Hiroshima (1946)
newyorker.com
newyorker.com
"She had not had an easy time. Her husband, Isawa, had gone into the Army just after Myeko was born, and she had heard nothing from or of him for a long time, until, on March 5, 1942, she received a seven-word telegram: “Isawa died an honorable death at Singapore.” "
In case you don't know what her husband would have contributed to in Singapore - "between 25,000 and 50,000 ethnic Chinese in Singapore and Malaya ... were rounded up and taken to deserted spots around the island and killed systematically." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_occupation_of_Singapo...
"Allan suggested we walk to the front of the crowd between the soldiers and the Timorese, because although we knew that the army had committed many massacres, we hoped that we, as foreign journalists, could serve as a shield for the Timorese. Standing with headphones on and microphone and camera out in full view, we went and stood in the middle of the road, looking straight at the approaching troops. Behind us, the crowd was hushed as some Timorese tried to turn away, but they were hemmed in by cemetery walls.
The soldiers marched straight up to us. They never broke their stride. We were enveloped by the troops, and when they got a few yards past us, within a dozen yards of the Timorese, they raised their rifles to their shoulders all at once, and they opened fire. The Timorese, in an instant, were down, just torn apart by the bullets. The street was covered with bodies, covered with blood. And the soldiers just kept on coming. They poured in, one rank after another. They leaped over the bodies of those who were down. They were aiming and shooting people in the back. I could see their limbs being torn, their bodies exploding. There was blood spurting out into the air. The pop of the bullets, everywhere. And it was very organized, very systematic. The soldiers did not stop. They just kept on shooting until no one was left standing.
A group of soldiers grabbed my microphone and threw me to the ground, kicking and punching me. At that point, Allan threw himself on top of me, protecting me from further injury. The soldiers then used their rifle butts like baseball bats, beating Allan until they fractured his skull. As we sat on the ground, Allan, covered in blood, a group of soldiers lined up and pointed their M-16s at our heads. They had stripped us of all of our equipment. We just kept shouting, "We’re from America!" In the end, they decided not to execute us."
Excerpted from http://www.democracynow.org/2006/11/13/amy_goodman_recounts_...
The parent comment is talking about one person who could be viewed as a hero and a victim, depending on the story teller.
I don't see why the East Timor story serves as a reminder, except that it's another example of an atrocity in war.
No war is nicer than any other and you can find many, many examples of atrocities like this throughout history across the world.
The thing to remember is,
(1) how devastating nuclear weapons can be
(2) how close the world came to a much larger nuclear holocaust during the cold war period
(3) that it's possible for us to forget the past and re-enter such a period
(4) that today's nuclear weapons are 1,000x more powerful than the ones that leveled two Japanese cities [1]
(5) only nine countries have these weapons, and
(6) that it only takes one bad actor to start a worldwide nuclear war
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_weapon_yield#Examples_...
"Allied commando unit known as Z Force led by Major Pidar McBlyat"
His name is made up of 2 common russian swear words
Same with Germans. People know about how the Germans behaved in WW2, they're not proud about it, it's learned in schools, and they do not hide it.
Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions. Japanese schools present a revisionist version of history in which all their horrible and brutal war crimes never happened. The Japanese people promote a vision of Japan with a tradition full of honor and virtue. Do they teach their kids that they dropped a bomb carrying the bubonic plague? or the massacre of Nanking? the mass beheadings of people? the sexual slavery? and many other horrible crimes, even targeting kids... probably not. This is the difference.
But all of this was done, and with an understanding that it would, cause a massive number of civilian casualties. The US and allies did this to Tokyo and Dresden with non-atomic weapons as well.
To me these are crimes that we as a country have never really admitted to. We discuss it openly, but we have never truly said that we were wrong to kill so many innocent people. I believe that this is partly why we today do not also hold ourselves accountable to the large number of civilian deaths in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Edit: I should include Vietnam as well in which we killed some multiple of millions. But even that has the list too short. We as Americans suffer from the Sam euro centric view we've always had, if your white, it's a death worth counting, if not, eh...
