I've dealt with a lot of Japanese media, including a shit ton involving the nukes in horrific terms. You know what never comes up when they discuss it?
That it was unnecessary. They will drone on about the power and evil of it, how truly fucked up it was and what it did to people. But never once will they pretend they don't get why it happened.
Because even they understand how fucked up their nation was during WW2, and public sentiment has gone from "woe is us, we are so broken" to "we were fucked up and broke ourselves in a lot of ways." But not once have I heard them cry victim about it being unwarranted.
I'm sure there is some talk of it, its completely valid to feel that way as it truly was a huge loss of innocent life. But its not an open and common sentiment.
They can claim it was bad, but they also basically didn't prosecute any of their war criminals, looked away when their war crimes were brought to their attention, and seem to always just look at it the war as if they had no agency at the time. Like it was some sort of natural disaster that just took place; because they really don't want to admit to the level of bullshit they believed in "We are liberating Asia from evil capitalist Imperialism, because it's not imperialism when we do it."; and the fact that because they believed in that shit, they didn't have a problem with what they did.
Considering that the militarists tried to stage a coup and assassinate the emperor even after having two nukes dropped on them; we know good and god damned well that the militarists would not have stopped. Hell, had they killed the emperor, they probably would have kept fighting.
We helped them cover their war crimes up because we did what we did with Nazi scientists for nukes with the people in charge of Unit 731 for chemical weapons. Declassified in the 90s, basically we intentionally fucked up the Tokyo version of the Nuremberg Trials so we could have the information.
To be honest, I already new about most of that. In fact, we actually had a treaty where we would just automatically forgive their war crimes as well as force them to forgive our war crimes.
My basic issue here is that the Japanese were never really forced to have an accounting of the shit they actually did. Now, the Americans like to gloss over it, but even with the smallest bit of digging, it's quickly apparent when the Americans were committing atrocities. In fact, atrocities were put front-and-center in both The Pacific and Band Of Brothers. Even Saving Private Ryan addressed US troops committing small war crimes. We shy away from it, but it's readily available. The Japanese never really wanted to have that kind of accountability, or even believe some of the shit they were responsible for.
Japanese culture tends to view the US in WW2 as an instrument of karma, rather than as a villain. Almost like we were a force of nature sent by the gods to humble them. So the nukes are more of a cosmic tragedy than a crime.
I've dealt with a lot of Japanese media, including a shit ton involving the nukes in horrific terms. You know what never comes up when they discuss it?
That it was unnecessary. They will drone on about the power and evil of it, how truly fucked up it was and what it did to people. But never once will they pretend they don't get why it happened.
Because even they understand how fucked up their nation was during WW2, and public sentiment has gone from "woe is us, we are so broken" to "we were fucked up and broke ourselves in a lot of ways." But not once have I heard them cry victim about it being unwarranted.
I'm sure there is some talk of it, its completely valid to feel that way as it truly was a huge loss of innocent life. But its not an open and common sentiment.
They can claim it was bad, but they also basically didn't prosecute any of their war criminals, looked away when their war crimes were brought to their attention, and seem to always just look at it the war as if they had no agency at the time. Like it was some sort of natural disaster that just took place; because they really don't want to admit to the level of bullshit they believed in "We are liberating Asia from evil capitalist Imperialism, because it's not imperialism when we do it."; and the fact that because they believed in that shit, they didn't have a problem with what they did.
Considering that the militarists tried to stage a coup and assassinate the emperor even after having two nukes dropped on them; we know good and god damned well that the militarists would not have stopped. Hell, had they killed the emperor, they probably would have kept fighting.
We helped them cover their war crimes up because we did what we did with Nazi scientists for nukes with the people in charge of Unit 731 for chemical weapons. Declassified in the 90s, basically we intentionally fucked up the Tokyo version of the Nuremberg Trials so we could have the information.
https://youtu.be/eMq-fApmzts?si=xMACD5q0q-68aQIw
This actually covers the coverup which I genuinely didn’t know about until a month or so ago when I was on my history binge
To be honest, I already new about most of that. In fact, we actually had a treaty where we would just automatically forgive their war crimes as well as force them to forgive our war crimes.
My basic issue here is that the Japanese were never really forced to have an accounting of the shit they actually did. Now, the Americans like to gloss over it, but even with the smallest bit of digging, it's quickly apparent when the Americans were committing atrocities. In fact, atrocities were put front-and-center in both The Pacific and Band Of Brothers. Even Saving Private Ryan addressed US troops committing small war crimes. We shy away from it, but it's readily available. The Japanese never really wanted to have that kind of accountability, or even believe some of the shit they were responsible for.
Japanese culture tends to view the US in WW2 as an instrument of karma, rather than as a villain. Almost like we were a force of nature sent by the gods to humble them. So the nukes are more of a cosmic tragedy than a crime.