagasaki, the activist group behind the petition, wrote: “We cannot help but feel that this insensitive #Barbenheimer movement completely downplays the atrocities of the atomic bombs."

It added: “We believe the #Barbenheimer movement is a clear indication that there is a widespread lack of awareness about the atrocities of atomic bombing.”

The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed some 110,000 people instantly, while 210,000 others eventually succumbed to radiation poisoning, Encyclopaedia Britannica states.

The petition has collected more than 21,000 signatures since Aug 1.

While some online users have sided with the Japanese, many others have defended Barbenheimer by claiming that the memes were not intended to poke fun at the nuclear bombings.

In reply to a #NoBarbenheimer tweet, one user commented: “They are not joking about deaths. It's just celebration of two movies bringing back audience to theatre… It's silly.”

Others accused Japan of being hypocritical since the country had also committed atrocities against other nations during the Second World War.