Like asahi said, and not even Germany was. The point you are missing is that the rulers of Japan knew that if Russia came in it meant not only the total destruction of the people that those rulers really did not care much about, but also the almost complete elimination of the government rulers and industry leaders. History showed that the remaining rulers that were not executed for war crimes were correct.
Ward Willson from Foreign Policy Magazine also points at other historians like Gar Alperovitz that argued back in 1965 that the timing of the bombs and the moves made to surrender do not make sense unless one takes the Russian attack and declaration of war into account.
Definitely, Japanese civilians killed by US bombing in 1945, North Korean civilians killed by US bombing in 1950-53, and South Asian civilians killed by US bombing in 1965-73 must be remembered. A total of 2.5 million civilians were killed by USA in these wars.
At that time racism was fashionable and well accepted in USA. Thus most people supported genocidal strategy which cost the lives of about 1,000,000 North Korean civilians. Now such tactics is unthinkable.
USA has a long history of disregard for human rights. Slavery in the XIXth century. Genocidal warfare in Philippines 1902, Japan 1945, Korea 1950-53, Southeast Asia 1965-73. Mass incarceration now.
I won’t be an apologist for Japanese war atrocities, of which there were many. Worse, the average Japanese person, thanks to careful and selective editing of “history” in Japanese textbooks, is oblivious to the fact that there is deep bitterness throughout Asia about their wartime conduct.
But Americans are on less brainwashed. Pearl Harbor didn’t happen in a vacuum and it was in no small way a response to Western imperialism, which would include the United States. America was fighting the Japanese empire while making absolutely no apologies for an empire of its own - an empire which was seen as a direct threat to Japan.
Given your insistence that the Japanese aren’t religious and that the emperor wasn’t divine even after you are shown to be wrong, along with your other absurd notions such as the Japanese core government remained intact and unchanged after the surrender, I think its pretty obvious which of us has very little understanding of Japan.
Bolding mine:
So which is it? The emperor was nothing but a rubber stamp for other’s agendas or Hirohito made the decision to surrender? While your at it, I’m sure you should have no problem naming these generals who supported the decision to surrender, particularly those in any kind of position of power. You are aware, for example, that General Anami, who continued to oppose surrender until Hirohito’s appeal before the Supreme Council for the Direction of the War was implored by his supporters to continue to oppose surrender or to resign as Army Minister (a move which again would dissolve the existing government) and was made aware of the impending Kyūjō incident by the very officers who were going to lead the coup d’état but chose to neither support it nor make any move to prevent it from happening.
When weighing the import of this statement, it should be borne in mind that there was an illusionary hope that the Soviet Union could be the intermediary though which they could broker favorable peace terms, and more importantly that these same members of the Supreme Council continued to remain opposed to surrender after both the bombs and Soviet entry into the war.
Compare that to 1,400,000, civilian deaths in Yugoslavia, almost six million in Poland and 7.5 million in China. For that matter, look at the 1.5 million Armenians who were killed by the Turks, the 1.5 million Cambodians who died during the regime of Pol Pot, and the 1.5 million Chinese killed during Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
When it comes to atrocities, Americans were amateurs.
Definitely there have been many atrocities in History, but USA has a long dark history – Slavery, then genocides in Philippines, Japan 1945, Korea, Vietnam. Now mass incarceration.
I lived in Japan for the better part of a decade, know the language fairly well, have had lots of interactions with various Japanese people of different backgrounds, and have read extensively about the history from multiple authors in both Japanese and English. So unless you’ve been an ambassador with the Foreign Service or something else, I’ll respect your opinion right around…never. I mean since you’re interested in a pissing contest over Japanese religion and spirituality, do you happen to know the difference (without Googling or looking at Wikipedia) between a jinja and an otera? No? Okay then, don’t talk to me about religion in Japan 'cause you know f— all despite your typically American stubborn insistence that you do. You can stay up all night and quote Wikipedia and History Channel all you want – I don’t give a ballpark frank.
Hirohito was used as a rubber stamp to carry out the desires of people who were already formulating the policies and yet he was also simultaneously an important cultural symbol and revered voice on behalf of the Japanese people. He is still an important cultural symbol to this day. Since Japan’s earliest days, there have been times when the Emperor has had more influence and times when he’s had less. This is somewhat analogous to the King of Thailand, who is not an official executive but is revered as a national symbol of Thai people. No, Hirohito was not (and is not now) divine, but that fact doesn’t mean that he was totally unimportant. The fact that he is unimportant doesn’t mean that he was divine, unilateral, demigod, either. There are nuances here that you don’t want to discuss – probably because you’re getting your ‘history’ from the usual biased sources and have limited depth and breadth of knowledge on this subject.
Fascinating. Since you have your finger on the pulse of the postwar Japanese mindset, perhaps you’d like to share with us the reason Japanese men and woman routinely gave their lives fanatically in service of Hirohito and the honor of their nation despite any obstacle one day, and the next stopped completely despite the shame of surrender. And please, ‘proven, at the very least by a plot to assassinate the man’, yeah, by the Rikken Seiyūkai, the Jingoistic military faction that made the war possible and prosecuted it. I was obviously talking about the common man, it only takes one to kill MacArthur. Not only did no one try, no one was worried they might.
Yes, I over simplified, but so did you. Talking about history on this board is just a waste of time so I’ll stop doing it.
No. What you’ve just done is post a rather bizarre interpretation of my post. I pointed out, quite rightly mind you, that it’s demonstrably false that “it was unthinkable in Japanese culture to defy the emperor” as it’s happened in the past, even when the society was holding onto the “god-emperor” concept. There were also periods in Japanese history when the emperor wasn’t really ruling a blame thing anyway as he was being controlled by powerful factions of Japanese society. I also pointed out that at the end of the war, Hirohito abandoned the claim to godhood. The fact that so many people did obey the man slavishly does not negate the other fact that there were people who not only thought about disobeying the dude, but did disobey him.
There’s nothing in my post about pulse. There is, though, referral to facts.