Japanese non-war guilt movies

[futon]

I haven't seen Oppenheimer nor plan to. Regardless, it seems like there was no scene for Hiroshima. 

Oppenheimer's conclusions match others even if delivered differently, such as the pilot of Enola Gay or US president Truman.. that it was necessary to end the war.  

The war could have ended without a US desire to occupy the country. Japan was beaten to a pulp, the navy thoroughly destroyed, and Tokyo fire bombed. Maybe that could have been enough payback for the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

So Japan had to be occupied to stop other wars in Asia? Surely the IJA wasn't going to stop its positions in China if the US hypothetically felt satisfied by April 1945. However, the occupation of Japan didn't end wars. Only the Pacific War and that could have ended without Japan occupation or the atomic bombs. So what lives were really being saved? Not javang to occupy Japan would also save the same lives that Operation Downfall would have committed. Instead.. due to the Atomic Bombs and the occupation of Japan.. there was the resumption of the Chinese Civil War and all the great many lives in opposition to the CCP afterwards, apparantly a number greater than those lost in wartime, the Korean War.. a war with a higher death to population count than possibly any other country during WW2.. and the freedom of determination based wars in South East Asia such as in Vietnam, Malaysia, and Indonesia. 

So no, the atomic bombing was not necessary to end the war. Is was part of pushing unconditional terms that were not justified. 

So just like how the cause of the Pacific War was not all Japan's fault.. rather it being 50/50, the other one about the dropping of the atomic bombing "being necessary" at the end of the bloody tale is also not true.

An old anime shows what amounts to the Tokyo Tribunal style "war crime" that the kangaroo court was designed to not count that Oppenheimer movie apparantly failed to include. 

 

Edited August 6 by futon

[bojan]

On 8/6/2023 at 3:46 PM, futon said:

...So just like how the cause of the Pacific War was not all Japan's fault.. rather it being 50/50...

So, you also think that current war in Ukraine is 50:50 fault to be shared?

[futon]

1 hour ago, bojan said:

So, you also think that current war in Ukraine is 50:50 fault to be shared?

The Ukraine, nor the West, didn't place severe economic warfare on Russia.

[bojan]

Did Japan have a right to invade China w/o consequences?

Did Russia have a right to invade Ukraine w/o consequences?

[Leo Niehorster]

Futon, the Japanese equivalent of Roman. 😛

[futon]

10 minutes ago, bojan said:

Did Japan have a right to invade China w/o consequences?

Did Russia have a right to invade Ukraine w/o consequences?

Japan did not have a right to invade China. But that wasn't the creation of a right for the US to intervene. Besides, the Chinese themselves have some fault in causing the Second Sino-Japanese War. 

Russia also didn't have a right to invade. The matter in Ukraine directly related to its neighbors, namely the Baltics and Poland, thus further in consequence the rest of Europe, thus extension in drawing the US. China's neighbor were colonies, not soveregn nations, and the SU which exported revolutionary style communism into China which has a generator to Chinese behavior in being a cause to the Second Sino-Japanese War such as the Xi'an incident. If Mao's communist was factored out, such conditions wouldn't have emerged. 

[futon]

13 minutes ago, Leo Niehorster said:

Futon, the Japanese equivalent of Roman. 😛

Shallow comment. Just a tool, 1 vote up presser type.

The corruption of democratic thought.

[bojan]

Japan did not have right to invade China. Russia did not have right to invade Ukraine.

US behavior in 1930s, just as EU/NATO today had morally gray elements, but they supported right side.

In the end it was Japan who decided to attack US for instituting sanctions toward them. If Russia one day decided to attack EU/NATO for instituting sanctions against them, it will be only their fault if they get beaten to pulp, like it was Japanese in WW2.

 

Edited August 8 by bojan

[futon]

8 minutes ago, bojan said:

Japan did not have right to invade China. Russia did not have right to invade Ukraine.

US behavior in 1930s, just as EU/NATO today have morally gray elements.

It was Japan who decided to attack US. If Russia one day decided to attack EU/NATO, it will be only their fault if they get beaten to pulp, like it was Japanese in WW2.

 

It was the US that decided to posture its diplomacy around the survival of CKS's faction and to the extent of imposing an oil embargo while at the same time training up AVG for action in IndoChina and position the Pacific fleet from California to Hawaii to serve as a message to Japan to not seek the oil in Indonesia. The Second Sino-Japanese may very well have ended by 1940 as the Nationalist Chinese continue under Wang Jingwei, GB and US interests and holdings in Hong Kong and Shanghai still intact.

