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Because they want the full story told to show the horrors of the bombs, but they probably don't want the full story told of what they did to deserve it. In other words, their reaction is hypocritical.
This is a myth that a racist nation of pigs has made up for itself in order to justify the annihilation of two entire cities of civilians. I only hope someone annihilates American cities one day under the same logic “they’ve all got guns, safer to vaporize the trash from afar.”
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Eh, most of the higher ups were done fighting and the people were so starved and tired they would have put up much of a fight. Japan actually offered to surrender as long as we let them keep their emperor and we said naw we are gonna drop it anyways. Even more proof is the second target was kokura and was only changed to Nagasaki at the last second because of fog. The decision was basically eh fuck it we gotta drop it somewhere
"People aren't allowed to be upset about war crimes committed against innocent civilians if their military has also committed war crimes against innocent civilians."
...seems to be what most people in this thread believe. I guess 9/11, October 7th, and various other terrorist attacks were completely justified - even moreso given how much smaller in scale they were, by the same logic.
Wasn’t a war crime.. The UN was not formed, and they were strategic targets with Hiroshima housing not one, but three different army commands.
Nagasaki was a major naval shipyard.
Proportionate response in an attempt to end a war.
So Name the exact crime that was committed. imperial Japan killed millions of Chinese, Koreans, started a war after the US cut off oil because of those acts. Then the US proceed to waffle stop Japan, yet they still fought. So the bombs were justified and not considered war crime..
So, what should America have done? A land invasion killing hundreds of thousands of American and Russian conscripts, as well as millions of Japanese soldiers and civilians? Firebomb the entire country until there was no Japan to invade? Let Japan suffer no consequences for torturing and geocoding tens of millions of Chinese people, as well as many more Koreans and South East Asians, so they can have the strength to do it again whenever they feel like it?
I am not talking about my feelings on the matter, I am talking about what specific laws did the US violate?
While stating the fact that they were strategic targets for multiple reasons. Stop being edgy. Use your head instead of feeling damn..
Well nobody really cares whether or not dropping two nukes, killing 200k+ civilians is actually technically on paper a definite war crime.
And you say these civilians and children deserves it because of what their nations military did in China and Korea. Where’s the logic rather than feeling in that?
Does it really matter what kind of bomb was dropped? Firebombing(s) of Tokyo killed more people than Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined yet nobody cares because it was "just another bombing in a war".
no, the point is that the movie was not made to be about the impact the atomic bomb had on the Japanese. It is not like the movie downplayed the impact that the bombs had on Japan, it just didn't talk much about it, because that was not what the movie was about. That is why people are making fun of them. Because they think everything needs to be about them and the struggles they face, while they refuse to acknowledge the struggles they have inflicted on other people to any extent.
You have made comparisons to 9/11. If someone wanted to make a documentary on Osama Bin Laden, I would be fine if the movie did not waste a ton of screentime talking about the horrors of 9/11 because talking about 9/11 would not be the purpose of that film.
Except the atrocities they committed and the Atomic bomb are directly related to the militaristic society in Japan during WW2?
Or except the fact that Japan still today refuse to remotely acknowledge (or teach in school for that matter) about what they did during that same war?
Since those two thing are in the same story and time period, is not so out of place to ask for both side to be told, and its pretty hypocritical to ask for one while conveniently forgetting about the other
...do you think the US and Israel's actions are unrelated to 9/11 and October 7th? Do you think the US and Israel are adequately teaching about the crimes they're committing, or have committed?
The reason why 9/11 happened is because of US military bases in Saudi Arabia, and the USSR invading Afghanistan back in the 80’s leading to a rise of religious fundamentalism in Pakistani refugee camps. OBL was not being a glorious revenger even in his own mind
> ["The American people should remember that they pay taxes to their government, they elect their president, their government manufactures arms and gives them to Israel and Israel uses them to massacre Palestinians."](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/02/bin-laden-war-words-quotes)
>
> ["The American people had risen against their government's war in Vietnam. They must do the same today. The American people should stop the massacre of Muslims by their government."](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2011/may/02/bin-laden-war-words-quotes)
-Osama Bin Laden, 2 months after 9/11
So, yes, at least in his own mind, he was acting in terms of vengeance against the US for atrocities the US was complicit in.
Not so out of place, AND this movie beinf made as is doesn't in any way prevent or suggest that the other side of thst story by told. This movie would have been less IMHO if it had tried to do that. Its not a documentary. I feel about this as i feel about KOTFM. the story centered on the white characters as a way to talk about the thinking and sociopathy underlying the white superiority that justified the actions. It would in sime ways have been insulting for scorcese to have made the movie that will be and should be made by native americans about the subject. Trying to be all things does not make a better movie even if on3 of the intentions of the movie is to bring awareness
> sociopathy underlying the white superiority
Except those were not the only causes to use the atomic bomb. The absolutely stubborn refusal to surrender by Japan (some minister refused to surrender even AFTER the bombs, saying it would be better to go extinct that give up), which would cause horrific casualties on both sides, was also a very important push in using the bomb.
And that 100% related to the militaristic society and especially government at the time
I guess the Germans should feel the same way about films like inglorious bastards then right??? Which btw was a lot more insensitive, but killing nazis is fine but not fighting the genocidal Japanese empire??
I don't recall the scene in inglorious bastards where they slaughtered hundreds of thousands of civilians, but it has been a while since I saw the movie.
That's not "what most people I'm this thread believe" and the fact you think that shows you missed several points, both the point of the movie and the point the OP of the comment made.
Because the film wasn't made for the Japanese, and it wasn't made to depict anything like the "true horror of the atomic bomb". It was made to show Oppenheimer and his actions/reactions.
Stating "there wasn't enough about the horror" completely misses the point of the movie. It's also hypocritical, thinking the point of the movie should be about "the horror done onto our people" when Japan itself refuses to acknowledge the own atrocities it committed during that time period, either through apology or even teaching it to their population.
Well the guy did invent the atomic bomb, any film about him should show the true horror of the atomic bomb. Doing anything else is downright irresponsible, even if the film is otherwise very good.
It's not "downright irresponsible". There are literally already dozens of other movies and documentaries on the subject of the atomic bombs and their destructive capabilities. We KNOW ALREADY. Why do you think we've literally *never used them against any other humans again*?
Or it was just their honest reaction to the movie of course. They aren't the target audience so they react differently than that audience did, there's nothing wrong with that.
Well also it wasn't about the atomic bomb at all. It was about the fusion bomb. And no one has ever used a fusion bomb in warfare. The horror of it is that someday it could be used. That we could all learn firsthand why Hiroshima was tiny when the power of a true citykiller is unleashed.
>Man makes giant bomb
>Man is surprised when giant bomb is used to kill people
I can see why the Japanese didn't like it, tbh, independent of their own issues with WWII.
To be fair to that former mayor of Hiroshima whom you quoted, he ends the quote with "but I would encourage people to go and see it.” He has his own take on what he would have liked to see, but even as the mayor of the town who lived through the bombing, he was objective enough to think the movie was well done and worth seeing. I think the response in this comment thread is presuming the Japanese response was less nuanced than it actually was. There is even a Hiroshima resident who astutely said “this was really a film about Oppenheimer the man, and the way he wrestled with his conscience, so in that sense, I think it was right not to broaden it out too much to show the aftermath.” I think that's pretty spot on.
Exactly. Americans could just as easily complain that there wasn't enough about the horrible choice that Japan's evil forced on us. I'd say there was just enough of both things though, because it meant to be more about the man than the geopolitics of WWII.
There's absolutely an irony about Japan saying that others are not sufficiently aware of their sins in WW2. I think there's weight to the idea that Oppenheimer should have given more attention to the suffering caused directly by the bomb. But I also thing that Japan has a blind spot as wide as Nanking regarding failures to own up to past transgressions.
Nationalism is shitty, and Japan/the US are countries that have a bigger problem with it than most.
Well I imagine it's a natural response; if a critic is mad that "not enough was *shown* of the actual atrocities", well then why can't foreign critics be mad there's no major movie, produced by Japan, about the atrocities *they* committed?
It's a dumb argument if you're disappointed not everything was shown, well at least it was admitted!
What do Hiroshima and Nagasaki citizens have to do about the atrocities you mentioned, and what does that have to do with the film and their reaction to it?
You mean citizens that were part of army and supported Japanese war machine? If they had nothing to do with it, why Japan even now never acknowledges or even apologized to Japanese, Koreans or Chinese that they had put under unthinkable amount of suffering and horrors?
Japanese are very nationalistic, this is just crocodile tears.
Lol, even Nazi Germany wasn't as "evil" as Imperial Japan, while holocaust was horrible, it doesn't even come close to atrocities and pure evil Japanese did to Chinese during WW2. What are you talking about?
There is no society evil enough to justify murdering hundreds of thousands of civilians, including thousands of children and babies. The things America has wrought on the world... they killed at least 500,000 civilians in the opening salvo of occupying my country. But I would never want to murder thousands of American children as some sort of "justice."
The horrors that went on there would probably make some of the SS wince, maybe for a second. Before the gas chambers were built, many of the Nazi killings were done by mass shootings carried about by special units called Einsatzgruppen, especially on the Western Front. The SS would would primarily shoot at people as a means of extermination until Heinrich Himmler witnessed a mass execution by the Einsatzgruppen, and decided to switch to gas chambers for a more "humane" way of killing millions.
There's no questioning how grusome the Holocaust was, and the sheer scale of it trumps Imperial Japan. But victims at Unit 731 were intentionally killed in ways that would inflict maximum pain and suffering. I remember reading about it for the first time in the 2000s and nihilistically concluding that a world allowing a place like that to be built and exist is doomed to fail.
I think the main point of contention is that Japan either denies outright what they did, or diminishes the war crimes they did and fails to include it in their education system. Whereas Germany post war is very educative of it.
Ive got a friend who's Japanese and had never heard of the Nanjing massacre, the kidnapped women used as sex slaves for the army, or Unit 731. She asked her mum about it and she said all she'd ever learnt was of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Comparatively all my Cantonese, Filipino, Singaporean, and Malaysian friends' grandparents still detest Japan for the horrors they committed. I think part of it is that they still don't largely acknowledge what they did, and many of the army officials weren't put on trial the same way the Nazis were in Nuremburg. Rather, they comparatively got away easy.
Education matters so much to gaining perspective not just on yourself but on your place on others and the world around you.
I commented this above but it was my experience too. They didn’t know about the actual details of the holocaust, or that they were allied with hitler. They view it as Japan being crazy before and not being crazy any more. They aren’t taught the details like we are (and yes our view is flawed too, but they really don’t know about the dark shit)
> Some people obviously do, but I mean like the public schools dont teach the average Japanese student about it
tbf my american education really minimalized the damage our colonizing did to the natives of every land we've colonized. until i was about 30 i had no clue just how brutally the native americans were treated, and how many politicians and notable people advocated for treating them like a rodent infestation.
American education can't be generalized because it's basically up to each school district and state to determine the breadth of education.
I went to school in TX and WA.
In TX we learned about crimes against natives like the trail of tears at the same time we watched the Alamo movie about 12 times to "learn" about the Spanish American war. This was elementary school.
WA was much more comprehensive and I was in a good school district. We learned about America's crimes in south America, injustices to the local tribes, jp incarceration in ww2, just to name a few.
Many Americans are woefully uneducated and it's all down to the political leanings of the state their in.
I grew up I good ol’ Kern County, CA. I would drive by Manzanaar as a child on the way to campsites all the time. We were not told in school what it was, and my family would always describe it as something like an extended stay campsite for Japanese people (except they openly used the O-slur). I was in high school when I finally googled it for myself.
In college I had the opportunity to be part of a volunteer archeological dig that happened there. It was a harrowing experience to be that in depth in that place, and I cannot imagine how the people felt who were imprisoned there, or how the man I was paired with for digging felt knowing we were digging up the exact basement/barracks that his father and grandparents had been in. The NPS workers leading the excavations took two hours a day and walked us all around the area and showed us how the Japanese people tried to create positivity while there, with gardens and orchards and courts. There were also many things they showed us that were absolutely gut-wrenching. It’s a place everyone should visit if they can and are nearby. The museum is also well put together.
Great. I only went during elementary school as I wrote but it's good to hear we ended up with similar experiences.
I'm guessing WA does not show the Alamo for elementary school though lol.
Communism certainly has issues, but people needed to see that for themselves. Invading because someone is trying a political experiment is generally not the most beneficial decision.
I won't even accept this framing, even democratic socialism was too close to communism for the US during the cold war and led to coups / election interference etc
Indeed. I have major disagreements with many US decisions back in the day. People need to actually put these things to the test. Find what works and what doesn't.
Not entirely. The bulk of the driving of the terrible decisions is in the Republican Party. They love conquest and cruelty and are full to the brim with Nazis, racists, and other human refuse, and when they are in charge, bad things happen.
I will be doing my part by voting against them. Might not fix all the problems, but them not being in charge is a good start.
I knew someone in high school who thought only 6000 jews were killed in the holocaust and that it “wasn’t even a big deal”, so just because people who are familiar with the topic are talking about the topic doesn’t mean that there aren’t an abundance of people who don’t know anything about it. For every person in this thread that’s actively aware of their government’s sins, there’s another person right around the corner who knows literally nothing about it.
And I know someone right now who adamantly thinks humans have never been to space. All the education in the world won't help the chronically ignorant, there's little point in trying.
Humans aren't inherently peaceful. That said, we're at a point in time when nationals borders rarely change, and when issues like Russian trying to take land in Ukraine, or all of Ukraine, it's a huge deal.
Pretty much everyone honors that sovereign borders must be respected. That's not true of the past, however. And you don't really even need to go back too far. I have no real qualms with historical imperialism, colonization, conquests (eg. Roman Empire expansion,) American Manifest Destiny, strategic treaties, or anything along those lines. Humans aren't all on the same team. There are winners and losers in global history. It just life.
I learned about My Lai in high school.
Also the Trail of Tears, the slave trade and the horrors of plantation life, the internment of Japanese Americans in the U.S., and the use of nuclear weapons on Japan. None of that gets left out of public school curricula in the U.S. At least outside the South.
Meanwhile the Japanese are like “Nanking? Where’s that?”
Don't side with the power threatening America with annihilation. America also rarely DOES the bad thing, they just rip out everyone they don't like and sit back as anarchy reigns, or hire mercs. At that time and in that zone, I mean.
How is that anywhere near comparable to the rape of Nanking, unit 731, comfort women or the many other war crimes of the Empire of Japan? More people were killed in Nanjing t than the US has ever killed in it's cold war foreign interference. When you go so far left you start defending fascist empires...
Whilst my American education went into detail about US perpetrated massacres and how they were shameful. There doesn't exist an analog in Japan. Way fucking worse by all means.
I grew up in Oklahoma. All the education I got about natives was 'they were primitive people until we manifest destined the 'savage nobles'. I didn't learn about the Tulsa (town I lived in) race 'war' (genocide attempt) until I left and went to college. Americans suck at acknowledging past atrocious acts, I honestly think its because too many people don't view them as atrocities. I hate going back to that backwards place to see family.
Yeah in my 4th grade state history for California we basically just learned about the Missions as sorta local farms and how neat it is that they’re still standing. Nothing about them being slave plantations run by the church with an appalling mortality rate. Didn’t learn about that until I took a CA history class in college
That was my experience with the state history curriculum as well. But when my daughter was in 4th grade a few years ago, part of their mission projects were specifically to describe how Natives were treated at the mission they were researching, as well as their opinions on what it lead to today. It's good that they asked the questions, but damn do 4th graders have some dumbass opinions.
Now I do think it's wrong that they've basically not educated their population on it for generations, but it's also kinda weird that... it sorta worked out for them? For all the common wisdom of "those who don't learn from the past are doomed to repeat it" it doesn't seem like Japan has gone down that road, actually if you asked me to make a list of countries least likely to go on warmongering conquest campaigns and commit terrible war crimes on a mass scale, Japan would be near top of the list.
My Canadian education didn’t teach us too much about japans involvement beyond pearl harbour and suicide bomber pilots.
There is a lot to cover on WW2. Some things were lessened because the world could only grasp so much collectively.
Yeah, but you’d think in Japan they’d have learned their own history. They do not teach it even to the extent that American schools do and American schools are famous for only teaching the American perspective of the war. Japan flat out denies or editorializes their past and basically pushes it under the rug. My Japanese friends didn’t even know the most basic stuff about the war between the us and Japan, let alone the wider war and hitler/mussolini etc
To be fair regarding the European war, Japan was hardly involved and even less so when it came to things like the Holocaust. There weren’t Jews in Japan and as such there really wasn’t antisemitism and I was informed of one story recently in which groups of German Jews expelled from Germany to some Asian country pillaged and occupied by Japan were spared because they were German.
I know overall though Japan has been getting better. Frankly from what I have read most of this has been curbed hard since the 90s.
> While Unit 731 researchers arrested by Soviet forces were tried at the December 1949 Khabarovsk war crimes trials, those captured by the United States were secretly given immunity in exchange for the data gathered during their human experiments. The United States helped cover up the human experimentations and handed stipends to the perpetrators
Not only Japanese cover up their war crimes, America also aided them in it.
Soviets reduced the few war criminals sentences fearing the soviets war prisoners safety. And also soviets issued a book in english which detailed the entire of trial.
I’m on your side. They shouldn’t shy from this. But the reason seems to be punishment. Not preventing it from happening. Japan is very unlikely to repeat mistakes of the past.
