A man who saved Kyoto from the atomic bomb (2015)
bbc.com
bbc.com
> But he was also behind the internment of more than 100,000 Japanese Americans because, as Mr Stimson put it, "their racial characteristics are such that we cannot understand or trust even the citizen Japanese".
The internment of Japanese-Americans is a blight on United States history [1], as is the gold rush era Chinese Exclusion Act [2] ("the first law implemented to prevent all members of a specific ethnic or national group from immigrating" to the United States), as was the 1950s "Red Scare" [3] (where accusations of being Communist spies were made without evidence.)
As the United States enters into a (likely multi-decade long) second Cold War and potential painful economic decoupling, it's worth knowing this history so that the real problems the United States has identified with the Chinese Communist Party can be addressed in accordance to the values the United States exposes.
Especially with the presumption of innocence (innocent until proven guilty) when it comes to individual people's lives, and the principle that everybody is created equal.
US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo's recent "Distrust and Verify" [4] reformulation (of a famous Russian proverb) should definitely be applied widely to counter the Chinese Communist Party threat, but great care must be taken to ensure America's core values are always respected. Cold Wars are very dangerous and vastly increase the risk of nuclear escalation, so it's vital we all understand what's at stake.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internment_of_Japanese_America...
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_Exclusion_Act
The US has never lived up to those. Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp (I hope no one forgot about that one) or all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
Thomas Jefferson wrote that "All men are created equal" in 1776 as part of the United States' founding principles, but it took until 1865 for slavery to even be abolished in the United States. He even owned slaves himself and famously bore 6 children with his slave, Sally Hemings. As recently as 155 years ago in the United States, you could own people as property, and 70 years ago black people couldn't drink out of the same drinking fountain as white people.
The US has always been a work in progress, and it's better to have some kind of aspirational set of values (like presumption of innocence and equality) that we should try and make sure our societies are living up to.
The US is a constitutional democracy that was created in a world of kingdoms. It has the oldest constitution, a code of laws that grants its citizens rights which the government is prohibited from violating. And while the UK may be considered as an (perhaps only) older running democracy, it had a king, where the US replaced this role with the invention of a popularly-elected president. Sure it's not so special anymore, since everyone has democracy and presidents these days. But it most certainly was not always the case, especially back when the US was stumbling at times living up to its ideals. I am old enough to remember a world where the most common form of govt was still a dictatorship, not democracy, and there were despicable authoritarian regimes on almost every continent. US history is certainly not all positive, but the positives are there. A constitution and popular elections are not ideals, they are results. People who have positive opinions of this country throughout history were not as blind and irrational as these dismissive posts think.
But that is just not true. From slavery, Jim Crow, internment camps, McCarthy, Vietnam, killing of “enemy combatants”, etc. You have never been even close to the way.
[0]England, Spain, Netherlands, Belgium, Sweden, others?
In contrast, most European countries have higher social mobility than the US [0]. And considering the influence of money in US politics, that matters more.
[0] http://reports.weforum.org/social-mobility-report-2020/socia...
But there are definitely a load of countries which make America look great, and if that's not a sign of how much progress humanity has still to make I don't know what is.
So, its not necessarily the case that just because everyone believes something, it is true...
In a country on the opposite side of the spectrum, doing that lands you in secret jail.
It doesn't matter what he did was lawful or not, or whether the law itself is right or wrong. In the end, he decided to hole himself up in a foreign embassy in London to avoid extradition to Sweden on some sex charges.
He offered to go back to Sweden to face the charges on the proviso that he would not be expedited from Sweden to the USA. This was not guaranteed.
Julian Assange is a political prisoner. All of the bogus sex crime charges against him have been dropped, and were never intended to be anything but a lever to get him to go back to Sweden so he could be extrajudicially rendered back to the USA - since Sweden and the USA have a track record of such criminal behaviour, Julian rightfully required a guarantee that the Swedish government could not provide.
And as a result Julian Assange is currently being psychologically tortured in Belmarsh - and has yet to face any of the charges against him. Nobody should think that Assanges' case upholds the highest values of Western legal justice, because it does not.
What is being done to Julian is tantamount to the same sort of treatment one would expect to happen to dissidents in dictatorships. Stop spreading the nonsense, and learn the facts about his case - it is chilling to the core.
Woman did not have rights in most of the world because they wanted to. But because the US pressured them to.