Also, I'd say those movies you're referring to were much more from the perspective of the unjustly forced into war soldier, than the plight of the Vietnamese.
I was not alive then, my knowledge of Vietnam is all books and information from my parents and friend's parents.
Edit: I want to add that in my personal experience, there is no place on Earth that is more peaceful and pacifistic than Japan in 2016. Don't pay attention to the government, which simply tows the line for America...I'm talking about the people in the cities and villages. Meanwhile, to my point above, America does nothing but wage wars since WW2. Make of that what you will.
America is the reason Japan is pacifist. America forced Japan to become pacifist at the point of (quite a few) guns. While it's wonderful that the Japanese people have embraced pacifism culturally, their country's pacifist stance is nonetheless paid for with the obligation of American military violence.
If nihonde wants to contrast Japan's pacifism with America's violence, they would do well to remember how much easier it is to remain pacifist when someone else has to take the bullets for you.
No normal people in Japan are interested in the territorial conflicts with China, or constitutional debates about self-defense, or where to stage American military hardware, except that they would like all of that nonsense to end so that they can get on with their lives.
Your 'Pax Americana' is doublespeak on the highest order, as Americans go around the world setting and lighting their own powder kegs.
Yesterday, a V-22 Osprey flew low over my house, and while it is a marvelous sight on many levels it is ultimately the only emblem of death and destruction on a landscape of almost unimaginable serenity. My neighborhood is all bamboo swaying in the wind, old people on bicycles running errands, kids playing baseball and catching beetles, some lazy cats and a lazy river...and here comes a fucking V-22 Osprey overhead.
Meanwhile, a Marine in Okinawa is accused of killing a young Japanese girl. These things just simply do not happen very often in Japan, so the attention on this murder is intense. Okinawa is a really nice place, and the people there would prefer not to deal with this cyclone of...death and destruction in their midst. It made sense at one time, but it really is not that time anymore.
I know that you have a hard time overcoming the urge (programming) to see America as the great liberator of the world, policing the wild streets of lesser, unruly regions that would be lost without Uncle Sam, but...at some point, the big bully protecting the block becomes the only problem that anyone on the block is having.
However, you seem to be incapable of perceiving Americans as anything but mind-controlled militarists, or of seeing Japan's relationship with the US military as anything more complex than a violent foreign intruder forcing its will onto a pure and innocent yamato nadeshiko, so I'm going to stop trying to engage you in thoughtful conversation on this topic.
Ah... that explains the sakura tinted glasses, then.
Anecdotally, I hadn't met any such people until yesterday, where I had to attend a rotary international conference for a scholarship I receive from them. The audience was composed of around 700 people, most of them CEOs of local corporations, politicians or otherwise wealthy and connected people. The average age must have been somewhere in the late fifties/early sixties. The invited speaker was Masahiko Fujiwara [1], a mathematician turned essayist, who probably should have stuck to number theory. It was basically an hour and a half of chauvinist propaganda, hailing the past greatness of Japan, the superiority of the Japanese people, and mocking (I quote and translate) "Americans, Europeans and white people" at every turn with racial stereotypes. And the entire audience was laughing and clapping their hands! It's scary to think that these people might well be a representative sample of the ruling Japanese elite.
I certainly don't see the current government of Japan reflecting the sentiments of normal people in any way whatsoever, but I think a lot of working class people feel like the government exists in a compromised world where influences of powerful nations like America and Russia use Japan as a proxy. Japan is not a passive player in that game, but the game itself doesn't seem to interest the average person. The people I know are just working hard to make ends meet and do a good job, raise a good family, etc.——normal human stuff.
I'm not so naive to think that Japanese people aren't capable of being racist assholes, but I would say the prevailing sentiment here is more humility than arrogance or conniving. I'm a white American who married into a Japanese family with a (very) distinguished naval history. My ancestry here is definitely elite, but the money and power are a shadow of what they once were——and that's probably a good thing. There's no room for hubris when you're on the ropes. Everyone just has their focus at the human scale.
There are quite a few old and small countries and ethnic groups that have reasonably good human rights record in the post-Columbus times. See Iceland or the Sami people for example.