This exactly, they want to be the victim and not face reality. To this day they deny things like 'comfort women'. Germany is respected because it admitted to the faults and worked to make sure it never happens again.
​
I know quite a few Japanese people whose knowledge of WW2 is little more than 'there was a global war, then America nuked us twice'. Like dude, the only reason America deployed troops at all is because YOU attacked the US. We can discuss nuclear weapons and fallout all we want but the US was completely content leasing weapons to the allied powers and 'staying out of it'
> Germany is respected because it admitted to the faults and worked to make sure it never happens again.
Due to political circumstances around post-war occupation, they didn't really have a choice. Allies tried to root out as much of defeated ideology as practically possible. Sadly, because it's not possible to erase one system and build new one overnight, this forced makeover could not have been absolute, but for the most part it succeeded.
In Japan, it was different. USA decided to not "attack" the position and function of Emperor. IIRC, reason for that is, they expected that Japanese would simply be unmanageable with that kind of social upheaval, that resistance would be too strong. After all, Emperor has been a central figure for hundreds of years, while Germany forced their Emperor (Kaiser) to abdicate about 3 decades prior, so they were not so attached to political figures; throwing away old and bringing in new was accepted.
The big problem is, that keeping Japanese Emperor around AND publicizing his role in massive warcrimes (as leader of a country, he was co-responsible, even if his rule wasn't absolute) would be a massive dissonance. There would be resistance to that, and even if people believed it in the end, that would raise a question "why do we keep him around?". It would lead to breakdown of Japanese society, one way or another, and while I believe it would have eventually been rebuilt better, it was a gigantic hassle and thus, something USA didn't want to deal with.
Now, that doesn't exactly mean "USA is to blame", which I'm sure is going to be our resident "free thinker's" only takeaway from this comment. Without external pressures, neither Japan nor Germany would have changed in any way. If those warmongering countries were not defeated and occupied, they would just have kept going and tried again, and again and again. Just like ruzzia does all the time (because even if ruzzia was defeated, and quite often in fact, no one was able to occupy it and break down cancerous social and power structures within), or how Germany did after WWI (problem of Treaty of Versailles isn't that it was "too harsh", like authoritarian simps claim. Problem was, that it was NOT ENFORCED. It's similar to criminal justice; harshness of penalty does not have strong deterring effect, inevitability does).
I'm just saying that while Germany did change for the better (though, worryingly, nazis are back, though to be completely honest, they seem to be back everywhere), they didn't do it on their own, though I guess they didn't really resist it. Difference between Germany and Japan is not some inherent quality of those nations, but fact that they weren't given same... "educational" treatment.
Japan has been unable to export weapons due to its ridiculous prices its corps set.
Meanwhile Germany: allo, zu u like cats we have big cats 🐈 called leopards. Do u like boats, we have a special boat called a U-boat
Also the gun that was used to kill bin laden was a hk416
They have one of the most powerful navies in the world. The constitutional prohibition is an internal Japanese political matter, the U.S. would be absolutely giddy if they finally amended that away.
Yes totally, they are trying to purchase missiles and trying to see if they can get a constitutional amendment or say missiles are only for self defense. You are correct, it's just something for the politicians to try to side-step.
Practically every middle class person in Asia holidays or has holidayed in Japan. Even citizens of the countries they have tensions with over war time atrocities like China and Korea. WWII ended nearly a century ago.
It'd be ideal if Japan acknowledged all their war crimes and educated their populace about them, but people still want to go skiing in Hokkaido and shopping in Shinjuku regardless. Also, the Yen is cheap.
it helps when the education you do as Germany can point blame to the previous government but in Japan the emperor was still there so like, you gonna openly call him a war criminal?
>Germany can point blame to the previous government but in Japan the emperor was still there so like,
The emperor was very much a puppet in the general power game of government. There many many far more powerful in the military that decided things.
The military btw murdered the primeminister directly and gave the guy who did it no punishment more or less.
They certainly aren't the first to do so, nor will they be the last. Nevertheless, it would be nice if countries could face the dark things in their past. To be able to say, "yes, that was bad and awful, but I'm going to do things better from now on." Perhaps it is an Eastern concept of family that is a roadblock to this; such things come easier to a Westerner due to their common conflicts with their families, and it doesn't end up being the end all be all of where your duties are. It should be okay to say that your family or your country did something wrong. I don't think any country on this planet is completely innocent in their past.
If you ever want to watch a documentary with the repression of guilt on full display checkout “The Emperor’s Naked Army Marches On”. A vet refuses to let his fellow soldiers lie about the atrocities committed during the war and literally goes to their houses and physically fights them into telling the truth. The crusader is not without fault himself, but you get to see just how much the Japanese refuse to admit the truth on a societal level.
Thousands of innocent people dying on behalf of a corrupt and evil government is not "deserved". We can argue whether the atomic bombs were a necessity of war, but no innocent person "deserves" that.
japan was honestly worse than germany. they were seriously on a different level with their absurd racism, weaponized rape campaigns, brutal famines. i'd say japan is worse because they've never apologized or admitted to anything they've done, and i'm almost certain they will do it again when given the opportunity. would be very surprised to see germany commit the same atrocities.
You should read up more on Germany's conduct on the eastern front.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generalplan_Ost
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_crimes_of_the_Wehrmacht#Rape
People have this weird idea the holocaust was some really neat and organized slaughterhouse type event. More people were murdered outside the camps than inside.
I once had a teacher tell me The Pianist wasn't a good holocaust film because it didn't have extermination camps. I was 12 and i didn't know what to say. I still don't.
There is an old Japanese movie about it surprisingly. Apparently their big plan was to release a modified version of the plague via beads, inspiration for this came after the project lead broke a pearl necklace of a woman he tried to rape.
In terms of numbers, they outdid the Nazis in every category. The Third Reich looks like a trial run in comparison to what Japan was doing on the mainlands, during WWII.
Where Nazis had quantity, Unit 731 had quality in terms of atrocities. Sure, they didn't systematically murder millions, but the shit they did do was so much more horrific
They were worse, even the Germans viewed them as too extreme. What puts the Germans ahead is they had specific efforts to eliminate certain groups in mass. But the Japanese still viewed themselves as the superior race to everyone and in general they were more brutal and fanatic.
They were worse, even the Germans viewed them as too extreme. What puts the Germans ahead is they had specific efforts to eliminate certain groups in mass. But the Japanese still viewed themselves as the superior race to everyone and in general they were more brutal and fanatic.
They were worse, even the Germans viewed them as too extreme. What puts the Germans ahead is they had specific efforts to eliminate certain groups in mass. But the Japanese still viewed themselves as the superior race to everyone and in general they were more brutal and fanatic.
They were worse, even the Germans viewed them as too extreme. What puts the Germans ahead is they had specific efforts to eliminate certain groups in mass. But the Japanese still viewed themselves as the superior race to everyone and in general they were more brutal and fanatic.
A lot of Japanese media and historical records are in denial about the horrors they were responsible for. Dropping those bombs was not a fun day in the park. It was done to combat a determined, frightening, and powerful enemy who would have eventually surrendered but only after much more blood had been spilled. They're determined to sanitize their historical record but happy to criticise others for doing the same.
I was in Hiroshima recently and went to go to the Peace Memorial because I figured it was a thing I should do.
One of the things that came into my mind during my walk there was the way we think about an enemy and their willpower, and how that can be used to justify things. We talk about the militaristic culture and how the invasion would mean fighting literally everyone.
They talk about Americans with guns behind every blade of grass.
I find myself wondering how much of that is just a thing we tell ourselves to justify the next action
Were the kamikaze pilots not convincing enough? It's such a tired debate. There were still Japanese hiding in wait to ambush Americans because they couldn't let the war go. It was necessary, and if you don't think so then you should picture yourself invading there and how brutal and horrific your death would've been at their hands.
> Were the kamikaze pilots not convincing enough
Some people were willing to kill themselves, yeah. Suicide missions happen in most major conflicts. When our people do them we often think they're heroes too.
>There were still Japanese hiding in wait to ambush Americans because they couldn't let the war go
PTSD is a hell of a drug. Yeah.
Ascribing that to the entire population is a little wild
>I find myself wondering how much of that is just a thing we tell ourselves to justify the next action
Considering they were literally arming women and children with spears and bombs in preparation for suicide attacks, as well as the fact that they had fought to damn near the last man on every island previously, not much of it.
I think the idea that am entire population will actually do total war is usually not correct.
You can train a kid to stab someone. How many will,I don't know.
Read about Saipan and Okinawa. Read about 30,000,000 Chinese civilians who died under Japanese occupation. Any discussion of the bombs being dropped that ignores the context, will let you make whatever claims you want. The Chinese, Philipino, Malay, Korean, and Indian historians may offer a more realistic perspective for you.
>The Chinese, Philipino, Malay, Korean, and Indian historians
Given that those are groups that mostly got atrocities done on them,and didn't win a lot I'm not sure what they add.
I think you want to argue that Japan did terrible things (they did) and that means that they were all just soulless killing machines.
I think that's an unhelpful and kind of dangerous way to think about peoples
This viewpoint isn't as straightforward as you're making it. That the atomic bombs were necessary to end the war has been a contentious topic for a long time. In fact, a lot of prominent military leaders condemned the action and stated plainly that it was not necessary to end the war.
It being the predominant viewpoint in the United States has more to do with propaganda than actual history. It was what we were all taught in school.
It's funny because it's very easy to acknowledge the horrors of Nazis and the Japanese in WW2 (and they were horrific), but as soon as you bring up something like Fire bombings and the Atomic Bombs killing hundreds of thousands of *civilians*, we go into mental gymnastics about why they were justified.
Unnecessary. Japan no longer had any airforce to speak of, which is why nuclear bombs, and fire bombs, could get dropped on Japan in the first place.
Japan was already completely crippled.
That's a popular idea in the leftist crowd because it gives the credit to the USSR. The reality is that the Soviets had no capability of launching an amphibious invasion in the Pacific and the real blow was the declaration of war. The Japanese had hoped they could get the USSR to mediate a peace settlement, and play the two superpowers against each other, and the war destroyed that hope.
They did not, however, surrender after that or signal a desire to surrender. Whether or not they might have eventually surrendered is a pointless argument. They surrendered after they got nuked. The Emperor talked about the nukes in his speech; he gave them the credit for motivating him to use his power to end the war.
I've always been flummoxed by the assertion that the bombs were unnecessary. That may very well be true, but in the meantime the much deadlier firebombings that were happening at the same time are never brought up in the same breath.
Do tell, what do you think should have been done instead? Maintain the blockade and let hundreds of thousands of women and children starve (the military and elites would have had food)? Launch an invasion, US/Soviet/Both and have a million+ more dead on all sides? Stop short of invasion and leave some vestige of Japanese imperialism that could come back and start another conflict?
The extremists were willing to defy the Emperor at the eleventh hour and some soldiers kept fighting for years, even decades, after the war ended.
Many military leaders of the time, including Admiral Leahy, General MacArthur, and General Eisenhower shared the opinion that a land invasion would not be necessary, the atomic bombs were not necessary to force surrender.
Japan was looking for a path to surrender.
Stop mythologizing the Japanese. Both my grandmothers survived that war and they, like most Japanese, were anything but this caricature you're painting.
I didn't downvote you, by the way. You're probably being downvoted because your response is arrogant and kind of weird.
Atomic bombings weren’t necessary in first place because Tokyo firebombing and invasion of Manchuria by Soviet Union and other factors that already cornered Japan, rendered them powerless and they intended to surrender but Truman just want to show the world the new kind of weapon and to kick Japan while they’re still down. Even without nukes, Japan still will surrender inevitably anyways.
The USSR scared Japan, but they didn’t have enough troops in the region yet to really be a threat. From the research I’ve done, intimidating the USSR was not a primary reason for dropping the bombs
>Even without nukes, Japan still will surrender inevitably anyways.
>It has sometimes been argued Japan would have surrendered if simply guaranteed the Emperor would be allowed to continue as formal head of state. However, Japanese diplomatic messages regarding a possible Soviet mediation—intercepted through Magic, and made available to Allied leaders—have been interpreted by some historians to mean, "the dominant militarists insisted on preservation of the old militaristic order in Japan, the one in which they ruled." On 18 and 20 July 1945, Ambassador Sato cabled to Foreign Minister Togo, strongly advocating that Japan accept an unconditional surrender provided that the U.S. preserved the imperial house (keeping the emperor). On 21 July, in response, Togo rejected the advice, saying that Japan would not accept an unconditional surrender under any circumstance. Togo then said that, "Although it is apparent that there will be more casualties on both sides in case the war is prolonged, we will stand as united against the enemy if the enemy forcibly demands our unconditional surrender."
Lol, no
I think the idea that the bombs weren't necessary will debated as for long as the bombings are remembered. It was a horrific and impactful act, and there were certainly other actions that took far more human life, like the fire bombings. War is horrifying, all wars.
I'll come back to the original point I was trying to make though. about Japanese history. Leaving out the horrors of the bombings was an artistic choice by Nolan, from listening to interviews it seems like he was trying to be respectful. With that said though, there are plenty of acknowledgements of the devastation that the bombs wrought in European, American, and Japanese history and media. I guess my criticism is that as much as this ex-mayor and other Japanese citizens want the horror to be shown, it's curious that they work so hard as a country to obscure and hide all the horrors that they committed.
I'd kindly like you to show me proof of this "determination" to sanitize their historical record. Every textbook in Japanese public schools currently begins teaching children about WW2 in elementary school, slowly introducing heavier topics until they cover Unit 731 and Korean rape victims in high school.
I lived in Hawaii, I had numerous Japanese born-and-raised friends who were studying abroad, living in Hawaii for a time, or being tourists, and went to Pearl Harbor with every one of them, and the way they visit that memorial is very different from the way Americans visit any memorial.
Yes, the government has attempted to remove text regarding war crimes, mostly in the context of not wanting to teach children about heavy topics, but they have consistently FAILED to remove it after 3 decades of lobbying because anti-war sentiment remains the strongest political force in Japan.
Sure, I'll include some resources below and leave the question of Japan's war crime denial to your judgement.
* **Textbook Controversies:**
* "[https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english\_edition/e\_international/989040](https://english.hani.co.kr/arti/english_edition/e_international/989040)" by Sheila Miyoshi Jager examines the ongoing debate about how wartime events, particularly comfort women, are portrayed in Japanese textbooks.
* "[https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=history](https://scholarlycommons.obu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1013&context=history)" by Mark E. Caprio discusses the pressure to downplay wartime atrocities in Japanese textbooks.
* **Yasukuni Shrine:**
* "[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni\_Shrine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yasukuni_Shrine)" dives into the controversy surrounding Yasukuni Shrine, which honors war dead including convicted war criminals.
* **General Studies On the Topic:**
* "[War and Its Remembrance The Perspective from Japan: ](https://www.jstor.org/stable/48602799)" by Maria Hsia Chang and Tsuyoshi Hasegawa explores the contrasting ways Japan and Germany have remembered World War II.
I would also add that it would be important to consider the perspectives of the victims of these war crimes and their statements on how Japan continues to deny or downplay their crimes. If the vitims statements aren't convincing then hopefully the small pieces provided above would be useful. I would encourage you to do further reading on it if it's a topic that interests you as I've only provided a small sampling of sources here.
It’s not about being “US BAD” it’s about the fact that you’re being a crybaby over reviews that aren’t even negative, only critical. Your first response shouldn’t’ve been “No u” when you read this, that’s just immature buck passing when faced with reasonable criticism from the descendants of the victims of nuclear bombing. There’s no “nightmare fuel” the Japanese committed compared to the carnage that nuclear bombing wrought, and before you bring up Japanese experimentation on prisoners or mass rape let me remind you of the [Tuskegee Study](https://www.mcgill.ca/oss/article/history/40-years-human-experimentation-america-tuskegee-study) that the US govt performed on unaware African Americans and the [widespread instances of rape](https://digitalcommons.wcl.american.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=2028&context=hrbrief) during the Vietnam war a decade later. Just because there’s now a US made film about how bad they felt bombing the Japanese (even though they were *totally* justified in doing so) does not exempt them from criticism. Either way, it’s not like there’s some warcrime/atrocity threshold where you become exempt from pity when it happens to your country, or unable to criticize portrayals of it.
I agree with you but you’re being equally annoying. You should delete the rest of your comment after the first ‘bombing’.
Having online slap fights over who did the worse WW2 atrocities is a garbage way to respond to a mild criticism from *the mayor of Hiroshima*.
Here’s the thing, I don’t really care about being “annoying”. Nothing I’ve said is incorrect and any discomfort I’ve provoked in you is totally justified and should be examined further rather than excused.
Yes let’s go into a deep examination about the horrors of nuclear war, and then we can fight online about historical injustices because some dickhead was sensitive about a criticism of a movie.
The best way to engage is to mock.
Most of Asia remembers the horror that came from the Japanese military. They used Germany as a scapegoat and got off without any real consequences for all the horrible war crimes they committed. What they did to humans was straight up comic villain cruelty.
Was gonna comment something along the same line but you beat me to it lol. Absolutely wild how Japan makes themselves out to be such a victim because of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, as if those just happened out of the blue. As if Japan didn't go around conquering their neighbors and genociding millions of people. As if Japanese citizens didn't support their government. And they refuse to acknowledge the extent of their atrocities to this day.
Yup, where are the movies about Operation Condor and the horrors that followed?
