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Comment by lotharbot | Hacker News Reader

Seems like every time this topic comes up, there are people who seem to "know" a lot of things, and on occasion they can point to real documentation -- letters that can be traced to people in the presidential cabinet, for example -- but very often the things people "know" turn out to be speculative, or after-the-fact rationalizations, or connecting dots that were known individually by people in different parts of the government but who didn't have a way to connect with each other.

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?

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> 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.]

interesting. Based on that, it looks like the sticking point really was whether the Emperor's safety would be guaranteed (thought he was eventually kept as a figurehead, it's not clear the US leadership expected to take that path.)

EDIT: that said, do you have a source that isn't a holocaust-denial website?

Ugh, yeah, that's a terrible source. Apologies for the bad Google-fu.

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.

IHR is not a trustworthy source...

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..."

Thank you for pointing this out. I unreservedly withdraw my citation!

Having withdrawn the citation you should either replace it with a better one or retract your assertion.

On a scale of "zero" to "a lot less than six million", how would you rate the Institute for Historical Review?

Oh shit. Withdrawn!

It's many years since I visited, but the atomic bomb museum in Hiroshima has an exhibit that appeared to cover the evidence surrounding this pretty exhaustively.

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.

Question should not be how well it is documented, but why it is not well documented.

I feel like this is akin to asking why the staging of the moon landing was not more well documented.

The two bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people. No idea what your point is, please explain.

I think he's implying that "why it isn't documented" might be "because it didn't happen" ("it" being serious offers of surrender by Japan that reached the ears of US decision makers.) And that asking "why wasn't it documented?" presupposes that it did happen, which makes it a leading question.

Yep.

I'm not assuming that it did happened, I'm assuming that if you're going to kill hundreds of thousands of people, that every attempt to reach a outcome that does not require it should be tried and documented.

Does 'years of war and 50 millions dead' count as an attempt? Rather than an armchair, the decision-makers were coming from a viewpoint that included more of their friends dying horribly every week. As Tibbets, the guy that flew the mission said about critics of the event, "Those people never had their balls on that cold, hard anvil. They can say anything they want."

The parent comment was in a sense asking if nkoren's assertion was reality, or after the fact speculation. If it was in fact speculation (like "the moon landing was staged") then it would follow that there wouldn't be a large amount of documentation. Admittedly not the best comparison.

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