There are a lot of Japanophiles (be it culture, food, anime or whatever). Much of it seems to spring from disaffection for the West. All of that's fine but this revisionist view of history is one thing that's always bothered me about Japan.
Now we have China and Japan squaring off over some uninhabited rocks in the South China Sea and I think it's at least in part a byproduct of WW2.
The Chinese remember Manchuria, Nanking, etc. From the outside looking in it seems like "payback" might not be the goal of this but it sure is a nice bonus.
The Japanese on the other hand as a whole I think don't understand this motivation because they don't have this foundation in historical events. To them it must seem like the Chinese actions are unprovoked and unwarranted.
This sort of thing is a dangerous and inevitable consequence of ignoring the lessons of history. Population and economics are on the side of the Chinese here.
US Hollywod movies (and McDonalds) are popular worldwide. Do those fans hate their home countries?
I went to school in Japan and we didn't learn a sugar-coated version of history. We went to Hiroshima and listened to a talk from a bomb survivor who told us it was our job to make a world where something like that could never happen again.
Ideally, teachers do not tell kids what to feel. Teachers share facts.
I remember wondering how it was actually performed. The story was told as a long line of men walking from on end of the island to the other, killing any aboriginals they found in the process. Tasmania is a very large island, so it seemed like they would need an inordinate number of men to form a line that joined all the way across it, and it would take a very long time to walk the length of it.
Turns out the line was a real thing, called the Black Line [1], and was part of a war called the Black War [2].
Lieutenant-Governor George Arthur decided to remove all Aborigines from the settled areas in order to end the escalating raids upon settlers' huts. He was also concerned about preventing the settlers from taking the law into their own hands and launching revenge attacks. To accomplish this he called upon every able-bodied male colonist, convict or free, to form a human chain that then swept across the settled districts, moving south and east for several weeks in an attempt to corral the Aborigines on the Tasman Peninsula by closing off Eaglehawk Neck (the isthmus connecting the Tasman peninsula to the rest of the island) where Arthur hoped that they could live and maintain their culture and language. This action was only directed against Aborigines of the Big River and Oyster Bay tribes, since the conflict was only with these two tribes.
Also I remember learning about measles blankets and all that, but it never got to the point of using this historical context to inform a discussion of the current social/economic situation Native Americans face. All in all it was portrayed as a romantic and fair battle between cowboys and Indians.
Tldr the only war crimes we teach our kids are those whose victims have survived and attained some political prominence.
The "Trail of Tears" is a major unit in several years of K-12 education.
From, say, 1928-1960 there was practically no wide-spread criticism of Jackson's personal history regarding Native Americans (or any of his other terrible beliefs).
Consider that FDR is still very highly regarded by the left in the US, despite the fact that he was a blatant racist and interned a hundred-thousand Japanese-Americans.
Do you know whereof you're speaking, or are you attacking a school curriculum you've imagined? Japanese education does cover these topics. There was a big controversy around 2000 when the government approved a new textbook that greatly downplayed Japan's military past but it was never used in more than a handful of schools.
Obviously there's a never-ending debate about precisely what gets taught, and right-wing activism to whitewash textbooks is always in the background. But the topics you're talking about do get taught, and discussed widely, and you'd have a hard time finding an educated Japanese person who isn't familiar with them.
The US, like the rest of the Allied powers, do more than their fair share of actively hiding their crimes during the war years. They also love to gloss over the degree to which, before they saw him as a threat to their existence, the Allied powers actually admired and respected Hitler and even sought to emulate his leadership.
I mean, most Americans sure as heck don't know that FDR literally modeled the genocide in Puerto Rico after 'the methods which Hitler used effectively'[0]. Because very few schools actually bother to mention Operation Bootstrap in the first place, let alone acknowledge that that the US forcibly sterilized 40% of Puerto Rican women (on the grounds that they were 'unfit to reproduce').
Hiroshima and Nagasaki are the exception only because the events directly led to the Cold War as we know it[1], and it's kind of hard to understand the next 50 years of world history without understanding that the Cold War was happening.