And let's not forget the ridiculous historical revisionism of films like Argo and U571.
Literally hundreds. Including what you are commenting on right now. It's completely acceptable to bash our gov and create movies doing so. Maybe they aren't encouraged by the gov but they definitely exist.
This 100%. I love Japan, but wish they would adopt Germany’s post war mentality of acknowledging everything they did wrong, and educating future generations about it. The atomic bombings were horrible and not something anyone who values human life should be proud of, but the deaths from the two bombings were a fraction of a percentage of the death and destruction the Japanese inflicted on the rest of Asia.
It was war. War is hell. People die in war. Soldiers. Civilians. Elderly. Babies.
Japan is a proud country with a proud heritage. They would never have surrendered until everybody was dead. They would have fought to the last man. We can see evidence of this with their kamikaze strategies: they are more than willing to die for their country’s pride.
Nuclear weapons gave them something no other method could have: an overwhelming, awesome force that was unstoppable. There would be no honor in resisting it: only death. From that perspective, the horrors of the two atomic bombs were necessary to show the Japanese both the capabilities of them, and our willingness to use them to defeat them.
Anybody who asserts they were unnecessary is clearly playing armchair quarterback with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. In Truman’s position, I do the same thing.
Seriously.
Oppenheimer wasn't actually about the nuke. It was about Oppenheimer. It was a biopic. That's why the second half was almost exclusively about the investigations into his Communist involvements.
People really don't get this and keep complaining that it doesn't go into the stuff that Oppenheimer was not personally involved with. "Well why didn't they make a movie about these other things!" Because that isn't what Christopher Nolan wanted to make? It's like asking why the movie isn't about the French Revolution.
US IS bad. If you don't realise that, it is because your history education has the same kind of holes and bullshit in it that Japanese history education does.
They don’t seem to really teach that much. Not that there seems to be a presence for embracing those old values, but whether it’s a shame thing or what, they barely teach anything about their WW2 wrongdoings and still have Shinto shrines of class A war criminals.
I sincerely don’t think it’s their equivalent of Neo-Nazism, it really just seems like wanting to bury their heads in the sand about dark history rather than acknowledge it.
As an American who grew up in Hawaii and got a very good education on the Pacific theater of WW2, it’s crazy how different say Germany and Japan collectively treat their history here. No one alive today should feel guilty, they couldn’t have possibly done anything whatsoever. Ironically, embracing that respectfully is the way you avoid looking bad. America has done tons of horrible stuff that I’m not proud of. Despite that I still think it’s also done amazing stuff and that it’s the best country in the world and wouldn’t want to live anywhere else (and have some experience in that matter even).
True, but it's still a national trauma. Actually most of the *Daikaijū* movies are about processing that, it's no coincidence that Godzilla was the result of nuclear weapons tests. And also, we know in hindsight, that the nuclear attacks were completely unnecessary, it was just a show to signal to the Soviets, who actually destroyed the Japanese army in Manchuria, that the US has the bomb.
It was not to "show the Soviets that they had the bomb" they could have done that on a test site you idiot. Millions would have died trying to get Japan to surrender, the nuke saved lives wether you want to believe it or not
The article is a pinned comment. The title is a chopped up quote:
> There could have been much more description and depiction of the horror of atomic weapons, From Hiroshima’s standpoint, there wasn’t enough about the horror of nuclear weapons, but **I would encourage people to go and see it**
But why would he encourage others to see it? Because:
> The hibakusha are all very old, so this is a film for young people … it’s now up to future generations to decide how to rid the world of nuclear weapons.
The title was crafted to derive responses like yours. Do not fall for it.
I think the correct way would be both. You would sound less like you did not want to recognize the legitimate horrors of the atomic bomb if you‘d also phrase it like that instead of some lame whataboutism.
It's not whataboutism, one side thinks about the moal quandery of dropping a spicy bomb twice all the time, the other pretends what they did never happend. Hoppenheimer is hardly a happy go lucky movie, this is a double standard, these critics find no problem in ignoring their movies lack of commentary on certain topic and straight up revisionism
Merdeka 17805 (2001) is a movie about how japan liberated indonesia with, i shit you not kissing the feet of the japanese. It was successful in japan and criticized for historical revisionism pretty much everywhere else including indonesia. Forced labor? Nah didn't happen. Famine? Why are you so nitpicky? Internement of civilian? Well yes but it's not like they died... well not all of them anyway.
It's truly insane how japanese in general cope about being victims when they were literally the only non european country that actively pursued colonization. Ryukyuu island, korea, manchukuo, sakhalin, the asian co prosperity sphere (their version of the british commonwealth and french aof/aef) and even hokkaido if you stretch it. Even before we enter war crime territory, japan is no victim, it's an agressor that refuses to aknowledge it.
In the 19th century they were shoulder to shoulder with european powers on chinese soil during the boxer rebellion
You are literally saying ”well, the bomb might have been bad but what about … (what the Japanese did)“.
The sad thing is I don‘t disagree with you on a fundamental level. I think any country should do their due diligence on their own history and too few do it. Including Japan. But the Japanese still have a right to criticize the depiction of the atomic bomb in a movie full stop. No amount of Nanjing changes that because you can not weigh one horror against the other. It‘s just multiple messed up things and I hate when people try to weigh them against each other.
I don‘t even think it‘s the wrong place to criticize the Japanese. It just shouldn‘t be ”the Japanese have no right to be critical about x because they themselves do y“. (Which I mean technically maybe wasn‘t said, but ”I wonder about x“ usually isn‘t a good faith question. If however it was not meant to downplay the right of the Japanese to criticize the depiction of the atomic bomb my point is kind of mood, but I can only work with what I got.)
The complaint on that movie was that it didn't show civilian suffering... this is a narrative choice, you can't fit everything in a movie and hoppenheimer is long enough as it is. The grave of the fireflies didn't show what oppenheimer showed, criticizing a movie on a topic it didn't want to focus on while silmultaneously doing exactly that but much worse is a double standard. Hoppenheimer isn't downplaying anything, but you know who does? I don't think anyone criticized for grave of the firefly's ultra japanese centric view of the ecents, because there is nothing to criticize, this is their point of view, so let hoppenheimer be another one's point of view?
This is not whataboutism, this is me pointing at a double standard. I never said "the japanese have no right to X or Y" what i said is that to many of them the coverage of ww2 folows 2 principles: "it didn't show what i wanted" and "it showed exactly what i wanted". Japanese schools and media has formated a large portion of their population to think a certain way, this is pure confirmation bias. If people in turkey criticized, say a movie on greco turk war of 1919 because of something silly like it didn't show enough the turkish side. i would laugh it off the exact same because they want others to comply to a specific view of an event. Not every piece of media requires to approach a topic from a specific point of view, there are multiple ways of portraying an event, as many as there are actors in play during these events.
And yet neither turks nor japanese want to place themselves or even hear about the point of view of their victims. demanding your point of view to be represented while ignoring that of another's is a double standard. There is a big relation here between refusing the point of view of your victims and demanding your point of view to be portrayed during that bombing. We know japanese civilians at hiroshima had it rough (euphemism), but not every piece of media needs to focus on them, something the japanese public has a hard time understanding due to their generally binary view on the war.
Obviously let's not get ahead of ourselves, this is an article (journalists are famously objective and not worried about how much traffic they generate so they obviously tend to not exagerate events /s) about what some people thought. But still what i'm raising here isn't whataboutism, it's structural in how many japanese people engage with ww2. I've seen again and again how the japanese portray themselves in their own media and it's blatant just how much they straight up ignore. There is the consistent notion that somehow japan could lead a pan asian political entity against a foreign political entity. Which is absolutely hilarious when you have any idea of what the current geopolitical spectrum looks like.
what i'm talking about isn't really about the bomb, it's how the japanese public want ww2 to be represented and how their reception of oppenheimer is a pure product of how they engage with that war.
It's not an enlightened centrism topic. The use of the bombs if heavily criticized and analyzed by the users of said weapons. Saem with the holocaust. The Rape of Nanking, Unit 732, etc, are not. This is not a "both sides" issue and any implication it is is disingenuous.
If you want to go down that way, well okay. Because you are right, this is not about both issues. Oppenheimer is about one issue: The atomic bomb. Not Nanjing. So what is disingenuous is some smart ass coming around and being like ”what about Nanjing“ when it is about the horror of the atomic bomb not being depicted enough.
And I‘m not against mentioning Nanjing and criticizing Japan for a lack of responsibility with its own history. Nanjing was another complete horror in its own right and it should be appropriately remembered. But again, not if the criticism is phrased in a way that takes away from other legitimate victims.
So if you want to move away from ”enlightened centrism“ then this is only about the atomic bomb. Otherwise you better embrace some position you try to downplay as ”enlightened centrism“.
This is a forest for the trees moment. Topic post is that Japan outward opinion on Openheimer is "There wasn't enough about the horror."
So the response that must be identified is "which horror?" Because it also glosses over Nazi Germany. And the firebombing of Tokyo. And plenty of other horrors directly relevant to the scope.
Should we have instead looked at the horrors of the Japanese Nuclear Bomb team that utilized uranium from slave mining in Germany? Or is, in fact, the scope of the movie focussed on two people specifically through the lense of the project and how they interacted, instead of something like Grave of Fireflies?
I, and many others just can't take Japan seriously everytime they try to play the victim, and rightfully criticize the lack of self awareness.
I think that the movie might simply not have been about the horror of the bomb is a valid criticism of the criticism. Unlike all the other stuff you said.
And if you mean by ”playing the victim“ that you can‘t take the victims of 2 nuclear bombs seriously, well that sounds like a you problem. It sounds awfully like you want to say, that the Japanese were not victims. I can get behind much of the criticism against Japan. It was an evil, imperialistic empire. But even if I follow the US narrative (written by the winners) to the fullest, that the nuclear bombs were absolutely necessary and there was no other way and combine it with the fact that to any moral standard I can come up with the Japanese Empire was very evil, I still can not say that they are not the victims of the nuclear bombs.
Again, I think any horror stands as a horror by itself. And there were real people and families and many, many civilians subject to this particular horror. If you can not take those seriously, well maybe you can accept that others can.
The US narrative was to hide Japan's involvement in the horrors of their occupation. The US policy to make Japan and ally and not blame them to create a bullwork against communism was perhaps realpolitik, but carried a lot of issues out of awareness until the last twenty or so years.
While horror as itself is important, the ability to reflect on the actions taken amongst ones own people that causes horrors on others is more important, morally. That's something the US has struggled with, but is getting better at. Something that Germany has done well. And something that both China (Mostly internally produced horrors) and Japan and Russia (Technically USSR but we know who was the most influential partner of those states) fail at, very badly.
See the recent backlash at the Three Body Problem on China over the struggle session. And that was a light depiction of how they went.
Either way, an internal criticism is going to be inherently more important then an external. Acknowledgment of the root issue is as 'they' say, the first step.
Again, I'm all in favor of holding Japan responsible. I'm merely at odds with the how. I'm not ranking self reflection and victimhood. I'm not even saying this is the wrong place to talk about both. I'm just saying that one shouldn't be used to downplay the other. The Japanese should both be acknowledged as legitimate victims of two nuclear bombs and be criticized for their own history, revisionism and hypocrisy. The original comment (as best as I can interpret it) is meant as a "but". I want an "and".
You can call out hypocrisy without what-aboutism. You can both acknowledge the horribleness of experiencing the atomic bomb and say that the Japanese position on what they did themselves makes them hypocrites. That's literally what my problem with this is. Because when used as a what-aboutism you do not acknowledge the former.
Oppenheimer isn't exactly about the bomb as much as it about the person who made said bomb.
Its called Oppenheimer. There are tens to hundreds of movies and documentaries about the bomb.
Whataboutism is not defined by lying. It‘s defined by deterring from one issue with another issue. Both can be lies, both can be the truth or one can be the truth.
It still isn't whataboutism. The point of the movie isn't the atomic bomb, as you've incorrectly stated in other comments. The point of the movie is about the MAN who basically headlined that creation, his actions and reactions to said creation. But it's not about the creation itself.
As I said in another comment, stating that "there wasn't enough of the horror" is basically stating they missed the entire point of the movie and want it to be a completely different point, a point they *hypocritically* do not show in their own media about their own actions.
If they want the "horror of the atomic bomb", there are numerous other movies and documentaries about it, and they shouldn't expect it to be a focal point of a movie that isn't about those atomic bombs.
That‘s a valid critcism of the criticism of the movie. Unlike being like ”but what about Nanjing“. Because one says that the films central point was misunderstood. The other says that the critics don‘t have the right to utter such criticism. They are very, very different arguments and I have no problem with one of them.
It's valid criticism to state "the point of the movie should have been X instead of Y"? That doesn't make sense, because *that wasn't the point of the movie*. If they can't see the point of the movie and want it changed, they are able to be called out about their own actions and lack of awareness, in that case.
? It's a valid criticism of the criticism (so the criticism of the criticism that the horrors of the nuke should have been emphasized more). I literally say that it's a valid criticism because it says that the movie was misunderstood (by the people who criticized it for not emphasizing the horrors of the nuke enough). I think you misunderstood my point.
And I think it's also valid to call them out on any lack of self awareness regardless. But that should not be done in a way that downplays the horror of having two cities essentially flattened by nukes.
Honestly, to me a valid criticism is only plausible. It doesn't mean I will agree with it in the end. But it's a constructive point. Which saying "the horrors of the nuke were not depicted enough" is. Which saying "the movie simply was not about the horrors of the nuke" also is. But which saying "you can't validly criticize the movie's depiction of the nuke because your own country did something bad elsewhere" is not.
I can’t name one movie about how bad Japanese imperialism was. I feel like that part of their history is always overlooked. But I want one that’s not C propaganda.
I can’t name one movie about how bad Japanese imperialism was. I feel like that part of their history is always overlooked. But I want one that’s not Chinese propaganda.
They literally foam at the mouth waiting to say anything negative about the US and how we are responsible for every single bad thing in mankind’s history.
Precisely **zero** of the children and babies of Hiroshima committed any war crimes.
So sick of people's IMMEDIATE reaction to any mention of the mass slaughter of 11,000 innocent people, always being "yeah but Nanking Unit 731 Comfort women". Like how bad is the cognitive dissonance that your only way of handling the story is to make it be about something else.
You misunderstand the point here isn’t that some Japanese soldier committed atrocities and therefore all Japanese people deserve it, the point here is that the movie Oppenheimer is very open about the atrocities that the atomic bomb caused and the mental toll it took on it’s creator, something that we have yet to see about the Japanese war crimes because they openly deny any war crimes their country committed.
They were forgiven after the war and not held accountable.
https://ahf.nuclearmuseum.org/ahf/history/unit-731/
"American forces, chiefly General Douglas MacArthur, decided not to put workers of Unit 731 on trial. MacArthur granted those involved immunity in exchange for the information they had gathered while doing their experiments. He believed that pursuing trials against these people would get in the way of the Americans receiving the medical information that had been documented from these experiments. Because of this decision, justice was never served"
Which officials? The ones who are dead as the war ended 70 years ago. How isn't it hypocritical of you to be upset over these atrocities when they were openly forgiven in exchange for information. Now that people have watched Oppenheimer they are suddenly experts on the Pacific conflict from WW2 because its trendy on Tik Tok lol
No, the officials that complain that oppenheimer isn't focusing enough on the attrocities while denying them, oh and by the way I COULDN'T GIVE LESS OF A SHIT that the US Government forgave them, the horrible things that the japanes army did was mostly to chinese, Korean and Russian soldiers, and they sure as shit haven't forgave them
Bud I also believe my country should take responsibility for its crimes. Two things can be wrong at the same time. I at least learned about the Trail of Tears and slavery in school, but it certainly wasn’t enough. Still more than the Japanese learn of their country’s crimes though. Btw what utopia are you from? Flair up
Dude, how fucking dense are you. Yes, we all know that every single country on earth has commited attrocities through history, mine and yours too, and that is not the point ffs. The point here is that a country that to this day denies the attrocities that they did in the past, considers insensitive the fact that a country that bombed them, did not focus enough on their suffering, which is hypocritical. do you understand that or do i have to explain it another time?
Precisely zero of those bayonet babies and pregnant women weren't soldiers. Unit 731 and comfort women were far from only war crimes committed. Oh the stories my great grandmother told of the war, as a civilian with her very young children trying to escape the japs.
By that same vein, then I too am also sick of the japanese lack of mention towards their mass indiscriminate slaughter and torture of innocent civilians, always being "yeah but nukes bad". Like how bad is the cognitive dissonance that their only way of handling history is to make it about themselves as the victim.
The way I see it, the japanese people who are complaining about this movie is throwing rocks from a glass house. EVERYONE in Asia is always waiting to throw rocks back. They will never be in a moral position to criticize other nations for their war crimes when they themselves are denying their own. Their statements will always be tainted with hypocrisy. I always liken japan to turkey when it comes to sweeping war crimes under the rug.
There is a Japanese animated film about the aftermath of the Hiroshima bomb I know of. But it appears they are still not culturally ready to produce art about their own atrocities in the way the Americans are. Even then the Americans aren't culturally ready to depict the true horror of the aftermath of the bombs. There are written historical accounts and I would encourage people to read them, but it seems the world still isn't quite ready to produce a movie.
The Human Condition Trilogy is amazing. I would even go as far as to say that it depicts the horror of war better than Come and See in many aspects. It's my personal favorite war film trilogy. It's certainly the best critical depiction of the Imperial Japanese Army and it comes from a Japanese director.
