Hiroshima (1946)

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1946/08/31/hiroshima

by canjobear • 10 years ago

173 186 10 years ago

Aelinsaar• 10 years ago

It must have been a surreal experience, to walk through the burning remains of your world, without an explanation as to "How".

slimsag• 10 years ago

Even with an explanation to "How", "Why" is the more common question when faced with intentional and extreme tragedy against yourself and loved ones.

niels_olson3• 10 years ago

Having gone through Katrina and been deployed for Fukushima, I assure you, there is plenty of time for the survivors to contemplate all the questions. That is arguably part of the tragedy of survivorship: facing down all the questions, and knowing with cruel certainty there will be time to face them.

lotharbot4• 10 years ago

I think the "why" would have been obvious to anyone -- there was an ongoing, active war in which both sides had been bombing each other and killing civilians, and Hiroshima was contributing significant production toward the war effort.

Trombone122• 10 years ago

Eh, when the gadgets fell the US had been terror bombing Japanese cities for 10 months: "why" probably wasn't very pressing at that point. Burning Japanese civilians was simply an American thing to do at that point.

canjobear3• 10 years ago

One particularly nice detail in the piece, the kind of detail you could only get from talking to real survivors shortly afterwards, is the kinds of theories and rumors that were going around the day of/after the bomb. People thought the Americans had sprinkled gasoline and lit it on fire, or thought that there had been some kind of trick involving dusting the city with magnesium. The weird rumors remind me of the kind of stuff I heard on the day of 9/11.

mevile2• 10 years ago

In the street, the first thing he saw was a squad of soldiers who had been burrowing into the hillside opposite, making one of the thousands of dugouts in which the Japanese apparently intended to resist invasion, hill by hill, life for life; the soldiers were coming out of the hole, where they should have been safe, and blood was running from their heads, chests, and backs. They were silent and dazed.

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.

chx2• 10 years ago

I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took
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.

sillysaurus3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure what to think, but here's an interesting argument. What would the counterargument look like?

"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."

pjys• 10 years ago

They sure teach the kids well in US schools.

stana• 10 years ago

I grew up in the Balkans and was taught in school that assassination of Franc Ferdinand in Sarajevo was jusified act to free South Slavic people from German oppression. To justify the aftermath of WWI - the education at the time said the World War I would have happened anyway.

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.

ck22• 10 years ago

By this logic, the US should just nuke any area causing problems for it.

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.

tim3332• 10 years ago

Well not really. Estimates for the cost of invading Japan were approx 1m US casualties, 5m Japanese. None of the above issues produce anything like that.

golergka• 10 years ago

By this logic, the US should just nuke any area causing problems for it.

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.

hasenj3• 10 years ago

The fact that you're getting downvoted for saying this on HN (out of all places) is kinda odd.

kbart3• 10 years ago

I'm not sure why this post gets downvoted as it makes a really good point I see from time to time when discussing this matter: why drop the first nuke on heavily populated city? Dropping few on the biggest military bases or naval fleets, would be enough to scare the shit out of anyone. Why shooting civilians is considered a war crime, but deliberately nuking (Hiroshima Nagasaki) or mass bombing (Dresden, Tokyo, Iraq, Afghanistan etc.) them somehow makes it acceptable?

ayyghost• 10 years ago

However I may feel about the bomb having been used, I don't doubt it saved more lives than it took.

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.

nkoren6• 10 years ago

This counterfactual loses much of its appeal when you learn that Japan was beaten and had been trying, through back channels, to conditionally surrender for months prior to the bombing. Their sole condition was guaranteed safety for the Emperor: the US refused to grant this, and so the fighting continued.

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?

lotharbot4• 10 years ago

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?

hackcasual2• 10 years ago

As in backchannels of primarily just Shigenori Togo. The Japanese war council was unanimous in rejecting unconditional surrender, and bitterly divided on the terms willing to be offered for conditional surrender. The idea that it was the safety of the emperor they were stuck on is new to me. Perhaps you are referring to Togo's statement that the Potsdam declaration would be accepted provided the position of the Emperor was maintained? Firstly, this was not an official Japanese government offer, secondly it's not exactly as if it's a reasonable request to allow a defeated belligerent to maintain their existing government.

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.

hudibras• 10 years ago

If the U.S. had instead somehow parachuted in 200,000 troops to Hiroshima, and then lined up and shot to death 100,000 men, women, children, elderly people, hospital patients, etc., and then burned every building down to the ground, would that be okay? What if by doing so it would end the war?