[0] https://books.google.com/books?id=3llNN7jmQE4C&pg=PA255&lpg=...
[1] Yes, the Cold War would still have happened even if the US had decided not to drop the bomb, but since we did, the bombings became the unforgettable, tangible symbol of the fear that the Cold War was based on.
Why do you apologize for the thing if it wasn't true? The thing which is making complicating is that the Chinese government is promoting hatred towards the Japanese government as a propaganda and is exaggerating the results.
Do you really believe the claims of the country which has the Great Firewall? Do you really believe the country which the government is officially producing anti Japanese movies? Do you believe the country which hides the Tiananmen Square Incident and the ongoing killings of the people in Tibet and Xinjiang?
There are suspicions of the claims and the numbers coming from such country.
There were no Japanese soldiers of such a young age.
Here is an excellent analysis of American high school textbooks and their handling of the war with Japan.
It's pretty clear that Americans do in fact censure what is taught.
Besides the atom bomb, America basically bombed Japan out of existence. So much so that when the atomic bombs were dropped, it was first assumed to be just another part of that night's bombing runs. No major city was less than 90% destroyed.
The issues of Japanese war behaviour comes up very often, and the people have been very outspoken in not wanting to return to a militarised state. I would say that Japan has mostly behaved in a similar manner to Germany on the topic (if with several decades of lateness).
You can open up Japanese textbooks and find the history of the war (and the unrest beforehand that lead to the military getting so much power).
EDIT: another thing. There are movies/TV serials about wartime Japan. Every single one of them highlights the absurdity of the war that people are being sent out to. The lies the government propagated to keep the war going. The punishing of intellectuals for expressing even the smallest doubt. Some even covering how foreigners were mostly thrown out of the country. I have rarely heard doubts about whether we should have bombed Japan as much as we ended up doing.
Are you sure on that? I doubt Japan's neighboring nations would agree on that.
Talking about comfort women, the system was not only Japan. USA and South Korea had also introduced exactly same system during Korean war. Look at today's USA. How many Korean prostitutes are out there? They would be called sex slaves 50 years later.
There is only so much room in Canada.
* It’s not really clear that Truman ever made much of a “decision,” or regarded the bomb/invasion issue as being mutually exclusive. Truman didn’t know if the bomb would end the war; he hoped, but he didn’t know, couldn’t know. The US was still planning to invade in November 1945. They were planning to drop as many atomic bombs as necessary. There is no contemporary evidence that suggests Truman was ever told that the causalities would be X if the bomb was dropped, and Y if it was not. There is no evidence that, prior to the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, that Truman was particularly concerned with Japanese causalities, radiation effects, or whether the bombs were ethical or not. The entire framing of the issue is ahistorical, after-the-fact, here. It was war; Truman had atomic bombs; it was taken for granted, at that point, that they were going to be used.
* Defeat is not surrender. Japan was certainly defeated by August 1945, in the sense that there was no way for them to win; the US knew that. But they hadn’t surrendered, and the peace balloons they had put out would have assumed not that the Emperor would have stayed on as some sort of benign constitutional monarch (much less a symbolic monarch), but would still be the god-head of the entire Japanese country, and still preserve the overall Japanese state. This was unacceptable to the US, and arguably not for bad reasons. Japanese sources show that the Japanese military was willing to bleed out the country to exact this sort of concession from the US.
* American sources show that the primary reason for using the bomb was to aid in the war against Japan. However, the fact that such weapons would be important in the postwar period, in particular vis-à-vis the USSR, was not lost on American policymakers. It is fair to say that there were multiple motivations for dropping the bomb, and specifically that it looks like there was a primary motivation (end the war) and many other “derivative” benefits that came from that (postwar power).