We are talking about the nuking of civilians. The Japanese government and military was fucking evil in WW2; **its still bad to fucking vaporize civilians**.
I’ll be real with you chief; the firebombings of Tokyo and other cities were so much more horrific than a nuclear blast - which granted, does sound like bullshit, but at least a nuclear blast doesn’t *suck people into raging flames and melt them as firestorms develop and tear through the region*
> but at least a nuclear blast doesn’t suck people into raging flames and melt them as firestorms develop and tear through the region
That is exactly what a nuclear blast does though.
Granted, a nuclear blast will cause firestorms in the aftermath of detonation, but unlike direct-firebombing, an overwhelming majority of the casualties in a nuclear attack will be killed instantly by the initial blast and pressure waves, before any firestorms left behind could possibly harm them - with just firebombing, you have a much larger population of ambulatory civilians trying to run from firestorms that have developed, thinking they’re reaching safety, only to get sucked into it or another firestorm due to the whirlwinds, or worse, slowly suffocated or roasted alive in a shelter as the flames outside consume all oxygen in the local area and raise the air to boiling point
> an overwhelming majority of the casualties in a nuclear attack will be killed instantly by the initial blast and pressure waves
The "instantly vaporized zone" is with ~0.5km² actually not that big. The area in which people suffer 3rd degree burns due to the intense heat of the blast on the other hand is 12km². 60% of the casualties of the bomb in Hiroshima burned to death and 30% were killed by falling debris.
Many of those burns occurred in seconds during the initial blast too, they just weren’t in the “instantly vaporised zone” - full 3rd degree burns, especially back then, tend to kill in an extremely short amount of time without treatment, which combined with shock and the fact 3rd degree burns kill nervous tissue, meant many would not have felt it when they died, unless much further from the blast site or partially sheltered (meaning they would instead receive second or partial-third degree burns).
There is a horrific agony with second degree and *partial* third degree burns, which were a lot more common in firebombings, due to the fact that a lot of nervous tissue can initially survive, and so a lot of victims take days, rarely even weeks to die in horrendous pain.
>I’ll be real with you chief; the firebombings of Tokyo and other cities were so much more horrific than a nuclear blast
But you dont get it...
​
Setting children and women and civilians and animals on fire ***SAVED AMERICA***
most of the napalm deaths were from asphyxiation inside bomb shelters (oxygen being depleted), which isn't too bad in the grand scheme of things. pretty quick & merciful, all things considered. not like build up of CO2.
after asphyxiation, the next common cause of death was smoke inhalation (inside bomb shelters), which also kicked in pretty quick all things considered - you lose consciousness rapidly.
it wasn't all slow & horrific burn-related fatalities everwhere as people think.
if anything, dying of dysentery or gangrene/necrosis in a POW camp sounds _much more_ horrific. that, or being deliberately kept alive with medical intervention for human experimentation (no anesthesia tho).
A fIrE gOeS aWAy oNcE pUt oUt
Bro you cant be fucking serious. All of Japan's infrastructure was made out of wood and extremely flammable materials. That's why the firebombings killed so many people and it spread so fast. You have almost no time to react as your house is being engulfed in flames. Maybe you should read about how those firebombings happened and why they were so unique. It was the single most destructive bombing raid in human history by the way.
No it wasn't their point and if it was, it was a shit point. Hiroshima and Nagasaki didn't really have a problem of lingering radiation because the bombs were detonated so high above their targets. Unlike the test sites that are still radioactive today, Hiroshima and Nagasaki's radioactive particles decayed within a few days. Tokyo after being firebombed, continued burning for days after.
Perhaps you are right. I mistook what they said as downplaying firebombs capabilities. Thus firebombs aren't nearly as devastating as nukes. Either way, I stand by what I said.
The only reason nuclear test sites are still somewhat radioactive today is because they saw a lot more and way more powerful detonations. As you've said radiation from nuclear bombs that aren't spiked decay quite quickly so while they do leave huge devastation behind they don't make the land uninhabitable.
They really don't that much. There's a reason Nagasaki and Hiroshima are still inhabited while chernobyl and Fukushima arent. Nuclear bombs decay nearly 100% of the nuclear material in the explosion, leaving barely any fallout.
Almost no time to react lol, yeah and nukes just sit around waiting for you to react. Notoriously slow, nukes. 🥴
If nukes and traditional bombs are the same, let’s just only use nukes then.
No one is saying that nukes and traditional bombs are the same. I'm saying that the firebombs were more devestating but if you want to go into specifics, I can tell you why the firebombs were more of a problem than the nukes were. Maybe you should read about it yourself. Hiroshima and Nagasaki weren't radioactive for decades like the test sites. Nearly all of the radioactive particles decayed within a few days. Tokyo continued to burn for much longer than either Nagasaki and Hiroshima were radioactive.
What a fucking idiot. Their cities were made out of wood and paper, and this was essentially napalm. There was no putting it out. It had to burn itself out. As it did that it created massive tornadoes of fire that sucked people in. The fire bombings killed 900,000 people more than both atomic weapons combined.
My friend we’re talking about firebombs in a country that at the time had cities almost entirely built out of timber and paper outside of a few structures like public buildings - even days to weeks after the initial firebombings, fires would restart and spread again through multiple neighbourhoods - sometimes several times over, catching out refugees who thought they’d escaped the first or second time, only to get burnt when another fire passed through the area; there’s a reason Tokyo was a major site of the construction industry post-war, and the key reason is a major portion of it was turned into charcoal
And if you’ve never seen the whirlwinds a firestorm can form, imagine a reverse hurricane that can lift your car and shovel it into a screaming furnace that liquifies your bones
If you tell a victim, who lost their home, their family, their friends, and the entire city they grew up in, along with everything they’ve ever known…
I don’t think they’ll care if it was a nuke or a firebombing that erased all that.
Both were terrible, yes, but my point was while the nukes were bad, they were better than another year, possibly multiple years, of further intense firebombing and a possible land invasion - that was the alternative to using nuclear weapons, and it would’ve led to immensely more death and human suffering across Japan than those two nukes ever could or have
What an absolutely brain-dead take. You can tell who has never cracked open a history book if you see them complaining about the bombings against Japan.
Japan was an insane, fanatical and genocidal state that was in many ways worse than even Nazi Germany.
Exactly. The people saying it wasn't justified are straight up stuck mentally in 3rd grade where their entire logic is: killing people = bad. So naive and ridiculous
Then what's the point of the comment if that's all it's saying??? It's just completely useless and might as well be a 3rd grader telling you their insight on the world. What's next, rape is bad? Wow crazy good point!!!
You completely missed the other user's point, and most ridiculously your counterpoint is something the other user has included in his comment. If the other user's take is brain-dead, yours is ret*rded.
Do you really expect anyone to swallow your stupid attempt to mix innocent civilians with combatants, or to pretend that this is a normal and acceptable act in a war?
It is a scenario where someone coldly plans an incursion to devastate everything and massacre hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians, including children and the elderly, for that very purpose of destroying a part of that ethnic group and causing terror.
That is absolutely evil in the totality of contexts, even those who callously justify it can see that. I wonder what kind of serious mental disorder one has to have to not do it.
Can we stop pretending that the nukes were special in terms of civilian casualties? We bombed the hell out of Japan using non-nuclear weapons, and killed way more people doing so.
War is hell, and the show of force with the nukes saved more lives than it cost.
What is being said is not that the nukes were justified. Its saying that compared to the rest of war, the deaths caused by the nukes were not the largest.
The use of a nuclear weapon to stop a war that would have costed multiple times more casualties under at the time calculations was the right decision. An invasion of Japan would have cost many times more deaths on both sides(or at least that's what all I two was pointing to at the time) and dropping those bombs secured the end of the war
Japan was open for talks before the nukes, but the US wanted an unconditional surrender which Japan (or st least the militarists in the government) were refusing
Why on Earth would the USA take a negotiated surrender from the militarists who had started the war? Versailles had just blown up in their face. Unconditional surrender was a reasonable demand
The use of nukes spared lives. A ground invasion of Japan would have been a massacre on both sifes. Operation Downfall would have had an estimated 200k to several million American casualties and into the tens of millions Japanese casualties, both civilian and military.
Using the atomic bombs saved millions of lives.
Yes if that stops a genocidal country killing 10 to 20 million people in china, korea and south east asia, lives of some thousands matter less than lives of a million. Just because you are a German or japanese, doesn't make you more valuable than millions of Slavs, jews, Romani, Chinese, korean,etc that Nazis and imperial japan killed.
Btw I think the bombed cities also had some military factories or bases.
What would you have done to stop World War 2?!
Try to convince the Japanese to surrender?
Guess what, that was tried, and it didn’t work!!
Actual brain dead take here…
I mean, you're right. It just doesn't sound good. But Imperial Japan was going all out in arming and radicalizing their civilians. It would have been an absolute bloodbath with millions more killed
Nukes changed the game though. They can teach school children how to shoot a gun and throw a grenade, but all that radicalizing does nothing to a single bomb, eliminating an entire city. You can't fight a bomb
The U.S. saved/spared more lives by nuclear annihilation. And it sounds so wrong
Tell me, would it be better for the Allied powers to have executed the largest land invasion in human history instead?
Surrender was the most dishonorable thing you could do in Japanese culture, and dying for the Emperor was of the highest honor. On Okinawa for instance there were 150,000 civilian deaths and a lot of that was suicides because the Japanese army had fed propaganda to the people that the Americans would do horrible things like cannibalize them or burn them alive if they surrendered.
The Japanese had Operation Ketsu Go in place, which to put it simply the Japanese High Commands plan at this point is making the invasion of the Japanese home island SO COSTLY that the number of casualties would be too high for the Allied powers to stomach. This would be primarily the Americans taking the casualties, but keep in mind you’d also have the Russian’s landing in Northern Japan, and there’s no telling what kind of atrocities they would do. So you tell me, is it better to use the bombs only twice and kill around 200k people, or have the largest invasion in history resulting in the deaths of ***millions*** of people on both sides of the conflict.
>the show of force with the nukes saved more lives than it cost.
Nukes were one of several different reasons that Japan surrendered. The common narrative that nukes saved lives isn't really true but it does serve as a great ex post facto justification for using them.
This video does a good job of going over the different reasons why Japan surrendered.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zMieIAjIY0c
You can't say it isn't really true because we don't know that. There are substantial arguments for multiple different reasons as to why Japan surrendered and there is no definitive evidence that it wasn't from the nukes and the bombings. That being said I'm not arguing that any theory is wrong. But you can't say it wasn't the bombs because you don't know.
I mean, we do though? We have primary sources for the internal deliberations of the Japanese government. We know the nukes did not substantively change the tactical situation, and did not of themselves significantly change the internal deadlock.
Internal discussion within the council >>> publicly speeches.
The nukes didn't even cause them to organise a meeting, never mind sway them to surrender
Of course it didn't cause them to organize a meeting, they were doing so regularly. When the first bomb dropped, Japanese leaders assumed America had blown their load so to speak, and didn't bother accelerating their schedule, since they were going to meet soon anyhow.
When the Japanese leaders arrived on August 9th to surrender, they were split and nothing seemed to sway either side.....until they heard Nagaski had just been hit. Throughout the meeting the bombs were discussed, as well as information obtained from a tortured pilot that America had 100 of them.
When the Emperor gave his final choice to Suzuki, he went into detail about the destructiveness of the bomb
Pretty fucking clear, that was the final nail in the coffin.
Except they did.
At this point in the war, Japan's strategy was attrition. They wanted to bleed America into accepting a negotiated surrender, and no matter how much damage American bombers did they could always point to a few knocked out bombers as a victory. After Hiroshima, a single plane could fly outside of AA range and destroy an entire city by itself. No more attrition.
When people say the nukes saved millions of lives it has nothing to do with any deliberations of the Japanese government. They were going to lose, that was a 100% certainty the only question was how long would it take for them to lose or surrender
If it wasn't for the nukes, America was planning to execute [Operation Downfall](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall) which **would** have led to the deaths of tens of millions of Japanese soldiers **AND** civilians not to mention the hundreds of thousands of US soldiers that also would have died during the invasion
So yea, when people say the nukes saved lived, it's because the only other alternative America was planning for was **MUCH MUCH MUCH** worse
After Nagasaki the Emperor is asked for a definitive position and the pro-war faction finally gives in.
The whole Japanese surrender process is more complicated than any single event, but Nagasaki is where they broke and indicated acceptance for total surrender.
>Nagasaki is where they broke and indicated acceptance for total surrender.
It was also after America (all but outright) said that the Emperor wouldn't be killed. One of the biggest obstacles for surrender was the condition of the Emperor's life. America had dug in too deep to accept anything but unconditional surrender. Japan would never accept the death of the Emperor, who was the living embodiment of a God.
And after Russia invaded Manchuria. Opening the war on another front, putting pressure on land forces who would be necessary to defend Japan in the event of a land invasion (not that I think that would've happened).
Prior to these events, Japan was trying to organise talks *through* Russian diplomatic channels. They were already trying to surrender.
No, they weren't.
The Japanese "talks" with russia were basically the fever dream of a lone diplomat who never had official sanction for it, and the Army tried to coup the emperor when he surrendered.
The “army” didn’t try to coup the emperor, there is no evidence of a “coup” happening.
It was a small group of army officers trying to physically halt the broadcasting of the Emperors surrender speech.
The Japanese condition for surrender was not the life of the emperor, rather that he remain as the emperor of Japan. Not in a constitutional monarchy way, but as the ruler of Japan. You can see this in the Japanese response to the Potsdam declaration when they said they would accept no peace that held any prejudice to the power of the emperor.
The Japanese tried one last time to secure protection for the Emperor, which was rejected. What they agreed to and signed was complete and unconditional surrender. During the occupation it became advantageous to preserve the Emperor’s office.
How do you think the people making the decisions thought at the time? It’s very easy to look at history in retrospect but you have to put yourself in the position of the people making the decisions.
what we do know though is that the bombs were never intended to save civilian lives. that narrative assumes the military made a tough decision for the greater good, but in reality the decision was 'oh nice a giant bomb, let's drop as many as we can as soon as possible'. they were always intended to cause mass civilian casualties. in fact the bombing of nagasaki was much less destructive than intended due to the bomb being dropped off target, and hills shielding much of the city from the blast.
We know it wasn't *the* reason, it was one of many reasons, so it isn't really true that the nukes were why they surrendered. Saying that brushes aside everything else. The nukes were *part* of why they surrendered but we cannot say definitely that the Japanese would have kept fighting were it not for the nukes.
Any narrative that tries to justify mass slaughter of innocent people should be viewed with the harshest scrutiny. We need extraordinarily strong evidence to say that the killing of 200,000 people with nuclear weapons was the lesser evil when the prior slaughter of as many as 900,000 with conventional bombs wasn't enough.
It was the pre use justification, not ex posto facto. Now there are arguments that ulterior motives blinded the US to other options, but the ostensible reason for the bombing was to end the war and save huge numbers of lives right from the beginning.
They weren't used to force surrender. the question was never bomb or invade, it was always bomb and invade. They were used because they were possessed and because the US had determined to fight until the unconditional surrender of the Japanese.
Explain to me how preventing an invasion of mainland Japan (estimated 1 million+ casualties) and extending the deadliest conflict in human history by an extra year or two isn’t saving lives?
>killed way more people doing so.
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> War is hell, and the show of force with the nukes saved more lives than it cost.
Maybe... But it wasn't necessarily Japanese lives that show of force saved. Dropping those bombs was the beginning of the cold war and the start of superpowers being terrified to end up at war with each other
The Japanese were training children to crawl under American tanks as suicide bombers. An invasion of Japan would have been extremely bloody for both parties.
War sucks. It would be better for all of humanity if we stopped all the pointless bloodshed. But the Japanese started that fight, so I find it hard to be sympathetic that they got retaliated against.
It’s hard to argue that the US didn’t play their cards right though, as both Japan and Germany are now both close allies.
The irony about it all is that to the people who dropped the nukes, there was nothing especially horrific about them. They were just "big bombs"
Hiroshima is what created the modern taboo on nuclear weapons. Without Hiroshima, we wouldn't have such a visceral reaction to the idea of cities being nuked.
The worst part about the entire thing is it wasn't a terror bombing versus a civilian population. It was a cold and calculated move. Hiroshima had a Army Division headquarters, arms factories and shipyards. The US Army (USAF didn't exist until 1947) sat down and did the math and said "Do we send hundreds of expensive bombers with unexpendible crews to *try* and hit 1/3 targets in the city, Remembering that "Strategic bombing" back then was "We're over the right(?) city boys! bombs away!" or do we send a few bombers with one big bomb and get all 3 at once?
the entire ordeal was quite sick when you think about it and it's honestly a good thing. The use of nuclear weapons at the end of WW2 made the world realize how horrific they were and when General Douglas MacArthur asked for 50 of them so he could win the war by created an iradiated hellsacape between the korean peninsula and communist China, President Truman said no
I mean, that was the best they could do back then. The US had one of the most accurate scope built ever but they still weren't pinpoint until the last 20 years or so. I bet if they could have assured that every bomb landed on target they would have. It would have been a huge help to the war effort.
This just never happened. It’s not even clear the US knew of the 2nd General Army HQ in the first place. We picked Hiroshima because it was the largest unbombed city left standing.