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.

sukilot9• 10 years ago

Why do soldiers deserve to die more than civilians? This is not obvious. Soldiers by and large are not enrolled in war by virtue of free choice among competitive options.

adventured3• 10 years ago

that doesn't in any way justify killing civilians

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.

niels_olson3• 10 years ago

Soviets

That would be some seriously revisionist history that would horrify the Japanese. My goodness. You should visit Japan some time.

canjobear3• 10 years ago

It took me about an hour to read this whole thing. If you are like me and find the Hiroshima event fascinating, I highly recommend doing this. The piece follows several people who ended up in a park together the night after the bomb, and hauntingly captures the mood of that night and the horrifying physical details of what people went through. I definitely think I'll remember some images from this article for a while.

gunnihinn• 10 years ago

The article was long ago published as a stand-alone book. I bought and read the book before I ever knew it came from the New Yorker. It's one of the most haunting things I've read, and I guard that book jealously, which is a long-winded way of recommending you find the book and keep it around.

Trombone122• 10 years ago

The following summary by Alex Wellerstein represents his understanding of the consensus view. Notably the idea that the bombings where carefully motivated by some sort of ethical calculus is not something that historians now believe. From http://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2013/03/08/the-decision-to-us...

* 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.

reso• 10 years ago

This is an excellent post that anyone thinking about Hiroshima should read.

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...

unknown2374• 10 years ago

And the states continue to get away with things like this to this day.

Zikes• 10 years ago

I don't recall the US nuking anybody recently. Did I miss something?

Hondor• 10 years ago

It's funny how war is always glorious from the point of view of the aggressor and always sad from the point of view of the aggressed (sp?), even when they're the same person! How we feel depends on who's story we're reading at the time.

"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...

kristopolous• 10 years ago

This reminds me of Amy Goodman and Allan Nairn's story when they were doing journalism in East Timor:

"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_...

studentrob5• 10 years ago

That's terrible, for sure.

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.

rangibaby2• 10 years ago

It wouldn't have been the first time the Indonesians killed journalists. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Balibo_Five

studentrob5• 10 years ago

Yes Japan was awful during WW II. That's why the US dropped the bomb.

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_...

mkoryak• 10 years ago

on a side note, that article has been vandalized.

"Allied commando unit known as Z Force led by Major Pidar McBlyat"

His name is made up of 2 common russian swear words

ksou324• 10 years ago

It's very easy to judge past America 60 years from the moment.

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 ?

nihonde13• 10 years ago

This article was written immediately after the war, and doesn't really pass any judgment. It's one of the greatest works of non-fiction of all time, in my opinion.

hasenj3• 10 years ago

I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians.

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.

hugh4• 10 years ago

I think would much rather my leaders just sign some sort of an armistice agreement rather than annihilate "enemy" civilians.

Great idea! Now, how do we persuade the other side to sign that agreement?

ksou324• 10 years ago

And the logic of killing civilians to save soldiers is just .. no comment.

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.

lujim4• 10 years ago

Well to be fair soldiers are humans and aren't just completely disposable. Read "With the Old Breed" by Eugene Sledge to see the fun and games a 19 year old kid from Mobile Alabama got to have as a US Marine in the Pacific. Spoiler alert, his experience was probably about as bad as anything a human could endure.

sangnoir2• 10 years ago

Added additional context to your question:

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.

ksou324• 10 years ago

Most of the men in WW 2 were drafted.

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.

microcolonel• 10 years ago

I read through this, revisited some of the images of the aftermath.

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.

TheOtherHobbes• 10 years ago

It's one of the usual outcomes of war in general. Humans have been maiming, burning, torturing, cutting, asphyxiating, and otherwise abusing other humans for all of recorded history.

The only difference is that nuclear weapons are industrialised death machines - much more efficient than the usual manual methods.

tiredwired• 10 years ago

It's ok, everything worked out in the end. US & Japan turned the whole relationship thing around.

nihonde13• 10 years ago

Well, that is actually a good point. As President Obama said in anticipation of his historic visit to Hiroshima this year (paraphrasing): the relationship of Japan and the United States should serve as an example of how we can build a lasting peace from bitter enmity.

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.

eceppda3• 10 years ago

The US started targeting defenseless civilians in Japan via fire bombing, and the majority of the Japan's cities had already been destroyed by the time they deployed the atomic bombs. The attacks on civilians in Japan were the first examples of what is now standard procedure in the air force, now known as "strategic bombing".

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.

afterburner• 10 years ago

This ignores the changes since Iraq War I though. Carpet bombing is no longer standard procedure, because more accurate bombing became a lot cheaper.

eceppda3• 10 years ago

Iraq II re-destroyed Baghdad and destroyed the city center Falluja. An estimated 655,000 civilians were dead by 2006 and another 2,000,000 displaced. The standard procedure of targeting civilians is still the central strategy.

kbart3• 10 years ago

"Carpet bombing is no longer standard procedure"

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.

partycoder4• 10 years ago

There are many views on the bombing. The difference is that Americans do not hide it. It's controversial, but people know about it.

