Interesting conversation with a J-Guy About WW2
I have a question I always ask my friends in Japan – “Why do Japanese love Americans when it was Americans who dropped a nuke on Hiroshim and Nagasaki?”. It isn’t a question borne out of any dislike towards Americans on my part, but something I seriously never understood. (I personally couldn’t imagine ever forgiving someone who did something like that). Usually the answer is a vague “Uh, I dunno”. Today I finally got a real answer.
Toshiyuki, a guy I met at that Nanpa party a week ago stopped by for lunch. Like me he had no idea what that party was really for. We met up today and ate while talking about various things. The nuke subject came up, and he basically said something like this; Japan was a country that had lost the war for sure, but its leadership was waffling over the surrender requirements. Furthermore, it was war time and it is only appropriate that a nation use all its means to bring the war to an end in an efficient manner. On top of that, America had not annihilated the Japanese, and ended the war upon surrender, and Japan had been given the chance to be reborn economically afterwards. Any “righteous anger” would be double-talk in the face of the crimes that Japan had committed in World War 2. He ended by saying that most Japanese people weren’t patriotic in the strictest sense, and that most did not feel that they were on the right side in WW2.
Although I still think that the atom bomb was a nasty piece of work, I was impressed at the rationale laid out.