Japanese industry was located in cities
We had 3 options
Blockade 1,000-10,000 civilians die a day starvation ( post war famine since no fuel for harvest)
Firebomb and nuke cities, 100k a pop, 1 million total ( almost all industry shit down , no targets left past November at bombing rates)
Invade with or without USSR, 1 million civilians dead at least ( it's Okinawa but bigger, 50 times bigger? No, 500x)
At the same time China is mostly occupied with about 5,000 civilian deaths a day
If ya have a solution to this war that didn't require Japanese civilians to die congrats you're Jesus
It's not really that simple though, because the American high command was planning to invade Japan if they didn't surrender which would have killed vastly more people.
Predictions from within the US were that the invasion of Kyushu to open Operation Olympia would be on part with previous campaigns in the Phillipines. The idea that downfall would have cost millions of lives is a post-facto justification to justify the dropping of the bombs.
​
[The source I'm working with, for reference.](https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/minutes-meeting-held-white-house?documentid=NA&pagenumber=3)
Yes your source indicates that the invasion *of Kyushu* would be similar in number of casualties to previous campaigns, but in the source you linked, Truman was concerned about casualties after Kyushu. Page 44 of your source (and in several other places too) reads "He had hoped that there was a possibility of preventing an Okinawa from one end of Japan to the other."
Indeed. We also know from Japanese sources that although the military talked a big game, they weren't realistically going to be able to mount a defence of the home islands. This wouldn't really have played into US policy (as there was no reasonable way to know this from the other side of the Pacific,) but even just Olympia, forget the rest of Downfall, would have been the 'stick a fork in them, they're done,' moment for Japan.
The idea of Downfall causing millions of casualties is *never* spoken about during the war. Nimitz, Leahy, Simmons, Marshall... None of these men made anything close to these predictions. The USA was not operating under these predictions. See 'Prompt and Utter Destruction' by J Samuel Walker (it's free to loan on the Internet Archive!) for more on that particular myth.
My gut instinct is the same as u/Wrecker013. While there would not have been the millions of casualties that some people have pushed in the decades since, there still likely would have been a significant number of American casualties— causalities that are hypothetical *because* we dropped the bombs.
I don’t know about you, but I don’t know that I could look American parents, wives, and children in the eye and say that the loss of their family member was worth some hypothetical moral high ground when we could drop the bombs and end the war
>My gut instinct
I'm glad you place gut instinct on the same level as academic history.
​
>I don’t know about you, but I don’t know that I could look American parents, wives, and children in the eye and say that the loss of their family member was worth some hypothetical moral high ground
The USA dropped nuclear bombs on city centres *knowing* that Japan had attempted to sue for peace, *knowing* that they were likely to capitulate soon, *knowing* that the Soviet Union had all but entered the war. Those who dropped the bomb are responsible for the blood of over a hundred thousand people, sacrificed on the altar of pre-cold war diplomacy.
> I'm glad you place gut instinct on the same level as academic history.
*eyeroll* That's a lame comeback and you know it. I'll couch it in academic language if you require it "Based on the information I have access to, my intuition is the same as..."
> Those who dropped the bomb are responsible for the blood of over a hundred thousand people,
Your own source estimated 30,000 American combat deaths from the invasion of Kyushu alone. Truman was concerned about *American* lives as he should have been. You didn't even attempt to address the idea that there could have been more potential Japanese casualties with an invasion of the home islands
>That's a lame comeback and you know it.
'My gut instict' doesn't deserve a better response... But since this very simple concept seems to be eluding you: Downfall was *one* option. It was an option they were persuing atop several others, most of which were infinitely more justifiable than dropping the nukes.
And one simple concept seems to be eluding you: *to whom* is it infinitely more justifiable? Us with 80 years of hindsight or to the American people who had already given about a million sons, brothers, fathers, and husbands to the cause of freedom? Your inability to empathize with the people making those decisions is unbecoming of a historian
Maybe not for the Americans, but the destruction and ensuing famine, additional bombing, blockades, etc. would absolutely have killed an equal number of civilians as both atomic bombs.
My guy if you want to go through the soruces I'm using for a literal dissertation on this exact subject, I can provide you with an extensive list. The Atomic Bombings were US big-stick showmanship to set the pace for the postwar clash with the Soviets. The Japanese had been open to capitulation under the condition that the Emperor's position would be preserved well before August of 1945, but such a deal was politically unacceptable (publically, anyway, MacArthur and the US still made sure to hide plenty of crimes on Hirohito's behalf) after the Casablanca Conference. The bombs *were not necessary* to conclude the war.
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Actually, yes. It is 100% justified to kill civilians of the aggressor nation, who largely support their government, in order to save civilians that the aggressor nation is murdering.
Watching/reading/talking about history does not put you in the shoes of folks who lived it and made decisions at the time.
If you can’t make that distinction idk what to say.
1.2 million people died in a SINGLE BATTLE (Stalingrad). It’s easy to get on Reddit 80 years later and say no war is worth that lmfao.
Killing civilians is just wrong. You can find degrees of how much less wrong as some arithmetic of saving lives or ending a war or whatever, but it seems we have a pretty distinct ethical approach here.
(For example, would the bombing of cities in 1941 still be justified despite the war not ending for years afterward?)
Of course killing civilians is wrong. Most of what happened in WWII was “wrong” through some lense or subjective perspective.
Again, I don’t think you actually understand or empathize with the reality of WWII and all that took place.
It’s very easy to say “civilians/innocents dying is wrong.” Unfortunately, the conversation is a bit more complex than that.
Lmfao.
I’ve read and watched so much WWII historical content that I can’t begin to measure it.
That doesn’t mean I can pretend to truly understand what these folks were going through at the time. I can speculate, but I can’t look down on or justify the vast majority of decisions.
You seriously can’t make that distinction?
Yes. It's not hard to understand. To deal with such a disgusting and ferocious enemy as ww2 era japan, you need to be even more disgusting and ferocious. The japanese killed a ridiculously high number of civilians for sport (not a joke, japanese newspapers at the time reported on commanders killin chinese civilians in THE SAME EXACT FORMAT as they did baseball reporting)
There was no *one* thing that caused Japan's surrender, but the revelation that the US had developed nuclear weapons, the nuking of 2 cities in 4 days with no indication of how many more nukes the US was able to deploy, and learning that the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan the same day as the Nagasaki bombing certainly all played an important part. The Emperor decided to surrender 3 days later.
That debatable. You can't say definitively that it didn't because you don't know that for a fact. There are some other theories out there but we don't really know 100% what caused the surrender.
Someone posted a video in a thread above that details this, but the decision making was not as simple as “bomb or invade.” There is little evidence of a decision to invade or not being an imminent pressing concern. Plans were being drawn up sure, but it was not a decision that was looming over everyone’s heads and the decision to drop the nuclear bombs was not made with it in mind. Japan still had territory on mainland Eurasia and for much of the time leading up to the bombings and eventual surrender was hoping to negotiate a peace with the USSR.
That doesn’t make any sense. How do you negotiate peace with country you aren’t at war with?
The USSR didn’t declare war on Japan until August 8, 1945
Hiroshima was bombed on August 6, 1945
So Japan was hoping to negotiate peace with a country it wasn’t at war with? No, they were hoping for a treaty with the USSR so they wouldn’t have to have an unconditional surrender with the US. Those are not the same.
Commie propaganda. Japan was never going to hold onto its colonies after the war. The Soviets would never have been able to naval invade Japan. It was more death or less death, simple as
That's one of those things that's been repeated so often that it's just accept as fact without proof.
It largely relies on a racist orientalist notion that the Japanese were some otherworldly brainwashed species unlike normal humans, who were supremely committed to fighting to the very last man, woman and child to protect their sacred honour.
Nah they would kill themselves en masse just to kill some americans because they were unafraid to die, the solution was killing them with nukes en masse as they are afraid to die.. see its logical
/s
> The tradition of death instead of defeat, capture, and shame was deeply entrenched in Japanese military culture; one of the primary values in the samurai life and the Bushido code was loyalty and honor until death.[4][5][6][7] In addition to kamikazes, the Japanese military also used or made plans for non-aerial Japanese Special Attack Units, including those involving Kairyu (submarines), Kaiten (human torpedoes), Shinyo speedboats, and Fukuryu divers.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
> It largely relies on a racist orientalist notion that the Japanese were some otherworldly brainwashed species unlike normal humans, who were supremely committed to fighting to the very last man, woman and child to protect their sacred honour.
That's literally a historical fact though... Perhaps you should read this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kamikaze
Also, it's a very western centric viewpoint to assume that people from every country actually have the same values as us. Some cultures, especially in the Middle East, heavily value honour, actually.
Yes they did. these counter factual people always come out of the woodwork when talking about the bombs It's really annoying. They just completely ignore all the actual evidence supporting what was gonna happen during an invasion and clutch onto the theories that support their narrative.
The actual evidence like General Marshall talking about casualties on par with the fighting in Luzon? How about the analysis by the USA suggesting that Japan would not be defeated 'from the air' and that Soviet intervention was likely to push Japan to capitulation? That evidence?
lol cope. It was literally their doctrine to use planes as suicide bombers and the government was literally training civilians to fight with bamboo spears.
American experience in the Pacific Theater saw **thousands** of civilians throw themselves off cliffs rather than fall under American occupation because they were convinced that the Americans would make their life a living hell. Military units would fight to nearly the last man, hell we saw holdouts in the Philippines continue to resist well into the 1950s.
In June of 1945, Japan created a civilian paramilitary force where *every single man* aged 15-60 and *every single woman* aged 17-40 was conscripted to resist the invasion of Kyushu. Allied planning and intelligence was preparing for an invasion where there would be no visible difference between civilians and soldiers, as Japan did not outfit most conscripts with uniforms in 1945. Regardless of whether every civilian was ready to fight or not, there would have been plenty of civilians who would fight alongside military units, and plenty of other civilians who would have committed suicide if capture was inevitable.
I think it's ridiculous to claim that it's racist or orientalist, when it was literally based on the experience of soldiers across the Pacific Theater and we know from Japanese sources that that's exactly what the plan was.
Dude... There is actually A LOT of evidence behind what he said. Go read about it. And as for the last part of your comment read about the invasion's of Saipan and Okinawa if you want to see what we expected as far as how civilians were going to behave. I'm sorry but you are just dead wrong.
There are multiple factors as to why they surrendered, not just the bombs. Saying that if the US didn't launch the nukes, we would had a land invasion is history revisionism at best.
Yes, let’s kill hundreds of thousands of our own civilians and hundreds of thousands more Japanese civilians with a ground invasion instead. Very smart
Why would there be a ground invasion? The Japanese were already trying to surrender just on slightly different terms. They were actively speaking to the soviets and only unconditionally surrendered after the declaration of war.
What a cowardly lie. No that’s not what they demanded. They received the potsdam conference news and knew that the emperor wouldn’t be overthrown. You disgust me commie loser
>Why are we even playing this game?
because it was Americans being evil so that means it's ok and becuase we're redditors we need to fight tooth and nail to ensure you understand ***JAPAN IS BAD*** :)
***REMEMBER DA RAPE OF NANKING????***
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lest redditors let you forget that 200 years ago, japan's army... was indeed pretty evil
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but I guess some unrelated group being evil justifies us being evil because... cognitive dissonance and decades of nationalist brainwashing or whatever.
The civilians were so brainwashed that they make North Korea look like a joke. The "innocent" civilians bought into by negative propaganda so heavily that they they flung themselves off of cliffs when the US landed in Japan, out of fear and "loyalty" to their empire.
One more thing that I've never seen one person ever mention about this topic: imagine if we didn't use the nukes and the US public found out after the fact that we had super weapons capable of ending the war, but instead chose to send hundreds of thousands of our 18 year olds into what is essentially a wood chipper. Good luck keeping the peace after that gets out.
Imagine the American populace finding out in 1947 that the US government secretly developed city-vaporising bombs that could’ve ended the war 2 years earlier and prevented millions of unnecessary deaths, then just never fucking used them- lmao.
Truman would have been dragged out of the White House and lynched.
Why would the war have ended later? The Japanese didn't even have a meeting after the first nuke, and the damage caused by the nuke was lower than other bombings.
The Japanese were already trying to surrender, they had just hoped to use the USSR's neutrality to negotiate better terms.
On August 10, 1945, Japan offered to surrender to the Allies, the only condition being that the emperor be allowed to remain the nominal head of state.
before hideki tojo (head of war cabinet) came to power, the civilian populace of japan was clamoring for the conquest & subjugation of surrounding countries in asia - starting with korea & china.
it wasn't the military leadership that dragged the populace into war, but the reverse.
the every day citizens wanted to get in on the riches & prosperity of the fruits of the empire, just like imperial powers of europe. they believed they were a superior people to the rest in their region, and were owed entitlements as imperial citizens.
it was the war-mongering will of the people that pushed the likes of hideki tojo further up in power - eventually taking over the military and exerting tremendous influence over the emperor - that led to WW2's pacific theater starting in the 1910s. the colonialism was well underway by 1930s.
by the time the japanese realized they were reaping what they had sowed & had forced hideki tojo to step down, it was too late.
every man is his own agent. you can't absolve the civilians from fault.
arguments like yours is equivalent to the post war's "not-all-nazis"-whitewashing
Honestly getting vaporized doesn't sound half as bad as the atrocities committed by the Japanese in WW2. They were NOT going to give up peacefully. Their government was ruled by the military and the people were manipulated by the government to never give up.
Dropping the atomic bombs definitely saved more lives than conventional warfare.
>Why are we so eager to find excuses to kill people
Raping and murdering millions of civilians in South East Asia then refusing to surrender seems like a pretty good excuse to me. Not wanting to extend the deadliest conflict in human history even longer, (to around 1946-47), causing an estimated 1 million extra casualties also seems like a pretty reasonable excuse.
Yes, we are aware that bombing civilians was bad. The alternatives were worse. When you start looking at the atomic bombings without tunnel vision, a severe lack of context, and Japanese apologist narratives, that much becomes clear.
Vaporizing civilians is a tragedy, but if killing 100,000 saves 1,000,000, is it bad? This is such a childish take on war. Yeah, killing is bad, but sometimes killing is necessary. This is the most entry level philosophical question.
Read the estimates of civilians deaths if we’d had to invade the home islands. I am firmly anti nuclear but like, the choice was between somewhat instantly kills lots of civilians and maybe ends the war, or something that over months or years kills many more civilians and servicemen on both sides. Of course it’s bad to vaporize civilians, no one is arguing that.
>**its still bad to fucking vaporize civilians**
That's how strategic bombing works, genius. That's how Britain, Germany and ussr were bombed too. One night of firebombing in Tokyo killed 200k people.
Just because you use the f word like five times in your comment doesn’t make it powerful or accurate. You are sorely misguided friend. Seek knowledge instead of conceit and maybe there is still time to save you from yourself. Good luck
Every major power killed civilians en masse in WW2. Every single one of them.
The one silver lining of Hiroshima and Nagasaki - and which is a pretty central thesis of the film, iirc - is that the bombings were absolutely horrible, and the sheer horror of those bombings, whether intentional or not, was necessary to fully demonstrate how horrible nuclear weapons truly are, and how we should *never* use them against humans - or the environment we live in - ever again.
I thought this is the main point of the movie - that he regretted how much civilian damage that could be done with this. He was ostracized by his own government for expressing this opinion after the war.
That is exactly the point of the movie. And it’s about how him and many of scientists (particularly Bohr) tried to advocate for peaceful uses of atomic energy and openness between nations regarding nuclear weapons to prevent an arms race and how they failed because of the political environment within the US at the time.
It’s a film, that depicts a historical moment and not even in a positive light.
I guess the Germans should feel the same way about films like inglorious bastards then right??? Which btw was a lot more insensitive and also included the gleeful killing of nazi civilians, but killing nazis is fine but not fighting the genocidal Japanese empire??
Who is saying that it's not bad to vaporize civilians? I think you're confusing people saying it was the best case out of a very shitty scenario with no good options, with it not being bad. I feel like you're somehow arguing against a strawman that you yourself have created, which frankly I don't think I've ever seen anyone do before.
>Why are we so fucking eager to find excuses to kill people en masse? Every fucking time, man.
Because you are on reddit.
The news could be about a fucking baby panda being born in a Japanese zoo, and people would still say "yeah, and how about all those pregnant women in Nanjing? Those children didn't even have the choice to be born!!!"
I find reddit to be the opposite. It's mostly people who can't see nuance in anything and therefore war is an impossible subject for them. Most of them don't understand the history behind the decision to use the weapons.
Mostly because of how hypocritical the Japanese government is about their role in WW2. They’ll fully acknowledge their role as victim in the horrific nuclear bombings but weren’t accept responsibility for the horrific things they did in China and East Asia in general
The same sentiment came also came from many in western media too.
The problem was how do you depict that without it being a cheap shot of some extras dieing. Similar to how holocaust depictions often feel cheap in other movies.
The whole film was centred around Oppenheimer's perspective; using a book that explicitly did the same.
And in that framing I think there where some scenes that depicted that horror through him to the audience; namely the scene where they had Oppenheimer addressing the other Manhattan project scientists/workers towards the end.
It’s hard for Americans to relate. Imagine if there was a great and conflicted genius behind 9/11 and a full movie exploring the deep struggle of the inventor behind the technology and one seen in which he imagines a level of destruction that it’s tormenting him, but not the actual destruction of the families, the people impacted by disease after, children obliterated. People’s friends, mothers, children, destroyed in masse.
It’s basic empathy to understand this about the movie.
It barely has even one conceivable historic comparison.