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.

mevile2• 10 years ago

Americans may not hide their actions, but they certainly paint the actions in a light favorable to the American self-image. Germany on the other hand exhibits complete contrition and there is no denial of the wrongness of the actions that happened. There are extreme and fringe holocaust denial beliefs in some sub-groups in Germany, but as a government policy what I've said is true.

partycoder4• 10 years ago

There are also groups of Americans that condemn such actions. There is also compassion for the victims. There is a mainstream ethical debate, which is what allows society to move forward.

bluejekyll5• 10 years ago

As an American, this is a question I struggle with. The the atomic bombs did what they were meant to, a swift end to the war with a full capitulation by the Japanese, before the Russians were able to mount an invasion of their own. This is generally forgiven because it in theory saved the lives of American soldiers who would have had a hard fight to take Japan.

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...

GunboatDiplomat3• 10 years ago

It's hard to have contrition for policies and actions which saved, arguably, millions of lives.

nihonde13• 10 years ago

For the record, this doesn't reflect my personal experience in Japan in any way whatsoever. People here are quite well aware of their history, but they don't understand some people's focus on Japan's most recent expansion into China and Korea any more than Americans would understand someone whose sole concern is the eradication of native Americans. This kind of "they're not sorry enough for me" discussion is fruitless, because no nation or ethnicity has a moral high ground to stand on.

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.

themodelplumber• 10 years ago

Yeah, regarding the not sorry enough position, people of the West generally broadcast toward Japan rather than the other way around. Read a book like "Senso," a compilation of letters to a Japanese newspaper by Japanese people sharing their recollections of the war. The sorrow becomes apparent. The shame is not hidden.

sukilot9• 10 years ago

The peace treaty that ended WWII handed over control of Japan's military to the USA. Japan's peacefulness is a gift from foreigners.

partycoder4• 10 years ago

I don't know how much of it can be attributed to the fact that they are required to be peaceful (as a country) by law.

krapp10• 10 years ago

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.

fatman13gg3• 10 years ago

I bet even during WW2 Japanese civilian life was peaceful too, but that doesn't prevent Japan's brutal invasion into other nations. Your personal experience doesn't matter much. Also I don't think Asians reveal their true thoughts to foreigners easily. Besides what matters is Japanese government's take on the history. If Japanese government continue to deny their wrongs during the war and worship their war criminals in shrine, then it is a major problem to the neighbors.

avallet• 10 years ago

I've been living in Japan for a couple years, and this reflects my experience too with regards to most people I've met. However, it's not just the government, but also a powerful and ageing elite which shares these views. Admittedly not people you'll meet everyday, yet they wield obvious political influence.

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.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Masahiko_Fujiwara

zurn• 10 years ago

no nation or ethnicity has a moral high ground to stand on

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.

cletus• 10 years ago

I came here to say pretty much exactly this.

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.

sukilot9• 10 years ago

It's rather xenophobic to think that anti-Westernism is the reason people find Japanese culture interesting.

US Hollywod movies (and McDonalds) are popular worldwide. Do those fans hate their home countries?

fatman13gg3• 10 years ago

The "rock" is actually located in East China sea.

rangibaby2• 10 years ago

It's not like Japan would be the first country to selectively remember history to make itself look good. I doubt they teach much about Dresden in the UK, or the extermination of Indians in America, or killing literally every Aborigine in Tasmania, or the British forcing the Chinese to buy opium.

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.

dkarp• 10 years ago

In the UK, children are definitely taught a history to be proud of in general. Which is the opposite of how history is taught in Germany. But there were a few exceptions. I'm certain we studied the Allied bombing of Dresden and also the massacres that occurred during the Indian independence movement.

vacri• 10 years ago

In Australia, the extermination of all Tasmanian aborigines was definitely not taught in highschool, in at least the late 80s when I went. It's not suppressed at all, and plenty of people are aware of it, but it's certainly not taught (or at least, wasn't at that time).

engi_nerd• 10 years ago

The eradication of Native Americans was discussed extensively during my public school education in the US. Make of this anecdote what you will.

animeweedlord2• 10 years ago

In American schools an overwhelming amount of time is spent teaching about the sins of our country and other white people. Slavery, Jim Crow laws, the genocide of Native Americans. In a unit on WWII, a week would be spent on the entire war, and the other 3 specifically dedicated to the Holocaust. All in all I'd say we spent over half of our history lessons and a third of our English lessons covering subjects like these.

sukilot9• 10 years ago

The USA just kicked President Jackson off the front of the $20 bill, and his genocide was part of the reason he was the least respected money face.

