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Kyuma apologizes, retracts comment on atomic bombing

Did they learn "A-bomd saved more Japanese"?
You know outside of Japan now a days, noone probably cares much that Japanese lives were lost or saved because of the bombs.

Nor that probably more importantly from the US's side that probably a million US lives were saved.

Dont get that wrong, people are concerned about nuclear proliferation but the sands of time have passed and history fades.

People wont forget Hiroshima or Nagasaki but I'll bet they forget the real circumstances around why they were used.
 
You can't agree for what reason? I can not imagine a Japanese poster saying the same things because Japan was the agressor back then.
I am not here to say...
Ladies and gentlemen, I never existed then.
But I just refer to the Treaty of San Francisco or bilateral treaties. Japan paid the price for what Japan did to the countries. And most importantly, Japan never repeat the past till now.
Just look at the Korean govenment who cannot face the Vietnam war or the Chinese govenment who started the war under the name of punishment.

Obeika, you exsistance in Okinawa is a good example. You can live happily there, right? That is the present ultra-militaristic, xenophobic, far-right Japan.
There are victims on all sides,
True, but few American know the one-sidedness during the occupation.
But I know Japan also gave okinawa less than what people in Okinawa wanted except the reunification, therefore the "we are only victim" facism prevails as the lefty agitates.

*snip*
Elizabeth van Kampen, correct me if I am wrong, but during the turbulent post-war period, some "evil" kenpeitai protected and saved many Dutch people, 900 or so, lives from the fanatic locals in Semarang. Even with the act, many officers were persectuted after the trial, so I understand how intolerant things Japan did to Dutch people then.
 
*snip*
Elizabeth van Kampen, correct me if I am wrong, but during the turbulent post-war period, some "evil" kenpeitai protected and saved many Dutch people, 900 or so, lives from the fanatic locals in Semarang. Even with the act, many officers were persectuted after the trial, so I understand how intolerant things Japan did to Dutch people then.

Hello pipokun,

The Japanese military who protected the concentration camps in the former D.E.I. were ordered to do so by Mountbatten! Japan had lost the war and England that had to set the former D.E.I free had not enough British military yet. Don't forget that Holland had been occupied by Germany.

Do you know pipokun that many war criminals gor free in 1957? This was not the case with the German war criminals, they stayed in prison until the end of their lives. Germany paid in many ways for the crimes comitted during WWII. And look at Germany today it is an openminded country in Europe, Germany has become really "one of us"".

The Japanese government is just like you denying all the war crimes.
Always blaming others, is not something to be proud off. Sorry pipokun.
 
My understanding is that part of the reasoning for the go ahead with the bombing (and many top military personal/advisors were actually against it) was to end the war quickly before the USSR could enter the Pacific war.

The USSR did not have benign rulers true,
but one simply cannot say for certain how things would have gone had the USSR occupied a part of Japan. If more or less lives would have been lost.

I mean, there has been US interference in the political affairs of post-occupation Japan for many years, via sending money to the LDP helping, if not ensuring defacto one party rule in Japan. And I thought I read something about violent suppression of street demonstrations at some point in the post-war period.

This may sound rather odd, or even extreme but,
A "divided Japan" or a "Japanese archipelago with political boundaries that do not look the same as a map of today" would not necessarily have meant more suffering of even having been a Soviet puppet or satellite. Wasn't there one or two eastern European countries that were not a part of the Eastern Bloc? Yugoslavia was it?

(and I type that not to support different boundaries today, but that only about a century or 2 ago, Hokkaido and Okinawa were considered like "frontier" [see chapter 5 of
"Multicultural Japan: Palaeolithic to Postmodern"
In Part 2, Chapter 5, Tessa Morris-Suzuki shows how the Chinese way of thinking of one's own nation as the center was taken on in Japan, so peripheral areas including Ainu lands and the Ryukyus were considered foreign until the modern era. The Japanization of the Hokkaido area was a response to the Russification of the Kuriles. Assimilationist policies were later extended from Japan's periphery to its colonies abroad. The Western-introduced idea of civilization (bummei) allowed the periphery to be reinterpreted not as foreign spatially but merely as backward temporally.
So, a different looking archipelago would not necessarily have resulted in a "war of reunification", being closer to the beginning of the modern era that Morris-Suzuki describes.

Of course, all lay-person speculation on my part.



To go along with the bombing stuff,
and wasn't there something about Japan having sent envoys to Moscow in spring of that year (or a year earlier?) to "feel around for peace"...some Japanese prince comes to mind as the envoy?
Of course, the only sticking point was to be able to keep the emperor.
Which ended up being the case anywho.
So a land invasion and/or divided occupation, as well as a-bombing could have been avoided as well.
 
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