Nagasaki & Hiroshima - What is Your Opinion?

Question

I would like to present this question to a Japanese audience but if you're not Japanese, feel free to also express your opinion. It seems to me like the Japanese do not really regard this event with any significant importance. Many Japanese do not even know that this even occurred and if they do they do not really know when it happened. It is incredible to know this.

Answer 1

firstly in regards to what the first answer says ... i think it is terrible that you can justify that and wish you dropped more bombs on other cities because it saved american lives. it may have saved alot of americans from continuing and dieing in the war but you where not the only country fighting in that war ...the dropping of those bombs where a war crime ... they targeted innocent civilans...making the american government at that moment in time on par with the nazi's that they where fighting against. and as fo them never admitting to any war crimes when was the last time america ever apoligised for any of their mistakes in war .eg. vietnam and hiroshima!

Secondly im not japanese but have many japanese friends here in ireland and they are fully aware of the events and consider a major event in the history of their country. however i believe if it was the nazis that dropped that bomb than the whole world would have benn one opinion ..that it was a war crime! but as we know that is not the case the ameriacn forces dropped that bomb and as the 'defenders of freedom' the world is expected to believe that it was justified and nessecary! Pearl harbour gets more sympathy in my opinion which is terrible because it was primarily an attack on a military base and less people died, i don't mean in any way to insult or unsignify the lives lost at pearl harbour but merely to put it into context with the bombings of hiroshima and nagasaki.


According to most estimates, the bombing of Hiroshima killed approximately 70,000 people due to immediate effects of the blast. Estimates of total deaths by the end of 1945 range from 90,000 to 140,000, due to burns, radiation and related disease, Some estimates state up to 200,000 may have died by 1950, due to cancer and other long-term effects At least eleven known prisoners of war died from the bombing.

other critics of the bombings wre albert einstein and leo szilrad who in 1939 sent a jointly written letter to president roosevelt in which they make the point that really summerises my arguement;

"Let me say only this much to the moral issue involved: Suppose Germany had developed two bombs before we had any bombs. And suppose Germany had dropped one bomb, say, on Rochester and the other on Buffalo, and then having run out of bombs she would have lost the war. Can anyone doubt that we would then have defined the dropping of atomic bombs on cities as a war crime, and that we would have sentenced the Germans who were guilty of this crime to death at Nuremberg and hanged them?"

Answer 2

In my opinion, it was necessary to end the war. To the US leaders at the time there was little indication that Japan was going to surrender. The closer Allies forces got to the Japanese home islands the fiercer the fighting got. Causalities went up on both sides and many times the Japanese units fought to the death.

What a lot of people forget was WW2 was a WAR, not some police force operation, a real war! War isn't civil and it isn't nice.

Truman had few options to ending the war, invasion (the estimates were at least a million casualties), possibly blockage (starvation for the Japanese population, continuation of bombing runs on the cities), or dropping a new weapon that might work and possibly end the war with 10 to 50X fewer casualties.

I think that if the Allies had invaded it would be something that Japan and its people would still regret to this day even more than the atomic bombs. The Japanese army was training women and children to defend the home islands. Imagine the horror of such an invasion, in my mind its even worse then what's going on in Iraq today.

Answer 3

Well, I've expressed my opinion on this several times, since this is not a unique question and is asked monthly.

I'm glad we did it. I wish we had had more atomic bombs so we could have bombed more cities. I wish we had dropped one on the Emperor's palace in Tokyo. I feel no compassion for the people who died and if anyone thinks this is wrong they should look at pictures of Nanjing when the Japanese were there or of survivors of Japanese POW camps and the Bataan Death March or visit the Arizona memorial. I believe that dropping these bombs saved countless American lives.

I am not surprised current day Japanese are ignorant of anything about the war. In Germany there are memorials to the victims of the Nazis and the history of WWII and the Nazis is taught in their schools.

Japan has never admitted their atrocities nor accepted responsibility, never paid any restitution, as the Germans have, never apologized and do not teach the history of WWII to their young. Very few of the war criminals were tried and punished.

I believe that this started when MacArthur became governor of post war Japan and thought more of personal power and self aggrandizement than he did of justice and used his position to allow much to be ignored and discounted.

Answer 4

War crime.