The US has never had a female leader and has never really been the vanguard of women's rights -- interesting that you should choose to ascribe all such success to the US. Womens suffrage was established in nearly 100 countries before the US.
> all the tragic events that ignited the BLM movement are just current examples.
A tiny minority of people caused the incidents that ignited the BLM movement. They're not widely held opinions, but happen to be rife in the police force. It's a bad culture in the police that needs to be cleaned out, not that it's in the US culture itself.
The violence against black people has been going on since the beginning with impunity. And people continue to elect the people that pay and control the police force.
Equating the two like so many people love doing is necessary step if you want to transition from the latter to the former.
On the other hand, even with a change in the Presidency, it is almost guaranteed that the GOP will do everything in its power to obstruct the new Administration, if it holds any power at all.
I am not sure what will happen. I share your hope but not your optimism.
Come November they'll likely be multiple vaccine candidates in late-stage trials, and the compelling argument can be made saying the botched crisis is almost over and Trump will soon be returning the economy to four more years of ~3% growth. After the vaccine is widely deployed, whoever is President will see a year of 6+% growth (after 2020's 10+% contraction)
https://medium.com/wintoncentre/what-have-been-the-fatal-ris...
Ask Israel how opening schools worked for them.
Some core Trump advisors like Peter Navarro (author of "Death by China" and the associated documentary) believe in economic decoupling far more deeply Biden advisors.
I agree some Democratic leaders like Chuck Schumer are hawks on China, but a Biden administration would be far less hawkish on the CCP issue than Trump.
I can see Trump using the 'nuclear option' and cutting off Hong Kong's ability to conduct transactions in US dollars (fatally killing the Hong Kong economy and deeply damaging China's, and far less so America's). I can't see Biden doing that.
Job done.
It's impossible to figure out what percentage of Japanese people in the US would have sided with Japan over America. But it might be telling that during the Niihau incident, literally every Japanese person the pilot ran across decided to help him, in contrast to helping the native Hawaiians they had been living with for decades. I wonder at what point the internment becomes acceptable. If 99% of the Japanese people in America would have supported Japan in the war, would the internment have been okay?
In this case, "literally every" means exactly three people, two of whom were first-generation immigrants without citizen.
I do hope you understand how that's not a sufficient basis to make conclusions about 120,000 people.
Would you have supported the internment if 110,000 of those 120,000 people supported Japan in their war against the USA?
I'm USian, so of course I like any argument that puts the US on the right side of history. But as that moment gets more and more into the past, and we lose the context of culture, etc of that time, what is left is that the US intentionally killed thousands of civilians to demonstrate military prowess and intimidate the opposition.
I've been taught the nuances. I've accepted them and perhaps even clung to them. As time passes, even USians might feel less need to keep the memory of those nuances alive. But the horror of that action doesn't go away.
I grew up learning about Christopher Columbus, and Pocahontas and Thomas Jefferson, and all the narrative we learned decades ago. Especially lately there has been a lot different version of much of those stories. Some see people and actions of the past as heroic, others see them as hideous.
I do not personally condemn decision makers of WWII. I am grateful for the sacrifices of past generations. But the fact remains that the US is the only country in the history of the world that has ever used a nuclear weapon in anger. That is extremely humbling.
One particular nuance you are passing over is that the US (and all other major combatants in the war) had already been engaged in the killing of thousands of civilians through total war and "conventional" carpet bombing. Nagasaki and Hiroshima were unique in that they were leveled from a single, nuclear bomb, but they absolutely were not unique in that they were leveled. Dozens of other Japanese cities experience the same level of destruction (literally 90+% of all structures destroyed) using firebombing (as in Napalm, used intentionally as most Japanese structures at the time were wooden) as the US pushed towards the Japanese mainland. And the US wasn't alone: the bombing of entire cities was a feature of the the Western German front and the German-Russian front, by both the Allies and the Axis.
So while you aren't wrong that dropping the atom bombs over Hiroshima and Nagasaki were essentially the US flexing its technological muscles, I am curious as to why it is considered abhorrent to kill thousands of civilians using a single "nuclear weapon in anger", but the killing of just as many civilians using many bombs seems to be accepted as just a part of the war?