* Japanese sources, especially those unearthed and written about by Tsuyoshi Hasegawa, make it clear that prior to the use of the atomic bombs, the Japanese cabinet was still planning on fighting a long battle against invasion, that they were hoping to exact the aforementioned concessions from the United States, and that they were aware (and did not care) that such an approach would cost the lives of huge numbers of Japanese civilians. It is also clear that the two atomic bombs did shock them immensely, and did help break the stalemate in the cabinet — but that the Soviet invasion of Manchuria also shocked them immensely, perhaps equally, maybe even more (if you have a choice between being occupied by Truman or occupied by Stalin, the decision is an easy one). But there is no easy way to disentangle the effects of the bombs or the Soviet invasion, in this sense — they were both immensely influential on the final decision. That being said, using the bomb as an “excuse” (as opposed to “we are afraid of Russians”) did play well with the Japanese public and made surrender appear to be a sensible, viable option in a culture where surrender was seen as a complete loss of honour.
This post by the same author also makes a convincing argument that the beginning of the firebombing campaign against Japan with the bombing of Tokyo (in which more people died than at Hiroshima) was the unnoticed ethical turning point.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2012/08/06/hiroshima-at-67-th...
Say you're about to be shipped out to run up a hill and killed by Japanese machine guns.
Wouldn't you prefer Truman use a super weapon to end the war ?
I mean there are ways to end a war without total destruction.
And the logic of killing civilians to save soldiers is just .. no comment.
Great idea! Now, how do we persuade the other side to sign that agreement?
This was a decision to hasten the end of the war, but did we ever actually leave? We still have bases in Japan. This was about hastening an end with a guarantee that the US would have full control of Japan.
Please don't misunderstand me though, Japan needed to be defeated thoroughly, it had acted and performed gross injustices against many people in the world. But these bombs were not necessary.
We could have used those 1 million Purple Hearts we produced for the invasion of Japan for anyone who stubbed a toe during all the festivities.
I talked with my grandfather often about his service as a submariner in the pacific, brutal, but oddly he never hated the Japanese. He saved that for the French.
Since their was totally a way to invade Japan and not harm any civilians. Since Japan totally didn't kill millions of innocent Chinese , Vietnamese, and Philippinos. It's not a bad guy good guy comic When exactly was the last no civilian casualties war ?
We firebombed Dresden too, but you don't see Germany getting a peace day.
And remember Truman's first duty is to save the lives of the drafted men on the front lines.
> Say as an armed soldier, you're about to be shipped out to run up a hill and killed by Japanese machine guns.
> Wouldn't you prefer Truman use a super weapon on civilians to end the war ?
I know WWII blurred the lines on what counts a legitimate target (military installations, civilian-manned factories, entire towns like the firebombing of Dresden). As a soldier, would you be able to justify indiscriminate targeting of unarmed civilians? I suspect some Americans lack empathy on that part because the US homeland has never had a hot war in a very long time to the extent that is not imaginable.
In that case I see no difference between a solder and a civilian. Truman's duty is to American boys who are dying in a war Japan started. He's wasn't the president of Japan
You also have to factor in with any negotiation Japan may of argued they still owned Korea, as they'd had since 1910
In the Battle of the Bulge children were drafted,they magically become disposable war machines.
Shouldn't those lives count as well.
Ether way Truman was president of AMERICA, not the greater good
Surely even when you're drafted, being trained and armed sets you apart from civilians? This WWII vet[1] is of the opinion that even unarmed soldiers (AKA ejected pilots who no longer have access to arms) are not legitimate targets, let alone civilians.
Mark Selden, a researcher at Cornell University, wrote an excellent article detailing this: http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/2414/article.html
He points out how the attacks on civilians in Dresden, for example, were met with shock by Europeans at the time. But the Americans never reacted as strongly to the same bombings in Japan.
Several cities of civilians were destroyed in the Korean War. In Vietnam city bombins and chemical weapons were deployed against civilians. Carpet bombing was the term for targeting civilians in Iraq I. Etc etc etc. It's all basically the same.
Really?
0. http://cursor.org/stories/casualty_count.htm 1. http://www.theguardian.com/world/2001/nov/01/afghanistan.ter... 2. https://warisboring.com/b-52s-in-massive-mid-east-carpet-bom...
etc.
"If they do, they do" is not something a President should be saying about other nations engaging in nuclear war. Go mess up someone else's planet, Trump.
