Why Hiroshima and Nagasaki Were Necessary

I've just come across this long but extremely informative post on the subject by a guy who knows his history a lot better than most. The sheer extent of the disconnect between the leadership of Imperial Japan and the reality facing its forces in the field is almost unbelievable: these were men living in a fantasy world so unreal it made Hitler's bunker ramblings at the close of the war look like hard-headed thinking, and the odds they'd ever have surrendered of their own volition was clearly zero, a fact of which the United States was well aware thanks to the MAGIC intercepts. Indeed, even after Hiroshima and Nagasaki had been bombed and the Emperor had finally exercised the prerogative he'd always held (but hitherto hadn't bothered to use) to force unconditional surrender, General Korechika Anami - who even at this dismal stage still believed in the possibility of a Japanese victory! - tried once more to use a procedural trick to render the surrender null and void, and failing that, began flagrantly consorting with coup plotters in the hope of scaring the cabinet into retreating, before coming to his senses and retreating to his house to commit seppuku.

There is much to admire about today's Japan, which is solidly committed to peace (whatever the insane ramblings of Shintaro Ishihara and the like might suggest to the contrary), but those who like to argue that Imperial Japan would eventually have surrendered without the shock of the atomic bombings to wake the leadership up from its slumbers do the historical facts an injustice, and thereby feed the victim mentality of the reality-challenged "Tenno-shugi" (天皇主義) nutcases who would like to back to the good ol' days when the divinity of the Emperor was unquestioned, army officers could kill any politicians who angered them with impunity, and it was seen as both the right and the duty of the sacred Japanese nation to gather all of heaven under the roof of the son of Amaterasu Omikami.

PS: I think it's worth noting for the sake of those still inclined to quibble just what the policy of the Suzuki government actually was - the "honorable death of the hundred million" rather than surrender. That something like this was indeed a realistic prospect is borne out by the mass suicides on Saipan and Okinawa, the numerous young men who threw their lives away in kamikaze attacks and even by Akira Kurosawa's own memoirs, in which Kurosawa - no militarist - admitted that he'd have gone along with the order to commit national suicide had the time come.

Comments

[Factory]

Erm, if one had assumed that the japanese would have fought on despite knowing that they would die pointlessly in large numbers in a war they could not win, then how does that square with history wherein they did surrender after less casualties?
Evidence would seem to indicate that Japan might have talked the talk, but didn't walk the walk.

[Abiola Lapite]

"how does that square with history wherein they did surrender after less casualties?"

Tokyo was next on the list of cities to be nuked, which meant that the Emperor and his entourage were all sure to die next. Not all lives were of equal importance in Imperial Japan.

[Jim]

"if one had assumed that the japanese would have fought on despite knowing that they would die pointlessly in large numbers in a war they could not win, "

They didn't expect to die pointlessly. They expected to die gloriously.

Surrenders varied in diffenrent places, both involving soldiers and civilians. It seems ot have depended a lot on local leadership. Some true believers mamnaged totalk a lot of people inot getting killed.

Something else to remember is the level of exhaustion and degradation the people as a whole had reached by that time. They were desperate by then. The range of choice between life and death was much narrorwer than in normal times.

[Chuckles]

An interesting article on Yuko Tojo:

http://atimes.com/atimes/Japan/GK12Dh04.html

His only crime was loving his country? Ye gods above. Well, I suppose it is understandable. I see that her Nanking talking points are essentially the same as that of the Society for a New History: The healing of wounds is probably the most difficult part about war; and festering sores in Japan should be a cause for concern. I think that more moderate voices are actually to blame for the current "revisionist" situation: By failing to address the Japanese condition squarely; as a whole: Including its impressive socio-economic conditions, they have left the field wide open to the Yoshinori Kobayashi types to define a "Japanese identity": One that is neccesarily reactionary.

There is much to celebrate about Japan and moderates shouldn't be allowing the right wing crazies control of the field. Alas: the famous voices from the Japanese art and literature scene are at best, ambivalent about being Japanese: which means that it is up to the rightists to minister to the sense of alienation and displacement that is reported to plague contemporary Japan.