But as they were on their 250th night bombing they just did the same as on 249th, but more efficiently. They used their cached reasons or were cherry-picking new reasons as needed provided that these reasons supported what they were already doing (chiefly the revenge argument that I deem unethical - and British probably would had consider as unethical before the war). They didn't seriously reconsider if they were still in to-be-or-not-to-be mode.
The point at which most of it started to unravel for me was when I learned that the United States had a whole spate of atomic bombs they were scheduling to drop if Imperial Japan didn't surrender. We think of it as two because that's all the further we got, but if things had gone a little differently it would have been six, eight, etc.
A willingness to cause that kind of unprecedented basically indiscriminate devastation, well it forced me to look at the events that actually did happen through a very different lens.
In that context an overwhelming and undeniable show of force arguably lead to less death on the obvious side, but also of those who would have been consumed on the side that surrendered as well. Consideration of the 'lessons learned' from (then, possibly either, 'the great war' or WWI) also required the consideration of recovery after the war.
My supposition is that for Japan the outcome is probably within the best likely range of variations. Cultural identity intact; culture nudged towards an easy, slow, movement towards global integration, tolerance and equality; a post-war rebuilding effort to ensure that recovery would stick and general prosperity would persist.
We should be so lucky to reflect upon the post-war lessons and once again apply them within as a New-New Deal. I hope that is how we apply the lessons of recovering from the world wars to recovering from the current 'war' on the pandemic (and all of the forces that cause it to be as bad as it has been; most domestic).
I can't find it now, but there was an audible audiobook that I used to have back in the dvd-audio days that showed just how much effort the Japanese government took to even be able to accept surrender when their militaries were extremely hawkish even to the end. It briefly touched on US discussions as well but was primarily focused on the Japanese government.
The Emperor of Japan himself had to do a certain amount of conspiring in order to be able to both surrender and not lose face. Even though he was in theory the supreme ruler, apparently if not done correctly there was risk of that military officers would go rogue.
> In a study published in 1996, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta claims that the Three Alls Policy, sanctioned by Emperor Hirohito himself, was both directly and indirectly responsible for the deaths of "more than 2.7 million" Chinese civilians.
Sankō Sakusen: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Three_Alls_Policy
(That "justification" doesn't look valid in my eyes, don't take me wrong. Eye for an eye, civilian for a civilian?...)
Alas, it certainly looks like US had already decided that they indiscriminately target Japanese civilians long before they had nuclear weapons. The single most devastating conventional raid on Tokyo on 10 March 1945 claimed 90-100 thousand deaths (it's slightly more than Hiroshima).
Everything indicated that Japan and it's civilian population was willing to fight off an invasion at all costs, through the bitter end. The Americans witnessed that absolute suicidal fanaticism in every single battle they've had with the Japanese whether they were military or civilians. What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways. I get that it's hard for some to acknowledge that the US has ever done anything good, but there are already tons of valid reasons to dislike America. This absolutely isn't one of them.
Btw in ww2, history seems to have been written mostly by the losers who pushed for the omnipresent "underdog" narratives that are usually nothing more than outright historical revisionism . The Japanese white washing of their ww2 history or the german generals post war memoirs that started numerous myths about the Werhmacht are proof of that. Ironically, one of those narratives is the tired maxim that history is supposedly written by the winners, which is a pretty convenient way for the losers to make their revisionism more compelling.
>What's actually "rationalization" is to pretend the Americans didn't try everything to convince the Japanese to capitulate or to push for the disproven theory that Japan was about to surrender anyways
Those weren't the only two options. Many scientists working on the Manhattan Project submitted the Szilárd petition, urging the US to inform Japan of the terms of surrender before dropping an atomic bomb on them. The petition was ignored. They didn't even try something as basic as that.
Further, the bombs destructive power could have been demonstrated without dropping one on two cities. A non-inhabited area very possibly could have worked, but a military only target was also a possibility.
This isn't an example of the losers rewriting history, it's straightforward logic. The only situation I would consider launching a nuke today is retaliatory, and I don't see how being the sole owners of a nuclear bomb makes any other situation ethical.
And why not? If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? What leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?
Those aren't terms. On a simple, likely over discused level, the Japanese leaders were against the removal of the Emperor. If the US had provided terms accepting a figurehead role for him they may have been willing to discuss peace.
>Keep in mind they were dropping leaflets warning the target cities' population of imminent doom for days before the bombings.
Though leaflets were dropped in Japan, they did not list Hiroshima as a target and they were not dropped in Hiroshima.