The inventor of a historic leap forward in science lauded by many is also the inventor of a nations collective pain, horror, punishment, humiliation and trauma for generations. Its hard to relate for anyone.
The genius of the movie is that if you are even somewhat empathetic(ie. A functional human in the 21st century) then you see that through Cillian's Performance as Oppenheimer.
The movie doesn't show it explicitly because it is somewhat an art piece restricted by genre to appeal to the largest audience possible in a what was a really effective cultural epic to show the interesting nuance of this topic through the lense of a more understandable personable character.
You can't explore all of Japans context through this lense. Especially to a large audience. So it succeeded where it could. And maybe others can explore the rest.
There are scenes of people being annihilated in nuclear weapons in Grave Of the Fireflies. Your brain probably blanked it out, the scenes are horrific.
Not sure if there are ones out there in western media already; I assume there are some in Japanese media.
But a film or tv series in the eyes of the Japanese could also be great. Maybe not 7 oscars worthy tho; kinda need a Nolan and hollywood cast for that.
Maybe more Chernobyl style; in like a mutiple followed characters and the influence of it on them; to properly personalise it vs 'just a few more scenes' to a movie with a different style.
The sheer human tragedy, horror and moral dilemmas at play.
Imagine a Hiroshima citizen receiving a leaflet from the americans to evacuate; do you believe it, what about your home, your veiws on the war, etc. Or the aftermath and its effects then and across time; ie. Not just the initial loss and tragedy but also the impact on the nation's psyche.
The best Holocaust depiction I’ve ever seen in a movie was in zone of interest, (spoilers ahead)
At the end, the commandment of Auschwitz has a brief moment of self reflection after getting the order to clear Hungary of its Jews and move them to the camps. He is leaving the building and stops, and starts staring down a hallway into the darkness. Then the movie jarringly cuts to a museum worker sweeping out the gas chambers at Auschwitz, and people cleaning the the museum as the camera pans around the shoes and clothes and personal belongings that are on display there. This lasts for a few minutes before cutting back to the commandment, who then proceeds to walk down the rest of the stairs and carry on with his orders.
Many movies have made the Holocaust feel “real” in one way or another, but no other movie I’ve ever seen has so effectively removed the distance between the viewer and the Holocaust the way that scene did.
the sentiment came only from those who disliked the intentionally limited perspective and wanted more of an emotional return — more climatic shock value or gratification. and sure it could have been more impactful but it really defeats the purpose of the limited perspective.
I feel like there should have been 2 sections of the movie with real footage. The first test bomb and the aftermath in Japan. These are things that should be seen and not looked away from and forgotten.
>These are things that should be seen and not looked away from and forgotten.
They aren't forgotten at all. There is so much about then to begin with. A big reason why this movie did so well is that the atombomb are famous.
The most known cites of Japan internationally are like Tokyo, Nagasaki an Hiroshima
I agree. There’s plenty of movies, especially in Japan, that dive into the actual bombing itself without pulling any punches. The focus on this movie was Oppenheimer himself, and that’s fine.
I feel like there should have been 2 sections of the movie with real footage. The first test bomb and the aftermath in Japan. These are things that should be seen and not looked away from and forgotten.
I saw the movie in a suboptimal setting, so I don't know how it shows on big screens, but it definitely came across less as a Bomb movie and more as an Oppenheimer movie. Shocking, I know, but it definitely explains why the bomb itself and the consequences of it aren't as explored as the psychology of the man who made it.
There are frequent shots of symbolic imagery that serve to spotlight Oppenheimer's personal guilt and horrified imagination of a post-nuclear world, but not as much attention is paid to the actual aftermath of the bombs because Oppenheimer wasn't there for it. He was stateside when Hiroshima and Nagasaki were destroyed. The story is about the bomb maker, not the bomb. If you want that, there's plenty of documentaries showing exactly what it looked like on the ground after the bombings. If you go into Oppenheimer expecting that experience, you'll be sorely disappointed.
He didn't even attend the operation crossroads tests and opposed them.
He had some input into their use in Japan but did seem more academic and from afar. So doesnt make sense, imao, to subtract from other aspects of the film or add to its long run time by adding that side of the story.
> Canada
Under the British command Canada committed one of the worst allied acts in the war. First they firebombed Hamburg to try to break the civilian resolve for war. Then they waited a few days for a 60k+ person refugee camp to form around one of the few remaining large buildings, then they went back and bombed the refugee camp.
Maybe they should have included more than one or two scenes about it while having a sprawling subplot centred on his squabble over a security clearance lol once the stakes are established the rest of the movie is baffling and pointless
The movie, titled Oppenheimer, is unsurprisingly gonna be about the titular character. Having random shots of the bombs hitting Hiroshima and Nagasaki and showing the civilians suffering is a waste of film because the movie isn’t about them. It’s about Oppenheimer and his life. The governments distrust of him is a very key factor in his fall from grace.
Nah. Maybe an unpopular opinion but that part was fascinating.
The Mccarthyism and whole political intrigue was also integral to Oppenheimer's story too. Up there with his internal strife over inventing (/facilitating of) the atomic bomb and show casing the many interesting historical figures of the time.
The Japanese often minimize their crimes against humanity. The rape of Nangking. The ‘comfort women’, their preference for killing or working to death any captured westerners.
People also forget that the firebombing of Tokyo killed more people than the nuclear bombing of Hiroshima.
Japan is definitely not a victim here. They have a long history of aggression. Their kings have plundered and raped Korean and Chinese women and Japan was a big player in WW
I know I said this in some replies already, but serious WTF is wrong with people, that they can read about someone who was a child during the nuclear bombing of their city, and their first and only reaction is to get up on their high horse and condescendingly preach that it's their own fault for committing all those war crimes. While they were a child.
The hypocrisy is staggering. Yes, Japan's war crimes were unspeakably horrific but that doesn't mean that nuking it was okay.
Reddit goes berserk when Putin talks about using nuclear weapons but when the US did it, it wasn't just fine - it was somehow good and anyone who disagrees basically supports the evil brutalities of Imperial Japan. And also the outrage over other countries developing nukes. American propaganda is insane.
It's so satisfying to see a thread with some sanity.
American propaganda and hypocrisy is legitimately unsettling on this site. If you try to point it out at all on most of reddit, they just start screaming "America bad!!!!" and try to shut down any criticism of their country.
Literal brainwashing in action.
Exactly. And it's not like the US nuked Japan to avenge Japanese war crimes in Asia so I don't get this whataboutism. Americans didn't (and still don't) give a shit about what happened. This is just trudged up to excuse literally nuking a country.
American propaganda is terrifying bruh. Its why we have been at war for 90% of this countries existence on foreign land, but somehow always on the right side lol
They literally brigade any post with the word "japan, Japanese or nuke" to bot propaganda comments about America being justified in one way or another
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Redditors unironically use ***"ERHRR DURRHHH RAPE OF NANKING"*** as a justification to racist ***TODAY****. A*s if the Japanese civilians born NOW are for some reason guilty for shit that happened **100 years ago under a fucking regime.**
Do you think a German, who are properly educated about what they during the war, would complain about the insufficient level of horror of the firebombing of Dresden in some fictional movie? No they would keep their fucking mouth shut because they know what they did was far worse. This is the problem with not giving an honest, accurate education.
There are plans drafted by the japanese goverment at the time, in the case of an american invasion, detailing the use of children, by strapping them with bombs and making them go under american tanks. I'm sorry, but Japanese culture at the time makes this a VERY complicated issue. Japanese kids were completely willing to die for their country, mostly because of a militarized education. Again, quite complicated to talk about with our american perspective.
do you have a source for the part about strapping bombs to children? i know they planned to use every able bodied person, and went so far as to encourage the suicide of people who couldn’t fight, but i’ve only ever heard about bombs being strapped to dogs to blow up tanks.
This is a good [overview](https://irp.fas.org/eprint/arens/chap4.htm#:~:text=The%20defensive%20plan%20was%20to,succeeded%20in%20winning%20a%20beachhead.&text=The%20Japanese%20were%20determined%20to,and%20decisive%20battle%20on%20Kyushu). Some relevant parts.
>The defensive plan called for the use of the Civilian Volunteer Corps, a mobilization not of volunteers but of all boys and men 15 to 60 and all girls and women 17 to 40, except for those exempted as unfit. They were trained with hand grenades, swords, sickles, knives, fire hooks, and bamboo spears. These civilians, led by regular forces, were to make extensive use of night infiltration patrols armed with light weapons and demolitions
Another [source](https://www.airandspaceforces.com/article/japans-last-ditch-force/) from Air and space forces magazine.
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In June 1945, Japan established the “National Volunteer Combat Force,” a civilian paramilitary corps. All males age 15-60 and females 17-40 were required to join. They received training from the army on whatever weapons were available, notably bamboo spears and hand grenades. They were expected to strap explosives to their bodies and throw themselves under advancing U.S. tanks. About 28 million Japanese were subject to conscription under this program.
Thoughts that these plans seem extreme or would not be carried out would probably be remiss from considering what happened in [Okinawa](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Okinawa).
>
On Okinawa, the [Imperial Japanese Army](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Imperial_Japanese_Army) mobilized 1,780 schoolboys aged 14–17 years into [front line](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Front_line) service as an *Iron and Blood Imperial Corps* ([Japanese](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_language): [鉄血勤皇隊](https://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E9%89%84%E8%A1%80%E5%8B%A4%E7%9A%87%E9%9A%8A), [romanized](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Romanization_of_Japanese): *Tekketsu Kinnōtai*),
>
About half of the *Tekketsu Kinnōtai* were killed, including in suicide bomb attacks against tanks and in [guerrilla](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guerrilla_warfare) operations.
The mainland invasion of Japan would have been a long, bloody campaign that would have probably resulted in the destruction of Japanese culture as we know it. Estimated casualty figures would have been 1.7-4 million on the US side and 5-10 million on the Japanese side (total population during WW2 was 72 million). The bombs were a more merciful way to end the war from a conflict the Japanese started.
“I know I said this in some replies already, but serious WTF is wrong with people, that they can read about someone who was a child during the nuclear bombing of their city, and their first and only reaction is to get up on their high horse and condescendingly preach that it's their own fault for committing all those war crimes. While they were a child.”
It probably has something to do with them being aware of the approximately 20 million Chinese people that were murdered by Japan. And that’s not even mentioning the countless other millions of people across East Asia that suffered and died due to the actions of the Japanese.
Why don't the german, the Soviet, the british civilians get the same sympathy then? Why are people who died from nuclear fission more special than say those who burned to death in Tokyo and Dresden?
The same folks who would argue with you that this is different will also argue that the horror of the bomb (and being bombed further) in fact played no role in Japan’s surrender whatsoever.
Counterpoint; Germany.
Until Japan as a whole becomes like Germany I really don't care.
Germany paid for their crimes, nationally recognized them, and taught it internally to their citizens to ensure they all knew what had happened and how it happened. It made them better and they're a leader of Europe today because of it.
Why don't the german, the Soviet, the british civilians get the same sympathy then? Why are people who died from nuclear fission more special than say those who burned to death in Tokyo and Dresden?
It’s easy to justify when you consider the fact millions more would’ve died with a conventional invasion. Japan attacked and waged an all out war against the USA. The USA ended it with an act of mercy as opposed to the ruin of the entire country, and millions more dead on both sides. Japan is lucky it wasn’t partitioned and its leaders executed. They got off light.
I look at it this way: the US could use the nukes and end the war with a few hundred thousand deaths, or not use the nukes, invade Japan the old-fashioned way, and cause probably millions of deaths. What would you choose?
Not enough about the horror? This movie was just as much about the horror as it possibly could be without being from the Japanese perspective, which it very obviously wasn't.
It's staggering how many people seem to think the film is called "Hiroshima" or "Nagasaki" when it quite clearly says "Oppenheimer" on all the posters.
Compare how the movie spends barely a few minutes pondering the morality of nuclear weapons with how it spends basically the last hour covering each detail of him losing his security clearance. I found it very strange for a movie about Oppenheimer to be so fixated on that part of his life.
But that's who Oppenheimer was. He DIDN'T spend months wracked with indecision and guilt about making the bomb; the kind of person who does that isn't the kind of person who actually is able to build such a bomb. It'd be disingenuous to portray him as some moralistic philosopher when he spent most of his time not really worrying about that aspect of things.
Oppenheimer became one of the world's foremost activists opposing nuclear proliferation. It was definitely something he thought about quite a lot. His mental journey to get to that point would be an interesting subject for a movie, and perhaps someone will make it someday.
Sure, of course. But at the end of the day he spent 5 years building it despite knowing that the whole time, and there's limited evidence that it bothered him unduly. He knew full well what he was making, and what it would be used for, but still believed it was for the greater good. His depression and regret occurred mostly after the detonation, as shown in the film.
The movie spends way more than "barely a few minutes" on the morality of nuclear weapons. Why would you be surprised that a movie titled 'Oppenheimer' would focus more on an important yet lesser known part of his life, rather than the most discussed topic on Earth?
I feel like this was a purposeful choice as the whole reason he lost his clearance was his opposition of the h-bomb and future use of nuclear weapons. It wasn't *just* him losing his clearance. It was the targeting and silencing of a brilliant mind and highly influential individual so he could no longer have as much of an impact on the nuclear weapons conversation.
This entire portion of the film I felt emphasized Oppenheimers horror and guilt of his participation in developing the A-bomb. How he was so outspoken about not making the same mistake again that he was politically targeted, smeared, and silenced. Honestly, any direct portrayal of the bombings itself would have probably felt super cheap and been criticized as horror porn.
The bigger picture is: why was Lewis Strauss and the US taking away his security clearance? And why in 1954 (9 years after dropping the bombs and 12 years after making him director of a top secret weapons lab)?
And the answer to that is because he very extensively pondered the morality of nuclear weapons and what the future would look like. All of the biographies about him cover this. He wanted more openness between countries to prevent an arms race and to prevent those weapons from ever being used again. The US at the time did not agree with that position and took his security clearance away (using McCarthyism) as a way to take his away his voice and power since he was still a valuable consultant and voice regarding decisions on atomic energy and the bomb. I mean he was the chairman of the general advisory committee of the atomic energy commission starting in 1947..
Yeah the only horror missing from the film to my eyes was the horror that the natives living in Los Alamos faced when the US armed forces took their land, forever
Totally fair, though IMO it would have been out of scope for the movie, since it doesn’t have much to do with Oppenheimer. Something like that should be its own (very interesting) movie or documentary.
"...suggested in an online discussion with Nolan that the time may be right for an account of the bombings from a Japanese perspective.
To enthusiastic agreement from Nolan, he said: 'I feel there needs to [be] an answer from Japan to Oppenheimer. Someday, I would like to make that movie.'"
Oh my gods let this happen. Take all my money.
Which hypocrisy are you talking about exactly?
Takashi Hiraoka famously criticized the practice of some Japanese politicians who honor WW2 war criminals at Yasukuni-jinja. He is a loud voice in the movement to abolish nuclear arms worldwide. As an ex-mayor of Hiroshima, he sees it as his duty to inform the world about the horrors of nuclear weapons.
All he said was that he had hoped the movie would put more emphasis on the horrors of nuclear weapons.
Similarly Masao Tomonaga, a survivor of the atomic bombing in Nagasaki went into the movie hoping for an anti-nuclear weapon message and the depiction of Oppenheimers shock and personal distress was enough to bring that point home. All of the other people quoted in the article have a history of anti-war or anti-nuclear weapon activism and their messages are primarily that the world should abolish nuclear weapons.
So what exactly is the hypocrisy?
I think it's valid, people are pointing out that the Japanese saying why did you not show the horrors of what happened but the Japanese don't show the horrors of what happened as well.
It was the biggest terrorist attack on human history, yeah I understand that the japanese don't exactly care about a drama on the lives of the people that did it
what·a·bout·ism
/ˌ(h)wədəˈboudizəm/
nounBritish
noun: whataboutism
the technique or practice of responding to an accusation or difficult question by making a counteraccusation or raising a different issue.
lie
/laɪ/
*noun*
a statement made by somebody knowing that it is not true
You said, it was the biggest attack in history, denying the murder of 20 million chinese victims, the holocaust in europe or that the firebombings cost more lives than the nukes. Maybe learn what whataboutism actually is before crying about it.
I stopped watching Hollywood about a decade ago, around when they made that film about some American who they said won the war for the mujahideen against Russia. I'd be shocked if a film made by Americans could capture the real horror of nuking Japan.
I agree, the lack of portrayal of what the bomb actually does to people was a flaw. I was disappointed at the time. I also thought the effects of the bomb itself sucked, they could have done way better.
Japanese citizens saying ANYTHING about ww2 and how much they suffered, while ignoring the 2 million dead chinese civilians they left is somewhat rich. Plus, imho, nuking someone is at least a lil more humane than bayonetting babies and raping their corpses.
In the article, one of Hiroshima's residents pointed out how the existence of such a thing is a threat to the whole world, not just japan. Hence, it is not about Japan. It is about the destruction it can cause. Someone that lives in Hiroshima is able to visit the museum, memorials, and buildings that were left there as memorials that document the event. They are able to see the destricton in that way and they were also able to see the destruction by knowing the people who survived it. The long-lasting effects it had on people even after numerous years have passed exist. A lot of radiation sickness.