Now, I just resign myself that for whatever reason it happened, and let us learn whatever we could from it.
[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...
I don't think I'll be able to eat meat today, my stomach is turning and I feel like I could vomit.
It is so painful figuring that this is one of the "better" possible outcomes of the war.
The only difference is that nuclear weapons are industrialised death machines - much more efficient than the usual manual methods.
It's also worth noting that President Obama and the G7 will be meeting on Ise Shima, near Japan's most sacred Shinto site, Ise Jingu. It's significant because the most important shrines of Ise Jingu are rebuilt on the site every twenty years. I've visited Ise Jingu a few times, and the incredible craftsmanship of the buildings is jaw-dropping. Every piece of ancient Hinoki cedar used in the buildings is chiseled and sanded to perfection. They've been re-building the shrines every 20 years for almost a thousand years. Among other things, it's a metaphor for this whole conversation about forging a new tradition.
However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took. As for all the civilians and children and other non-combatants, I doubt the tragedy would have been less without the bomb. It's hard for me to reconcile how such an obvious force of destruction could be more desirable than an invasion, and that's probably because it's very hard for me to understand the destruction an invasion creates. An invasion's impact isn't as easy to put into neat pictures and anecdotes as a singular experience that a bomb explosion creates.
There's some question if the ramp up of the Soviets on their eastern border had more to do with Japan's surrender than the atomic bombs we dropped. I'm not sure there's a clear answer there.
> I'm not sure there's a clear answer there.
You need to investigate your beliefs. I will not make a stand, there's https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing... a long going debate.
"When Okinawa was finally declared secure, the cost had been horrific. Some 150,000 Okinawans died, approximately one-third the island's population. An additional 10,000 Koreans, used by the Japanese military as slave labor, died as well. Of the 119,000 or so Japanese soldiers, as many as 112,000 were killed in the battle or forever sealed inside a collapsed cave or bunker. Aside from the human cost, most of the physical aspects of Okinawan culture were razed. Few buildings survived the 3 months fighting. Collectively, the defenders lost more dead than the Japanese suffered in the two atomic bombings combined. The United States lost 13,000 dead: almost 8,000 on the island and the remainder at sea; another 32,000 were wounded.
The loss of life on both sides, particularly among the Japanese civilians, caused immense worry in Washington. New President Harry Truman was looking at the plans for a proposed assault on the Japanese main islands, and the casualty projections were unacceptable. Projections numbered the potential casualties from 100,000 in the first 30 days to as many as 1 million attackers, and the death count for the Japanese civilians would be impossible to calculate. If they resisted as strongly as did the citizens of Okinawa -- and the inhabitants of the home islands would be even more dedicated to defending their homeland -- Japan would become a wasteland. It was already looking like one in many areas. The U.S. bombing campaign, in place since the previous September, was burning out huge areas of Japanese cities. How much longer the Japanese could have held out in the face of the fire bombing is a matter of much dispute; some project that, had the incendiary raids continued until November, the Japanese would have been thrown back to an almost Stone Age existence. The problem was this: no one in the west knew exactly what was happening in Japan. The devastation could be estimated, but the resistance could not.
Thus, with the casualties of the Okinawa battle fresh in his mind, when Truman learned of the successful testing of an atomic bomb, he ordered its use. This is a decision debated since 6 August 1945, the date of the bombing of Hiroshima, and even before. Just what was known of Japanese decision-making processes before that date is also argued to this day. Was the Japanese government in the process of formulating a peace offer, in spite of the demand for unconditional surrender the Allies had decided upon in February 1943? If they were doing so, did anyone in the west know about it? Who knew what, when they knew it, and what effect that knowledge had or may have had on Truman's decision making is a matter of much dispute. Whatever the political ramifications of the atomic bomb on the immediate and postwar world, Truman's decision was certainly based in no small part on the nature of the fighting on Okinawa. Truman wrote just after his decision, "We'll end the war sooner now. And think of the kids who wont be killed."
Horrible as the effects of the two atomic bombs were, the number of casualties in Hiroshima and Nagasaki as compared with the potential number an invasion could have caused is small indeed."