> If you had a weapon you knew could end the war and lead to much, much less casualties on your side why not use it? leader would prefer the death of hundreds of thousands of his own soldiers (and millions of civilian casualties) in a total war because nuclear somehow makes it less ethical?
Again, those weren't the only options available. It's entirely possible their weapon could have ended the war without using it on cities.
We'll never know, as instead they demanded unconditional surrender and used atomic bombs to force acceptance.
Either way, the US was never in a scenario where their only option was nuke cities or a full scale invasion.
You should definitely try to understand that. Perhaps if the bombs had been targeted at LA or NY by Germans (who would certainly be as correct as you are that doing that would've saved millions of lives in a potential invasion of the USA by Germany once it was done in Europe) it would be easier for you to understand that the potential for a future, prolongued military battle in no way can be used as a justification for immediately killing hundreds of thousands of civillians.
Again, it's pure non sense to advocate that those numbers would have been better than 2 nuclear bombs because... at least it was conventional? And why can't an assessment of the potential casualties be used as a justification? Because that just sounds like grandstanding that completely ignore the reality of the war in the pacific.
Not only that, but Germany was still planned to be a target if it hadn't surrendered by the time the bombs were ready. So yes, it could have happened, but only the japanese were willing go fight until the very end. They had to be shown that they would not die in a honorable resistance against the us forces, but instead will simply get nuked with no chance of fighting or retaliating.
It wasn't "potential", it was already happening. People fixate on the atom bombs but completely ignore the carpet bombing campaigns that had been going on long before. Dozens of Japanese cities were flattened to the same extent of destruction as Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The only difference is that with those two cities, it was accomplished with a single plane, dropping a single atomic bomb, whereas with other Japanese cities, it was accomplished with hundreds of planes dropping thousands of napalm filled warheads.
I think you need to spend some quality time going over pictures and statistics from cities like Volgograd and Berlin. The destruction was by no means unprecedented and the death toll among the locals was on the same order as what you'd expect from fighting over the city. The low cost to the attackers was what was unprecedented.
Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself. The war pigs have a different lie for every different constituency, and "nukes are green" has somehow been swallowed by a small number of very vocal (on HN anyway) internet environmentalists.
They would essentially be UN consequences, they don't have a great track record of enforcing things like that.
>Having escaped those consequences, would they then have subjected the globe to a rampage of nuclear holocaust
Looking only at nukes, dropping one more on a populated area is worse than reality so far. And it's impossible to guess what kind of warfare a world without MAD would gave faced.
>Nuclear power absent the support of militarists in control of public money would be, absent. Only by the most skewed of accounting methods does it even begin to pay for itself.
Nuclear power obtained without the focus placed on weapons would be a completely different economy. Not only are design choices often made allowing more bombs to be created, the control of information and resources drives the price up.
It's not quite as much of an unalloyed good as you're suggesting.
I kind of wonder about the timeline in which Kennedy and Khrushchev hadn't been cancelled by their respective hardliners. Would we have wound up with a world of laws, in which the strong are just and the weak secure and the peace preserved? Would the US and the USSR have converged on market economies with strong safety nets? Would we all now be celebrating Hearth's Warming Eve with pantomimes?
If you read the accounts from any person at the time. Regardless of the theater or the nationality the overwhelming consensus was that the priority was to get the war over with ASAP so that everyone could go home. Anything else was just a side benefit.
He married with another legend Lin Huiyin, whose niece Maya Lin later designed Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington DC. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maya_Lin
I read the New York Times "Overlooked" obituary for Dr Liang Sicheng but found no reference to this event. [1]. The closest thing I could find was [2] which writes the following (and links to a currently-unavailable article hosted on the government of China mouthpiece China Daily):
> During World War II, as Japan occupied Beijing and most of coastal China, Liang Sicheng was working in Sichuan. According to Luo Zhewen, a former student who frequently assisted Liang Sicheng in his research, Liang heard that the Allied forces were planning on bombing Japan and Japanese-controlled areas in China. Liang began drawing up a map of the major Chinese cities occupied by Japan as well as Japan’s former capitals, Nara and Kyoto to help American military planners avoid destroying important historic sites and buildings. Liang then traveled to Chongqing, the wartime capital of the Republic of China, and passed the maps to the US Army liaison stationed there.