I think it is also very unlikely that this person who said that in particular did any of the crimes mentioned becuse they were 3 years old then, i think it is also very unlikely that that person in particular would support such things. He didnt ignore any of the crimes that Japan did to other nations, the article was about Oppenheimer and nuclear destruction and they provided a comment on it. “It’s important to show the full story, including the victims, if we are going to have a future without nuclear weapons.” The person didnt talk about suffering in that comment, they talked about the importance of showing the destruction it can cause so the world would avoid using it.
> Japanese citizens saying ANYTHING about ww2 and how much they suffered, while ignoring the 2 million dead chinese civilians they left is somewhat rich.
no its not. We're talking about the horror of the bomb, the film is about the guy who made the bomb.
I don't see how it's weird to hear that a country that got nuked twice have mixed feelings about this movie, nor that how their society is more immoral that others.
it’s not hard and shouldn’t be hard to say nuking japan had horrific consequences and while the nukes “hit” military targets the collateral and fall out was horrendous.
japan was awful and at the time maybe nuking japan was the right move but now 80 years later we should really be able accept that the nukes were horrific even if japan was also horrific. there’s not always a happy ending and the US isn’t always the good guy
We can debate the horrors of both countries’ atrocities forever but that is not what the movie is about. The movie is about Oppenheimer, hence the damned title. He never witnessed the horror. He only imagined it. The movie is about his conflicts: between communism and capitalism, ending the war and slaughtering people; the desire to explore the limits of atomic physics while preventing nuclear proliferation; his marriage and his affairs; and so on.
If people bought a ticket to see another war movie, they should have read the reviews first.
First free
Pakistan occupied Kashmir
Pakistani girls occupied Balochistan
Pakistan occupied afganistan
China occupied Kashmir
China occupied Tibet
China occupied Mongolia
China occupied islands
Nah, not really. There are many movies, docs, novels, essays, and poems on the consequences of dropping the bomb on Japan that depict the awful aftermath. Japan, on the other hand, consistently tries to sweep their actions during the war under the rug and pretend they didn’t happen.
Except the point of Oppenheimer isn't about developing a weapon to save China from Japanese oppression.
Literally the whole point of the film is in the last scene where we learn what Oppenheimer said to Einstein.
This entire post/article is about how we treat history and some Japanese sensitivities to portrayals of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I'd say that pointing toward Japan's own policies regarding the teaching of subjects surrounding WWII are absolutely fair game in that context.
The entire post? Nothing to do with the movie Oppenheimer which had a very specific, focused plot?
Huh, you're right, I was wondering why the way Japan teaches about their own atrocities in WWII in a movie set in the United States during WWII and during the Red Scare also in the United States.
Every 9/11 documentary should have a large part about US intervention in the Middle East. Since Americans like to pretend that their actions shouldn’t have consequences.
Many do, lol. Also the US general public Id say is pretty well aware of the consequences of drone strikes, occupation, and destabilization in the Middle East, hence why none of us are leery to go back into the region with force.
Nice try, though.
Yes, I'd say they aren't broadly aren't as aware of the consequences their actions had on others. There are certainly some paralleles between american and Japanese nationalists with regard to trying to erase or ignore the past. However, unlike in Japan, there has been extensive coverage of American transgressions both domestically and internationally. That is not the case in Japan.
Could also be because the US is still in the Middle East and it’s much more recent compared to Japans war crimes 80 years and 99.9% of those who committed those war crimes are dead.
That doesn't hold much weight when this entire argument is about how some in Japan think Oppenheimer didn't focus enough on Japanese suffering in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
It really *is* hard for you to following along, isn't it?
How are you gonna support Japan and listen to the Deprogram. Your waifu isn’t gonna come to life because you play devil’s advocate to a messed up society dude
There is plenty of media regarding the awful things that happened in the middle east made by western media. Just watch "Generation Kill" on the invasion of Afghanistan and you'll see the US military is not painted in a positive light.
So... are the Japanese releasing global blockbusters portraying their actions while completely overlooking their victim's perspective? Are these movies in the room with us right now? If that was a thing, it wouldn't be so different from an actual American movie actually doing that exact thing you just made up.
Taiwan, an ex-Japanese colony, has some of the most positive views of Japan in the world.
It’s really just Korea and China. Some in South and Southeast Asia even see the Japanese as liberators, and worship those that fought alongside them.
Subhas Bose and the INA being hailed as heroes fighting against the evil British Empire is a great example.
Japan was absolutely barbaric in Korea and China, don't pretend it's only political. I think it's extremely insulting to victims of Japanese atrocities to brand their dislike as purely political.
Japan liked to brand themselves as liberators when their plan was to make an empire of their own. The same way that the Soviet did during WW2 when they installed puppet government obeying Moscow. It's only propaganda, their sole motive was imperialism.
> Nanking (Chinese: 南京) is a 2007 documentary film about the Nanjing Massacre, committed in 1937 by the Japanese army in the former capital city Nanjing, China.
You mean this one?
Or the Philippines. How do you even make a movie about:
> The Bayview Hotel was used as a designated "rape center".[6] According to testimony at the Yamashita war crimes trial, 400 women and girls were rounded up from Manila's wealthy Ermita district, and submitted to a selection board that picked out the 25 women who were considered most beautiful. These women and girls, many of them 12 to 14 years old, were then taken to the hotel, where Japanese enlisted men and officers took turns raping them.[7]
>Despite many allied Germans holding refuge in a German club, Japanese soldiers entered in and bayoneted infants and children of mothers pleading for mercy and raped women seeking refuge. At least 20 Japanese soldiers raped a young girl before slicing her breasts off after which a Japanese soldier placed her mutilated breasts on his chest to mimic a woman while the other Japanese soldiers laughed. The Japanese then doused the young girl and two other women who were raped to death in gasoline and set them all on fire.[8]
>The Japanese went on setting the entire club on fire killing many of its inhabitants. Women who were escaping out the building from the fire were caught and raped by the Japanese. 28-year-old Julia Lopez had her breasts sliced off, was raped by Japanese soldiers and had her hair set on fire. Another woman was partially decapitated after attempting to defend herself and raped by a Japanese soldier.[9]
Ight just gonna say it.
Japan deserved it.
Rape of Nanking.
*rape*
like, as in forcing sex on someone
it wasn’t just that they destroyed the city
they so thoroughly wanted to humiliate and dominate its populace. They raped so much the only verb to describe the whole event was “rape”
like that in and of itself showed how absolutely horrific the Japanese Empire was.
Get into unit 731, the many war crimes the japanese committed, the various death marches, beheadings, torture, and so much else-
and like I can’t ever think that those two bombs were any kind of mistake for finally just ending the fucking violence.
Especially when you get into the japanese plans to defend the islands from invasion… The glorious deaths of 100,000 iirc
This thread should just be an exhibit of the fucking mental gymnastics American redditors do to justify their bullshit.
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What generations of brainwashing does to a mf.
Some of these comments are literally psychotic.
I understand the sentiment of people from Japan, especially from Hiroshima or something like, that the film could've shown more of the horrors of the bombings. I get it, and I respect that opinion.
However, I think that disregards the point of the film. The movie is called "Oppenheimer," not "The Manhattan Project," or something like that. It is a film about the life of Oppenheimer, adapted from a book about the life of Oppenheimer. It's told from his perspective, delving into his psyche and his thought process. To do something like that effectively, sacrifices have to be made, and I'd argue it's actually better to have not shown the horror of the bombings because that adds to the harsh reality of things; not everyone cared, or at least truly realized, exactly how devastating those bombings were at the time. This was a time of war and there were so many differing opinions on how it should be one, so many political voices going back and forth, it only makes sense that you couldn't get the full picture in a movie talking about one man.
I think the film did exactly what it needed to do, while still managing to show that the bombs were not some incredible achievement that should be celebrated (Oppenheimer literally has a whole panic attack for like, the last 30 minutes of the film bc he can't handle the consequences of his actions).
oh hold on guys, hold on!
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Reddit post with japan in the title! Que up your "rape of nanking, worse than the nazis!!!!" comment's, single file now, there's enough for everyone!!!
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Woah! hey! we aren't even ready for the "AMERICA JUSTIFIED" comments yet, no pushing!!!
The horror comes after the bomb with Oppenheimers realization, but he doesn’t witness the horror first hand, it’s only in his imagination, which is why that’s what we get as an audience.
yea the film clearly very intentionally doesn’t show the attack itself
it’s purposefully a distant unseen event to convey the perspective of those who made the bomb
Yeah there’s also context that’s difficult for modern audiences to understand. WW2 was something that affected every member of American society. When you have the collective sons, nephews, brothers, fathers of America fighting overseas to heavy casualties, the idea of being able to end the war and bring those people home is hugely exciting.
The long term effects and how this would affect your “enemy” was, right or wrong, a secondary consideration.
Maybe a hot take, but personally I don’t think people today in a similar situation would make a different decision. Morality can get a bit fuzzy when it’s your own friends/families lives on the line.
I said the same exact thing in the US.
IDGAF what scientist banged which scientists wife. They made a movie about the bomb like it was a new fucking wonka candy.
I knew an old man, immigrant from Japan. He had about 50 large framed pictures everywhere in his house, with the destruction and painted interpretations from the nukes dropped on his country. You wouldn't enter his house without being pulled inside his pain. Very vivid and livid.
Ah yes, the country that doesn't educate their population about the 20,000,000 Chinese people they killed during the second sino-japanese war and denies the atrocities they committed is mad that a biopic about the man who made the nuclear bomb doesn't focus on them being victims is upset. Shocking.
They started the war with the US in the first place, and the nuclear bombings literally saved millions of soldiers on both sides and their own civilians from death and misery. They can't play the victim card when for decades they didn't even ACKNOWLEDGE the horrifying shit they did to Chinese civilians and to other nations like Korea. The US dropped 2 bombs to stop a ground war that would have killed exponentially more people. This isn't what about ism, it's calling out Japan's hypocrisy considering there were people in charge in Japan what would have seen them fight to the last man for "honor" even if it meant many more of their own people dying for it.
Victims of retaliation after they launch unprovoked attack first on the nations, definition of "fuck around and find out".
lol, lmao even. There is a reason East and South East Asia hates Japanese to this day. They never even apologized or acknowledged their atrocities against China, Korea, Philippines and other SEA countries.
Haven't seen Oppenheimer, but Barefoot Gen did a great job showcasing the horrible effects of the nuclear bomb. If it included the bomb but not scenes like this, I feel they missed a great opportunity.
[https://youtu.be/98WhGgEjhHg?si=TlSI1pLdCX6GVFhl](https://youtu.be/98WhGgEjhHg?si=TlSI1pLdCX6GVFhl)
Every time I see this clip posted here on Reddit, many commenters keep saying it was justified, necessary and saved a lot of lives or whataboutism (like they are in this post). It's amazing how people can watch it and still think nuking was *okay*.
Oppenheimer is a good movie, but it only shows everyone hearing about the bomb dropped. There's a scene where Oppie sort of imagines how people might have been killed but they never show anything related to Japan. I can understand where Nolan is coming from; it is a biopic after all, but I don't blame the Japanese for wanting to show a little bit about the people who suffered because of his actions.
I think an Oppenheimer-Barefoot Gen double feature would be an interesting (and harrowing) experience.
My wife and her family is from Nagasaki, and they all liked the film. As an American myself, there is a lot to talk about with regard to the bombings but for Japan it often becomes the focus point of the entire entanglement and the idea that there was “not enough about the atrocity” is sort of saying that this movie does not approach the bomb the way that Japan prefers to talk about it, then about what the actually content of the movie was.
I remember a conversation with my wife where I was explaining to her that Japan did not lose the most people during WW2 and that they weren’t even in the top 5. But another part that’s not very clearly conveyed here is how much the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki influenced the conversation around the atomic bomb during the Cold War, and I think Oppenheimer does a good job at addressing that part.
I wondered how this would play in Japan because the movie doesn’t focus on the carnage as much but it also doesn’t focus on the build up. Like in America we know why we dropped the bombs and what we thought about the war and what the Japanese had been doing, that they were allied with hitler, etc. But in Japan, they are not taught about it like we are. Many Japanese do not know the extent of the crazy shit. I asked my friends when I lived in Japan, and like 3/5 of them didn’t know who hitler was. My girlfriend at the time just said “Japan was crazy then.” They simply don’t learn about the war like we do, and I think they see the bomb as something totally out of left field and horrible (which it was, but it didn’t happen in a vacuum). They definitely don’t learn about the atrocities and shit like we do.
Yes you are absolutely right. They basically deny their war crimes to this day. They certainly don't teach their children anything about the Pacific war or the sino war except that it happened.
Not true. [Most Japanese textbooks talk about Japanese war crimes, and the ones that don’t have been shunned by nearly every school district.](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_history_textbook_controversies). I’d argue that the amount they are being taught is not enough, but to say that Japanese children are not being taught this at all is false.
As for the denialists, they are a loud minority in Japan, and there are just as many Japanese people who are vocal about making sure that Japan’s military crimes are not forgotten. As for the government, they have acknowledged and apologized numerous times for their past actions (although their sincerity is dubious considering how many prime ministers and politicians from the LDP continue to visit the Yasukini Shrine).
The issue is less about denialism and more that many Japanese people don’t talk about it in the same way countries like Germany do. Many Japanese are either oblivious (having forgotten it from school) or apathetic (it was a long time ago). While this is shameful, it’s hardly unique to Japan. Many British nationalists have a rosy view of their former empire, despite centuries of [atrocities](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/worst-atrocities-british-empire-amritsar-boer-war-concentration-camp-mau-mau-a6821756.html).
Im not trying to make a whataboutism and argue that Japan shouldn’t do more to reconcile with their past horrors. It’s shameful that the Japanese government and many civilians continue to underplay their past. However, this is hardly unique to Japan, and with the exception of countries like Germany, nearly every country is guilty of this in some way
i’m not gonna play the whataboutism card but reading the critical response from the japaneses, they either don’t know oppenheimer or their media misinformed them on what this film is about.
There were critics in the US that said the same thing.
The movie was from his point of view. It was incredibly clear he knew what happened. But he wouldn’t have seen any of it firsthand. And based on his personality in the movie I’m not sure how much he would’ve cared.
Clearly, but it’s pretty easy to interpret what’s happening in the film even if you don’t know Oppenheimer. It spends 3 hours spelling it out for you in a fairly on the nose fashion
That's an entirely valid perspective. But the thin-skin of (some) westerners will use this to take shots at japanese society.
Like, bro, obviously people in japan will not receive the movie on the same way.
Those shots are well deserved. Japan to this day refuses to acknowledge the extent and utter depravity of the atrocities they committed in world war 2. Japan murdered tens of millions of civilians in world war 2. They were exceptionally brutal and depraved. They went through China raping, murdering, butchering, bayoneting babies, burying people alive, burning people alive, and destroying everyone around them. And they want to make themselves out to be victims in a war they fucking started? Fuck that. Japan deserves zero sympathy for the atomic bombings.
I'm talking about japanese perspective. A scientist moping doesn't cover the things people that grew up in japan are hyper-aware of in regards to the bombs.
And again, it's okay. People from different places consume media differently. People in japan were not the target audience here, but then they also get to give feedback without incurring some knee-jerk protectiveness. It's not an universally appealing movie, that's not a big deal.
I'm talking about japanese perspective. A scientist moping doesn't cover the things people that grew up in japan are hyper-aware of in regards to the bombs.
And again, it's okay. People from different places consume media differently.
I don't think the atomic bombs changed the face of their society at all. It was the war in general that changed it. There were more damaging bombing runs than the atomic ones being made all the time.
Yes, the point of the film wasn't the horror of the atomic bombs (although it *is* present) it was Oppenheimer himself.
Now, having said that, that doesn't make Japanese people wrong for feeling weird about how the movie doesn't focus on that. The actual survivors in particular, are watching a movie about a man who is partially responsible for the deaths of friends and family, and seeing it focus on him rather than them. That's completely fine since (again) that was the point of the movie, but would it not be really goddamn weird if that *wasn't* awkward for them?? If anything, I'm surprised at how receptive some of them were to the movie, especially the one survivor who actually felt sympathy for Oppenheimer - I suppose it's so long ago that any wounds have long since scarred but it's still amazing to me.
In short, their criticisms are, frankly, wrong. But that doesn't make their *reactions* wrong. Oppenheimer is fine the way it is. Japanese people are touchy about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. End of story. Chill the fuck out.
I feel like I’m the only one that hates this film lmao. The pacing was horrible for me. My wife agreed. Though not sure if she was just agreeing with me though.
I think this narrative that many war films needs to have that shot or two of the result of such action, ala the atomic bomb, in order to drive the purpose that "war is bad" should really go away.
Yes, the atomic bomb really changed the perspective of how deadly a conflict can be on a human, nation, and global scale. But Oppenheimer wasn't necessarily about the fact that the US had to use the atomic bomb, it was the lead up to the use from the perspective of a scientist, who was merely leading the Manhattan Project.
It showed how propaganda, morality, this desire for an everlasting legacy, all of these things can contribute towards committing to an action or a project that actually perplexes the character's true morals versus what lies in front of them in their eyes.
This is meant to create a discussion about how wartime creates this allusion for people in research & development, so much so that weapons of mass destruction end up being used for the "greater good of their nation".
What about the horrors the Japanese forces imposed on the people in the countries they occupied and to Allied POW's? They have expressed "regrets" but never actually apologized.
This is an interesting take considering that a Japanese film, The Wind Rises, is also a story of a WW2 era figure that pioneered a technology which ended up creating mass devastation that went beyond their initial intentions.