Edited August 8 by futon

[bojan]

  

16 minutes ago, futon said:

...Just a tool...

You looked into mirror?

[futon]

Just now, bojan said:

  

You looked into mirror?

Thank you for accepting my posts are correct indirectly.

[R011]

56 minutes ago, futon said:

 The Second Sino-Japanese may very well have ended by 1940 as the Nationalist Chinese continue under [s]Wang Jingweip[/s] Hirohito's reiign. 

Fixed it for you.  No one then or now except perhaps you, believed Wang was anything but a Japanese Quisling or that a Japanese victory would leave China with more than nominal independence.

Edited August 9 by R011

[futon]

2 hours ago, R011 said:

Fixed it for you.  No one then or now except perhaps you, believed Wang was anything but a Japanese Quisling or that a Japanese victory would leave China with more than nominal independence.

Wang was one of the top people for the cause of China throughout the interwar period. It's paranoia and war drumming to assume it would be an enslaved China. Rather Wang's pro-pan Asia views would be what would be disagreeable to western imperialists, neo or not.

Edited August 9 by futon

[R011]

1 hour ago, futon said:

Wang was one of the top people for the cause of China throughout the interwar period. It's paranoia and war drumming to assume it would be an enslaved China. Rather Wang's pro-pan Asia views would be what would be disagreeable to western imperialists, neo or not.

And controlled nothing save what the Japanese allowed him to after utterly failing on his own.  Like Quisling and other patsies of the Axis powers.

[futon]

23 minutes ago, R011 said:

And controlled nothing save what the Japanese allowed him to after utterly failing on his own.  Like Quisling and other patsies of the Axis powers.

His failing was due to the US's policy in backing CKS, but at the same time, not backing him the right way by wanting his forces to do more in Burma and completely disregarding the need of his forces to save strength, so thus he failed. And provided Taiwan, to run dictatorship on there for 4 decades. This pride and stubbeness for the glory narrative has too little to go for it like in Western Europe. Same broken polices like in Afhganistan and Vietnam. South Korea too actually. Strong US military sure, but without past experience in Imperial Japan, the South Koreans probably would have folded like the Vietnamese. 

Despite all that, It's not hard for me to imagine to concede these historical points and combine it core US principles to create a view for a continued US-led sphere in the Asia-Pacific. But people are so stubbon about the old-good ole boy glory narrative. Too few to openly concede on important points. Due to that, core US values end up as just mere rhetorical points to serve neo-imperialism it seems. 

 

Edited August 9 by futon

[R011]

13 minutes ago, futon said:

His failing was due to the US's policy in backing CKS,

 

You mean the defacto and de jure government of China?  How awfu!  Clearly that justifies a genocidal Japanese war of conquest.

[futon]

31 minutes ago, R011 said:

You mean the defacto and de jure government of China?  How awfu!  Clearly that justifies a genocidal Japanese war of conquest.

Another example of the dysfunctional US foreign policy like in Afghanistan and Vietnan was that after Japan's defeat, Chiang Kai-chek was sort of wanting the Japanese to stay longer and the Japanese force did remain longer, even until 1946 to help hold ground until CKS's Nationalists can move in and take control so that the Chinese communists don't fill in. Apoarantly CKS would have liked it the Japanese remained longer and the Japanese would have been willing to remain but as under CKS's command. But the US wanted complete demiliterization of Japan. A few Japanese would still aid the the Nationalists, such as former general Hiroshi Nemoto who received special appreciation and gift from CKS. All said and done, CKS was more anti-communists than anti-Japanese. That's how pivotal the Xi'an incident was. In the end, it was actually the US blew it for him as he lost the mainland and stuck on an island. 

[Der Zeitgeist]

By the way, if anyone really wants to read a modern historian's take about the atomic bombings of Japan that goes beyond simple black & white morality tales, I highly recommend this article by Alex Wellerstein:

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2020/06/09/what-journalists-should-know-about-the-atomic-bombings/

Especially this part:

Quote

There was no “decision to use the bomb”

The biggest and most important thing that one ought to know is that there was no “decision to use the atomic bomb” in the sense that the phrase implies. Truman did not weigh the advantages and disadvantages of using the atomic bomb, nor did he see it as a choice between invasion or bombing. This particular “decision” narrative, in which Truman unilaterally decides that the bombing was the lesser of two evils, is a postwar fabrication, developed by the people who used the atomic bomb (notably General Groves and Secretary of War Stimson, but encouraged by Truman himself later) as a way of rationalizing and justifying the bombings in the face of growing unease and criticism about them. 