The NYT article suggests Dr. Liang Sicheng was later in life sent to re-education as a counterrevolutionary of Maoist China, but that he has had his reputation revived by the CCP which turn him into a folk hero. I don't doubt that he passed on maps and messages to the US Army in the hope of sparing culturally important sites from bombing, but without further evidence the claim that he was an advisor to the US military that convinced them to spare Kyoto and Nara appears overblown.
I am happy to be convinced if independent historians believe Liang Sicheng had a part to play in the decision, but right now this claim feels like highly-upvoted CCP propaganda.
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2018/04/11/obituaries/overlooked-lin...
[2] https://radiichina.com/did-chinese-architect-liang-sicheng-s...
Even for HN this is ridiculously paranoid.
Ah okay, sorry, I thought that's what you meant.
"Von Neumann, four other scientists, and various military personnel were included in the target selection committee that was responsible for choosing the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as the first targets of the atomic bomb. Von Neumann oversaw computations related to the expected size of the bomb blasts, estimated death tolls, and the distance above the ground at which the bombs should be detonated for optimum shock wave propagation and thus maximum effect. The cultural capital Kyoto, which had been spared the bombing inflicted upon militarily significant cities, was von Neumann's first choice,[131] a selection seconded by Manhattan Project leader General Leslie Groves. However, this target was dismissed by Secretary of War Henry L. Stimson.[132]"
"We choose not to destroy cultural value" seems a compassion argument until one realizes that the atomic bomb murdered more civilians that a conventional attack would have killed. To try to justify the attack, to talk about the process, the decisions, removes a very important part of the discussion. And that is the consequences on the civil population.
I accept that talking about strategies and politics make sense. But, to remove any human consideration from the discussion only makes us one step closer to repeat the horrific acts of the past.
As we have seen so recently, facts do not change people's minds, but feelings do. To talk about the effects on the population, to talk about the suffering will help people to change their minds about using atomic bombs.
From a recent study into USA attitudes to the usage of nuclear weapons in warfare:
> Sagan noted, “The most shocking finding of our study is that 60 percent of Americans would approve of killing 2 million Iranian civilians to prevent an invasion of Iran that might kill 20,000 U. S. soldiers. ”
I think it's pretty hard to overstate how concerning that study result is. The nuclear bombing of Japan killed 120,000 people. Here, 60% say they'd approve of killing 2,000,000 _civilians_ to save 20,000 U.S combatants.
I'd hazard a guess that more Americans are proud of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki than are ashamed of it. To not reckon with the horror and the pain of those bombing is to be open to doing the same and worse in the future.
With Fascism whipping up in the USA, that survey result becomes even more ominous.
1. https://news.stanford.edu/2017/08/08/americans-weigh-nuclear...
Says who? The firebombing of Tokyo killed just as many civilians as the atom bomb over Hiroshima did (100k+), and is still considered the single most destructive air raid in human history[0]. And that was just Tokyo. Dozens of similar air raids were conducted throughout Japan, to say nothing of the European/Russian fronts.
It is not those defending the atom bombs that are removing "any human consideration from the discussion". It is people like yourself who, presumably because you don't know the relevant history, are removing the human consideration by ignoring the hundreds of thousands of civilians who were already being slaughtered. But for some reason killing someone with a napalm filled "conventional" bomb is more acceptable than killing them with an atomic bomb.
The conventional bombings on Tokyo killed more people than any atomic bomb.
Tokyo had at the time a population of 1.1 million and 90,000 to 100,000 dead on the bombing of March 10th 1945.
Hiroshima had at the time a population of 255,000 and 66,000 dead caused by the atomic bomb.
You are right. It would have been way worse if the USA has attacked a more populated area. The situations is no less horrific because it.
And Tokyo is not a city, but a region. It has naturally more population because of it's far bigger area. Whether population at the time was also denser than in hiroshima back then, do you have data for this?
Anyway, the point is that it doesn't matter which tool you use. The death toll depends more on the effort and will you put in, than on the bomb you use.
Tokyo was not chosen because it's too important to nuke. Demonstrate isn't the only criteria.
In the end they decided the target mainly by effective damage (physical as also psychological), which ruled out already attacked areas and left only a handful cities. Of those hiroshima was the best, because of size and the surrounding mountains, which made the best setup for effective demonstrating the power of the atomic bomb.
http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2014/08/08/kyoto-misconceptio...