And that film also doesn’t show any of the actual devastation caused by the technology.
Seems like a fair reaction from the country that got nuked. I mean it was such a massive cataclysmic event for them that the horror of it has permeated through their culture ever since.
obviously it was horrific how they were nuked twice, it’s also horrific what they did during the war and equally unsettling how they don’t teach these things in Japanese schools
First off, the movie was less about the bomb itself and more about how Oppenheimer did it/felt about it. The actual devastation and the aftermath of the bomb is not the main focus. It’s a movie about Oppenheimer the man first and foremost.
Second off, the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were justified given the circumstances. Cry about it all you want, but it effectively ended the war and prevented millions of civilian and military deaths. Was it horrifying? Absolutely. So is war.
This film was from Oppenheimer’s perspective. It was all about him really. It’s that simple and I’m glad a couple of the people quoted understood that and didn’t expect to see a ultraviolet depiction of Japanese civilians dying by a mountain of fire
I found the movie pretty boring and pretentious. I don’t think RDJ is that great an actor either. But they literally don’t even teach Japanese students about nazis..So they don’t really get an opinion on what atrocity gets represented or not.
This was a movie about Oppenheimer. This is not a movie about the bomb going off. This was not a movie about the bombings in Japan or the Japanese people. People keep struggling to understand that.
I agree in a way admittedly. But that wasn’t the point of the movie. I guess, maybe to a degree it was. I think the podcast by hardcore history should be required listening for everyone. He describes in details ac points he found of the bombings.
Go listen. It’s horrible. But that alone couldn’t be translated across the screen with any ease while sustaining a run time less than 4-6 hours
I could never really get into Oppenheimer bc like everyone around me kept saying he was so conflicted on it and its like dude built a bomb and then was seemingly surprised the bomb was used to bomb ppl?
Imagine having your worse nightmare living and walking next to you like nothing happened. Japanese lost their way. Why do they even call themselves Japanese?
Also, the conventional fire bombing of Japanese cities had more casualties in total, and a conventional land invasion had so many projected casualties that the US is STILL giving out the purple hearts that were made in preparation of that offensive.
This is 100% correct. The invasion was going to have a ridiculous amount of casualties. Before someone comes out of the woodwork with the really low estimates that were put out more recently they've basically been debunked. The higher end estimates are far more widely accepted and evidenced.
[General Marshall himself in 1945 disccussing casualty predictions for Olympia/Downfall](https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/research-files/minutes-meeting-held-white-house?documentid=NA&pagenumber=3), along with further debate regarding the Japanese capitulation.
Love Japan, but its so tiring to see Japan always play the victim when it comes to WW2. German atrocities to Jews is very well known, but the war crimes Japan committed during WW2 is far worse and it isnt taught.
They always spin every WW2 story around to make Japan the victim like they are doing with this movie. They completely missed the point of the entire film.
Nobody put a gun to America’s head and forced them to use it. Whether it was a necessary measure or not is up to history. Some say it wasn’t because the fire bombings had caused enough damage. Some say it was because the war would’ve been dragged out for far too long and the Japanese were unlikely to surrender. Then there’s the endless debate on what it meant to use civilians for the cause.
Yes that’s the common argument I’ve heard. But as you can see in this thread, people point to the firebombings. Some believe the Japanese would’ve surrendered eventually. But look at Japanese culture at the time and their belief of surrender we don’t know.
The Japanese very clearly started the war. Then they fought bitterly for every scrap of land the allies took back from them. They obstinately refused to surrender, down to individuals.
Look at that situation from the perspective of the politicians and generals in America. How many telegrams must be sent to inform wives and mothers that their men and boys aren’t coming home? From a war that none of them wanted. A war they only wish would end.
But the Japanese won’t let it end.
How many incinerated Japanese civilians is one telegram not sent worth?
I totally understand why they did it. Why they’d do anything to just make it stop.
You can understand then. I’m not passing any moral judgements. Nuclear technology was new at the time. Just explaining that Americans weren’t forced and did what they felt was necessary. From what happened no matter how many wives and mothers around the world lose their men in wars no country will use it again.
The movie wasn’t about the horror. We already have that movie, several times over.
This was about the humanity and moral conflict within the people that made the horror possible.
Hence the title. It was about that guy.
I wonder how it must feel to be attached to your own nation in a way that you view what happened to it in the past as if it happened to you.
I've never felt that attachment. I've seen films about tragic events in my countries history. And the fact that they were about my country had zero effect. The past is a foreign country. But honestly even if it wasn't the past, I just don't feel that national connection.
I don't think people are weird for it. I'm obviously the odd one out here. But I can't imagine what it would be like.
That’s surface-level thinking, which I guess is par for the course coming from a politician.
The depictions of the mental state, the struggles and the maneuvers of the military painted for me an appropriately dark picture of human nature: “Look at what humans do to each other in the name of winning and glory.”
But yeah, I guess Japan wasn’t specifically painted as the victim. C’est la vie.
How about we talk about the Sino Japanese war then too? Japan likes pretend to be an innocent victim but they spent 10 years butchering and torturing millions of civilians.
I feel like it is ok for the Japanese to have this perspective. They were the ones bombed, it shouldn't be hard to believe that art takes a backseat for sentiment here.
We, as neutrals, can also say that the bomb not being shown is because the film is about Oppenheimer, not Hiroshima and Nagasaki themselves, and that showing a handful of shots might've trivialised it, as if few seconds are enough to capture the horror.
This is exactly how I felt when I left; it felt like they were going in that direction for a little or wanted to a bit but then pulled back, and it would have been the perfect movie to look at individual equity and its context zone with community equity.
Idk what you guys are on about. The movie was about the nuclear bomb and the Japanese audience simply were disappointed in how that aspect was displayed. Imo this movie is so damn average that I completely understand where they are coming from.
Interesting guardian article.
Meanwhile over Reuters, the responses from some Japanese viewers:
> “Of course this is an amazing film which deserves to win the Academy Awards," said Hiroshima resident Kawai, 37, who gave only his family name.
"But the film also depicts the atomic bomb in a way that seems to praise it, and, as a person with roots in Hiroshima, I found it difficult to watch."
> A big fan of Nolan's films, Kawai, a public servant, went to see "Oppenheimer" on opening day at a theatre that is just a kilometre from the city's Atomic Bomb Dome.
"I'm not sure this is a movie that Japanese people should make a special effort to watch," he added.
> Another Hiroshima resident, Agemi Kanegae, had mixed feelings upon finally watching the movie.
"The film was very worth watching," said the retired 65-year-old. "But I felt very uncomfortable with a few scenes, such as the trial of Oppenheimer in the United States at the end."
> Speaking to Reuters before the movie opened, atomic bomb survivor Teruko Yahata said she was eager to see it, in hopes that it would re-invigorate the debate over nuclear weapons.
Yahata, now 86, said she felt some empathy for the physicist behind the bomb. That sentiment was echoed by Rishu Kanemoto, a 19-year-old student, who saw the film on Friday.
"Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the atomic bombs were dropped, are certainly the victims," Kanemoto said.
"But I think even though the inventor is one of the perpetrators, he's also the victim caught up in the war," he added, referring to the ill-starred physicist.hata, now 86, said she felt some empathy for the physicist behind the bomb. That sentiment was echoed by Rishu Kanemoto, a 19-year-old student, who saw the film on Friday. "Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where the atomic bombs were dropped, are certainly the victims," Kanemoto said. "But I think even though the inventor is one of the perpetrators, he's also the victim caught up in the war," he added, referring to the ill-starred physicist.
https://www.reuters.com/lifestyle/japan-finally-screens-oppenheimer-with-trigger-warnings-unease-hiroshima-2024-03-29/
The depiction of the horrors of atomic weapons is more similar to horror movies where you never see the monster. It concentrates on the reactions from the actors and actresses which is arguably scarier than just seeing the bad thing.
Wasnt the movie about Oppenheimer? I think it was quite intentional that they did not show any of that as Oppenheimer personally did not see any of the horrors. You see it all from his perspective. This complaint does not make sense.
Hard agree. Oppenheimer was great and even if I understand why the emphasis was on the launch on Trinity, it would have been harrowing to see the devastation, in all its horror. Couldn't show the actual detonations with the same buildup, as the effect was so succesful, it would have been failed a second and third time, but the movie really needed a few clear shots in that great sequence, where Oppenheimer freaks out and hallucinates crushing a burnt cadaver.
I think the world could use a stark reminder of the cost of nuclear weapons, when we're seemingly on the verge of WWIII because of Putin and Xi's outdated notions of conquest.
Kids, women, men, elderly, pets, buildings, trees, all atomized in painful detail in IMAX. Fuck subtletly, people always need reminders, and I find that the lessons of history are never more clear than when they're detailing precisely the horrors that happened and risk to happen again if we're not wiser.
Making a movie about the first nuclear bombs without showing a single Japanese casualties was a mistake imo. The aftermath should have been the one moment where the focus leaves the architect so that we could witness his design.
I don't think there was ever a world where Japan was happy with how a movie like that came out.
Not discrediting their criticism, I just don't think a single movie could ever fully realize the magnitude of that event and the effects it had on Japan, its people, and their culture.
> I don't think there was ever a world where Japan was happy with how a movie like that came out.
I reckon if you do something around [the aftermath](https://c1.staticflickr.com/1/65/178584719_518f34af37_z.jpg?zz=1) you can get them onside.
I don't think I've yet seen a film attempt to do show this graphic horror. But I guess the "good" news is that in the age of information that when the next nuke flies we'll get accurate footage so won't need the film.
The movie is about Oppenheimer, not the nuke. Albeit the nuke is what made him relevant, the story was a dive into Oppenheimers perspective, not the bombs or japans. To tell the horrible story of what happened on that day, I feel it is only appropriate a Japanese studio/director brings that picture to the world.
Do they want to see a movie about the Rape of Nanking, Unit 731, various Death Marches, Comfort Women aid stations, surprise attacks on peaceful nations, kamikaze units...*and* two atomic bombings?
It was an American movie for a western audience. We can leave the apologia for an attack against a fanatical, cruel enemy to the Japanese.
I'm surprised they haven't made a movie about the Japanese internment camps starring Tom Hanks as the Camp Commander who wins over the disgruntled prisoners and teaches them the true meaning of American patriotism and self sacrifice.
Plenty of people in the US have asked why this aspect of horror is missing too, and you can't blame them for the actions of a few higher ups that most of the population had no control over. It's really part of the same issue with many American biopics, they tend to ignore the people, often minorities, that were being put down and suffering for their success. The bob marley biopic did this quite well
Seriously I've checked the post histories of the first three people whose reaction to a story about the survivors who were children in Hiroshima, with a bunch of "they deserved it for Unit 731", and it's 100% people who are in other threads justifying Israel's current land theft and massacre of civilians.
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> # [‘There wasn’t enough about the horror’: Oppenheimer finally opens in Japan to mixed reviews](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/mar/29/720)
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> It is hard to think of a more emotionally charged venue than Hatchoza for the first screening in Japan of the Academy Award-winning film [Oppenheimer](https://www.theguardian.com/film/oppenheimer). The cinema in Hiroshima is located less than a kilometre from the hypocentre of the first atomic bombing in history – the devastating culmination of the American physicist’s work.
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> The film finally premiered in Japan on Friday, more than eight months after it opened in the US, to reviews that ranged from praise for its portrayal of J Robert Oppenheimer – the “father of the atomic bomb” – to criticism that it omitted to show the human misery it caused in [Hiroshima](https://www.theguardian.com/cities/2016/apr/18/story-of-cities-hiroshima-japan-nuclear-destruction) and, days later, Nagasaki, in the final days of the Pacific war.
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> Instead, the film details a haunted Oppenheimer’s struggle to justify [Harry Truman’](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2020/aug/04/harry-truman-grandson-hiroshima-nuclear-atom-bomb)s decision to use the bomb and, in the then president’s eyes, bring to an end an increasingly costly war against an enemy determined to fight to the death.
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> “There could have been much more description and depiction of the horror of atomic weapons,” said Takashi Hiraoka, the 96-year-old former mayor of Hiroshima, who attended a special screening earlier this month. “From Hiroshima’s standpoint, there wasn’t enough about the horror of nuclear weapons, but I would encourage people to go and see it.”
>
> Audiences in Japan were forced to wait to see Nolan’s hit biopic, which secured seven Oscars last month, after criticism last year that it had been marketed in a way that [trivialised the tragedy](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/aug/01/not-big-in-japan-country-rejects-co-marketing-of-barbie-and-oppenheimer-as-trivialising-nuclear-war). Viral “Barbenheimer” memes sparked an online backlash in Japan, forcing its local distributor, Warner Bros Japan, to apologise.
>
> [Takashi Hiraoka, a former mayor of Hiroshima](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/32b424fb0f27980294cf0eae2ba7a1b530f31fe3/0_395_4032_2419/master/4032.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none)
>
> Takashi Hiraoka: ‘There wasn’t enough about the horror of nuclear weapons.’ Photograph: Justin McCurry/The GuardianMany _hibakusha_, or survivors of the atomic bombings, had hoped the film would at least acknowledge the misery unleashed by the Enola Gay, a US B-29 bomber, after it dropped a 15-kiloton nuclear bomb on Hiroshima on the morning of 6 August 1945. The blast killed between 60,000 and 80,000 people instantly, with the death toll rising to 140,000 by the end of the year. Three days later, the Americans dropped a plutonium bomb on Nagasaki, killing 74,000.
>
> Prof Masao Tomonaga, an A-bomb survivor and honorary director of the Japanese Red Cross Nagasaki Atomic Bomb hospital, said he had come away believing Oppenheimer was an “anti-nuclear” film.
>
> “I had thought the film’s lack of images of atomic bomb survivors was a weakness. But in fact, Oppenheimer’s lines in dozens of scenes showed his shock at the reality of the atomic bombing. That was enough for me.”
>
> Tomonaga, 80, who spent his professional life studying the health effects of exposure to radiation from the atomic bombings, added: “The _hibakusha_ are all very old, so this is a film for young people … it’s now up to future generations to decide how to rid the world of nuclear weapons.”
>
> [Toshiyuki Mimaki](https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/oct/30/hiroshima-survivors-plead-for-nuclear-free-world-as-global-tensions-rise), a co-chair of Hidankyo, a confederation of A-bomb survivor groups, who was three years old when the bomb destroyed his home town, was among the audience in Hiroshima on Friday.
>
> “I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did,” said Mimaki, 82. “It’s important to show the full story, including the victims, if we are going to have a future without nuclear weapons.”
>
> [Toshiyuki Mimaki, co-chair of Hidankyo, a confederation of A-bomb survivor groups](https://i.guim.co.uk/img/media/4e7f05e13ff875b5d8ba16db6de6cbab5c508498/0_443_4032_2419/master/4032.jpg?width=445&dpr=1&s=none)
>
> Toshiyuki Mimaki: ‘I was waiting for the Hiroshima bombing scene to appear, but it never did.’ Photograph: Justin McCurry/The GuardianThere was praise, though, for Nolan and Cillian Murphy, who [won the best actor Oscar](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2024/mar/11/cillian-murphy-best-actor-oscar) his portrayal as Oppenheimer, whose moral crisis over his role in developing a weapon that was used on civilian populations loomed large in the film’s climax.
>
> “I’m a fan of Christopher Nolan, so that gave me another reason, along with the venue, to come and see it as soon as it came out,” said Mei Kawashima, a young Hiroshima resident. “When Hiroshima was mentioned in the film, it triggered something in me.
>
> “This was really a film about Oppenheimer the man, and the way he wrestled with his conscience, so in that sense, I think it was right not to broaden it out too much to show the aftermath.”
>
> Shogo Tachiyama, a university student, said he had known very little about the man whose work would result in the destruction of the city where he was born six decades later. “We learned about the bombing and its aftermath at primary school, but I knew nothing about Oppenheimer,” he said.
>
> “I learned a lot from the film, and it’s made me think again about what I and other young people can do … starting from the insistence that nuclear weapons should never be used again.”
>
> This may not be the end of the Oppenheimer story, at least on the big screen. Takashi Yamazaki, the director of the Oscar-winning [Godzilla Minus One](https://www.theguardian.com/film/2023/dec/13/godzilla-minus-one-review-rageful-monster-is-one-of-the-best-in-the-series) – another film with a strong nuclear theme – suggested in an online discussion with Nolan that the time may be right for an account of the bombings from a Japanese perspective.
>
> To enthusiastic agreement from Nolan, he said: “I feel there needs to [be] an answer from Japan to Oppenheimer. Someday, I would like to make that movie.”
- - - - - -
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Hi empleadoEstatalBot,
We've found **49 sources** (so far) that are covering this story including:
- The Guardian (Leans Left): "‘There wasn’t enough about the horror’: Oppenheimer finally opens in Japan to mixed reviews"
- KIFI (Center): "'Oppenheimer' finally premieres in Japan to mixed reactions and high emotions"
- The Star Kuala Lumpur (Right): "Japan finally screens 'Oppenheimer', with trigger warnings, unease in Hiroshima"
Of all the sources reporting on this story, **17% are right-leaning**, **36% are left-leaning**, and **47% are in the center**. Read the full **[coverage analysis](https://ground.news/article/oppenheimer-finally-premieres-in-japan-to-mixed-reactions-and-high-emotions_c3aa61?utm_source=redditReplyBot&utm_medium=redditReplyBot)** and compare how 49+ sources from across the political spectrum are covering this story.
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