What did happen was far more complicated, multifaceted, and at times chaotic — like most real history. The idea that the bomb would be used was assumed by nearly everyone who was involved in its production at a high level, which did not include Truman (who was excluded until after Roosevelt’s death). There were a few voices against its use, but there were far more people who assumed that it was built to be used. There were many reasons why people wanted it to be used, including ending the war as soon as possible, and very few reasons not to use it. Saving Japanese lives was just not a goal — it was never an elaborate moral calculus of that sort. Rather than one big “decision,” the atomic bombings were the product of a multitude of many smaller decisions and assumptions that stretched back into late 1942, when the Manhattan Project really got started. 

This is not to say there were not decisions made along the line. There were lots of decisions made, about the type of bomb being built, the kind of fuzing used for it (which determines what kinds of targets it would be ideal against), the types of targets… Truman wasn’t part of these. His role was extremely peripheral to the entire endeavor. As General Groves put it, Truman’s role was “one of noninterference—basically, a decision not to upset the existing plans.”1

Truman was involved in only two major issues relating to the atomic bomb decision-making during World War II. These were concurring with Stimson’s recommendations about the non-bombing of Kyoto (and the bombing of Hiroshima instead), which I have written about (and now published about) at some length. The other is the (not-unrelated, I argue) decision on August 10, 1945, to halt further atomic bombings (at least temporarily) because, as he put it to his cabinet meeting, “the thought of wiping out another 100,000 people was too horrible. He didn’t like the idea of killing, as he said, ‘all those kids.’”

[bojan]

Pretty good article.

[glenn239]

On 8/6/2023 at 9:46 AM, futon said:

 

The war could have ended without a US desire to occupy the country. Japan was beaten to a pulp, the navy thoroughly destroyed, and Tokyo fire bombed. Maybe that could have been enough payback for the attack on Pearl Harbor. 

 

Perhaps, but the foundation of the post-war US-Japanese alliance, one of the strongest alliances in modern history, IMO came out of the occupation.  Both cultures had evolved very wrong opinions about the other, and the exposure of occupation, seems to have been the cure.  Had the US not occupied Japan I wonder whether US attitudes towards Japan would have evolved, or if the vibe would have been more like the Roman attitude towards Carthage after the 2nd Punic War.

[futon]

22 minutes ago, glenn239 said:

Perhaps, but the foundation of the post-war US-Japanese alliance, one of the strongest alliances in modern history, IMO came out of the occupation.  Both cultures had evolved very wrong opinions about the other, and the exposure of occupation, seems to have been the cure.  Had the US not occupied Japan I wonder whether US attitudes towards Japan would have evolved, or if the vibe would have been more like the Roman attitude towards Carthage after the 2nd Punic War.

That's the thing, both sides worked very hard to make it work in post-war era. That credit goes to both sides. In very basic terms, the US plays as a good winner and Japan plays as a good loser and so the new power arrangement in which Japan host US forces is maintained be it historical disagreement, Okinawa base protests, low level flying UH-60s, trade, or w/e. Relations with China is a new and complex and challenging matter with alliance undermining implications.

But for on these forums, history is history, it is what it is, and the handling has bearing and impact in various ways at a closer level. 

In some way, I should be wanted to stand up for what and how I see it. Otherwise I shouldn't be trustworthy for not doing what I really think. A person that does that is a broken person. And a different person that wants someone else to be broken is a corrupt person. Better a black sheep than a broken person. So off I go, black sheeping myself.. as usual.

[Der Zeitgeist]

2 hours ago, futon said:

In some way, I should be wanted to stand up for what and how I see it. Otherwise I shouldn't be trustworthy for not doing what I really think. A person that does that is a broken person. And a different person that wants someone else to be broken is a corrupt person. Better a black sheep than a broken person. So off I go, black sheeping myself.. as usual.

You're wrong about Oppenheimer, by the way. The movie, I mean.

[rmgill]

17 hours ago, bojan said:

Did Japan have a right to invade China w/o consequences?

Did Russia have a right to invade Ukraine w/o consequences?

50/50 war guilt for the chinese in Nanking I guess. 

[rmgill]

If the US had played the end of the war by Japanese IJA rules what would it have looked like? You think the country would have been left standing? 

 

 

[Stuart Galbraith]

Well it kinda wasn't as I recall...

 Japanese non war guilt movies? Battle Royale and Black Rain.