The "Trail of Tears" is a major unit in several years of K-12 education.

fenomas2• 10 years ago

probably not

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.

chimeracoder• 10 years ago

Japan on the other side, actively hide their actions.

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.

doall2• 10 years ago

It's not that Japanese people are hiding their history. If there are clear evidences that are not flawed and could not be denied, they will not deny, but admit and apologize. For example, there was the famous Korean sexual slavery issue coined by Seiji Yoshida that later he and Asahi Shimbun admitted it was a complete fiction. This revealed that the comfort women issue was not about slavery but prostitution.

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.

partycoder4• 10 years ago

https://sfi.usc.edu/news/2016/05/11436-japanese-activist-tam...

http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068

eceppda3• 10 years ago

http://apjjf.org/-Mark-Selden/1943/article.html

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.

rtpg• 10 years ago

At least in my experience in the US school system, not a lot talks about American behaviour in WW2

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.

fatman13gg3• 10 years ago

I would say that Japan has mostly behaved in a similar manner to Germany on the topic

Are you sure on that? I doubt Japan's neighboring nations would agree on that.

freemore2• 10 years ago

Today, Chinese government says that Japanese army killed 300,000 people in Nanking. In reality, Nanking's population had been doubled at that time. Plus, there were only 200,000 people from the beginning. I still think there had been something small massacres though, why can't we find dead bodies for 300,000 people?

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.

kbart3• 10 years ago

I didn't downvote you, but such claims really require good sources.

joshfraser• 10 years ago

When I visited the peace museum in Hiroshima, I was surprised by how honest the exhibits were about admitting their own ugly history that led up to the bomb. I was shocked by the forgiveness of the Japanese people. Some survivors actually work in the museum and greet visitors coming through. The peace museum is one of the most emotional places I've ever visited and it leaves such a vivid picture of the human cost of war.

oska• 10 years ago

The Bomb Didn’t Beat Japan… Stalin Did [1]

[1] http://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-japa...

dmfdmf6• 10 years ago

I have no problem with America bombing Japan with nuclear weapons. They (and Germany) deserved what they got, they started a world war and we finished it. All this American angst and apologia is coming from the anti-American intellectuals in the US. They have been spreading their propaganda unopposed for decades. The US is NOT GUILTY and owes no apologies whatsoever, Obama's pathetic mea culpa trip to Japan notwithstanding. For all you rationalists who like thought experiments (pretentiously called gedanken experiments by the same intellectuals); imagine what the world would be like if Germany and the Japanese had won WWII.

dannypgh• 10 years ago

Hitler offed himself and Germany surrendered months before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. Your thought experiment has no bearing on reality because Germany had already long lost the war.

krapp10• 10 years ago

You're accusing others of propaganda while trotting out the old right-wing hobbyhorses of "anti-American intellectualism" and Obama apologizing for American foreign policy.

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.

dmfdmf6• 10 years ago

Do you mean the same anti-intellectual "right-wing" who thinks the USA should be a faith-based, Christian nation? You have me confused with somebody else and need to consider the fact that both the left and right are wrong.

rootbear• 10 years ago

I read the book version of this essay shortly before visiting Japan. It is strange to stand next to the one preserved ruined building at ground zero and think that there was once an atomic fire storm in that spot.

studentrob5• 10 years ago

Cool. I hope Americans remember this as we consider electing someone who thinks nuclear war is a bargaining tool.

"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.

sandworm101• 10 years ago

WWII is falling out of living memory very quickly. It should be of no surprise that it is becoming every more glorified. Europe is shifting dangerously to the right. The US is about to elect a hawk (both of them are hawks). An Asian nation (this time China) is talking expansion, in influence if not in literal territory. The western world is split on the issue of migrants fleeing local conflicts. And everyone talks of tightening boards. All the ducks are lining up nicely for the day we forget the lesson.

There is only so much room in Canada.

homero• 10 years ago

Africa is back as a colony of China this time

KamiCrit• 10 years ago

Wow that was a great read. Really shocking about what to took to survive Hiroshima. The bomb, fires, flooding, radiation sickness.

palerdot• 10 years ago

The more searing question for me is the argument that the shock created by the atomic bombings has successfully prevented a WW 111. I cannot come to terms with this argument though I slightly tend to agree with it. On the other hand, the bombings were done just to force a japanese surrender, not with a foresighted view of stopping all the horrible future wars in this planet. Also, I'm not sure whether vietnam, gulf wars will be considered under the "world war" category as a lot of them happened after the japanese bombings.

Now, I just resign myself that for whatever reason it happened, and let us learn whatever we could from it.

Hiroshima (1946)

Related Stories