"...the Japanese were ready to surrender and it wasn't necessary to hit them with that awful thing." - DWIGHT EISENHOWER (in 1963)
"It is my opinion that the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender because of the effective sea blockade and the successful bombing with conventional weapons." - Admiral William Leahy, Truman’s chief military advisor
The month was likely below average for the war. So, it's not just a question of would we have invaded, but just how many days it shortens the war.
Further, it is likely more people died in Tokyo than either of those city's.
> Admiral Soemu Toyoda, the Chief of the Naval General Staff, estimated that no more than one or two additional bombs could be readied, so they decided to endure the remaining attacks, acknowledging "there would be more destruction but the war would go on"
In any case, even now, virtually every person who was a child during WWII in Japan suffers from severe osteoporosis which is apparently a result of malnutrition as a child. For those who have never been here (especially in the countryside), a huge percentage of the population over the age of 70 is doubled over, unable to stand upright (they are still out in the fields working, though... which blows my mind on a daily basis). The difference between health issues for the elderly in Japan and my home country of Canada is really amazing.
Again, I have no idea about any of this stuff, but my experience here in Japan lends some credence to the idea that a land invasion of Japan would have been completely unnecessary. Just keep mining the seas and in a year the war would have been over, I think.
One of the most ironic things about thinking about this is that without the unconditional surrender of Japan, I think it is unlikely that MacArthur would have had as much success in rebuilding the country. I think I would get no argument from anybody here that some of the best things of modern Japanese culture arose from that period.
To be honest, when I see articles about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, I wish people didn't dwell so much about the decisions made at the time. However you slice it, war produces incredible amounts of suffering. The idea that no matter how atrocious one side behaves, we can always pull out an atrocity that will shock them out of their behaviour is crazy. Possibly it is the only way we know how to operate, but I refuse to believe that it is the only way that can be effective.
They used to say that WWI was the war to end all wars because we would remember how awful it was. But it didn't take us long to realize that we didn't have the tools to stop another world war. We need to remember Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only to avoid these disasters, but all of the disasters that come from the situations that led up to it. To think that we allowed the situation to get so bad that we can justify nuclear weapons -- that is what is scary. To think that we weighed the possible outcomes of hundreds of thousands dying in a land invasions, millions dying in a mass starvation, or tens or hundreds of thousands dying in a nuclear explosion. That's lunacy.
www.defence.gov tells me that the budget for the military is 585 billion this year. I assume that does not include the CIA. Where is the government "department for avoiding war"? I seem to see that the budget for the UN is $5.5 billion. 1% of the military budget. Will history repeat itself, or will we try to remember and learn from it?
While the Japanese were certainly willing to use civilians for tactical or strategic gain, one cannot assume that their military forces would have raped and pillaged their own populace in the same manner.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa#Civilian_los...
Moved out West and obviously introduced to a few different interpretations of the event, but it took a few years to start to question what I was taught early on and that maybe it is not 100% what would have happend in regards to WWI if not for the assassination.
Iraq invades Kuwait? Nuke it.
North Korea developing weapons of mass destruction? Nuke it.
Why mess around with invasions.
Note the scientists who developed the bomb begged the US government to first drop one off the coast of Japan to demonstrate to them what they were facing.
Instead we killed tens of thousands of civilians on purpose, not once, but went back a second time. The lucky ones were vaporized instantly. The unlucky ones died over weeks in horrible pain from radiation and mass organ failure.
August 9th, bombing of Nagasaki
August 15th, Japan surrenders.
One could note that the two bombs were of different design, that both were tested on real cities and real human beings. As for whether or not Soviet or the bombs won the war - or if the bombs made much difference that waiting would not have; it's hard to judge. Here's one take on it:
http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/08...
I don't think you actually understand said logic. US was in war with Japan for a long time, and was steadily winning; however, against self-interest of their country, Japanese command would not surrender. Continuing assault, US inflicted enormous civilian losses on Japan. The firebombing of Tokyo alone was at least as deadly as Hiroshima atomic bomb. And yet, Japan command did not want to surrender. Only atomic bomb finally succeed in ending the war.
It didn't happen because of some abstract "score"; it happened because of sheer moral shock of how one bomb was able to destroy an entire city. If US had decided to just bomb Hiroshima with conventional methods, inflicting exactly the same amount of death and destruction, it most likely wouldn't have ended the war.
Iraq, North Korea and other situations you can link with "this logic" are _not_ similar to this.
There's absolutely no clear answer to this question, even among military historians, so I'm not sure how you can have no doubt about it.
As history shows, the US had no intention of harming the emperor -- so why wouldn't it accept this condition? And why did it target civilians, rather than (as the Los Alamos scientists had called for) a demonstration just off the coast which would have made the point equally well?
So my question is, how well documented was the Japanese back-channel surrender offer? Is it documented that it was made to legitimate decision-makers through those back channels?
[Edit: I linked to a terrible source. I apologise.]
EDIT: that said, do you have a source that isn't a holocaust-denial website?
I have heard this claim from decidedly less-terrible sources, but the hour is too late in my current timezone to pursue this thread. So until then I will need to relax the certitude of my claims.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Institute_for_Historical_Rev...
"The IHR is not regarded as conducting serious historical research by mainstream historians and academics but rather as conducting pseudo-science..."
My vague recollection is that most of it was evidence of perception on the US side that Japan was ready to surrender - as opposed to evidence about specific back-channel negotiations.
Edit: Sources From The Shock of the Atomic Bomb and Japan's Decision to Surrender: A Reconsideration http://www.mconway.net/page1/page15/files/Shock%20of%20Atomi...
Togo reasoned
that "the introduction of a new weapon, which had
drastically altered the whole military situation, offered the military
ample grounds for ending the war." He proposed that surrender
be considered at once on the basis of terms presented
in the Potsdam Declaration. (When those in the peace party
talked about "accepting the Potsdam terms," they meant acceptance
with one crucial condition: retention of the emperor
system.) However, the military authorities refused to concede
that the United States had used an atomic weapon. Given the
army's intransigence, it was impossible for the cabinet to take
up Togo's proposal.Even if there were going to be many U.S. military casualties (which I doubt, although I know this is debatable), that doesn't in any way justify killing civilians. It's a tragedy of World War 2 (and Korea and Vietnam to lesser extents) that our leaders thought this was an appropriate way to fight a war.
WW2 wasn't just a war, it was absolute war: the survival of nations and perhaps hundreds of millions of people were on the line. In absolute war, most of the resources of the nation, including most of its labor pool, is put into war supply mode. That is a critical distinction. Killing civilians was inherently necessary, as they worked the manufacturing plants that supplied the weapons. If you intend to destroy the factories to stop the flow of weapons and supplies, you are going to kill very large numbers of civilians. And before the reflexive comment: simultaneously I'm not condoning intentionally targeting civilians as an appropriate means of instilling terror or capitulation.
That would be some seriously revisionist history that would horrify the Japanese. My goodness. You should visit Japan some time.
Your claim that he's making a "pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan," despite the White House having stated clearly that he doesn't intend to apologize for the bombings when the visits Hiroshoma, is itself propaganda.
As has been mentioned elsewhere, Germany and Japan were both incapable of winning anything when the bombs were dropped (Germany had surrendered, and Japan was wrecked,) so the outcome where they won WWII if the atomic bombs hadn't been dropped simply couldn't exist.
At least we can agree to agree, the Left and Right are a false alternative offered to the American people.
Isn't this an absolute? So you tend to disagree with yourself or do you make exceptions for self-contradiction?
It is a strawman to imply that my position is that no one is allowed any contradiction or errors whatsoever. The issue is not errors of knowledge or mistakes but the failure to correct such errors when they are found. An honest man works to correct his errors and contradictions, i.e. is consistent, while the dishonest like to wallow in them or pretend they don't exist or rationalize them by misquoting Emerson.
It's also a strawman to imply that I ever implied that.
Don't think we didn't noticed that you ignored the fact that you misquoted Emerson.