On my way to the swimming pool today, I was wondering about something; pretty much all of Europe harbours some resentment towards Germany for what happened in the first and second world wars. I know that much of south-east Asia harbours resentments towards Japan for what happened in the second world war, and pretty much anywhere where countries have inflicted violence on other countries there’s resentment. Now, the U.S. will have to endure a lot of flak for what happened in Iraq, and it’ll be for a looooong while to come. But what I’m curious about is if the Japanese harbour resentment towards the U.S. for destroying two of their cities with atomics. It was an unprecedented scale of devastation that was never seen before, and has never been seen since. Now, history is written by the victor (which is proving less and less true as technology advances), and everyone has sort of forgiven the U.S. for it, since it put a rather abrupt end to the fighting on the Pacific front. While we (the rest of the world) have forgiven them for such massive slaughter, have the Japanese? I can’t imagine. I find it hard to believe that the rest of the world is and was okay with it, but I find it even harder to imagine the Japanese feeling that way.
2 thoughts on “…twice!”
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[i]It was an unprecedented scale of devastation that was never seen before, and has never been seen since.[/i]
Unprecedented in the sense that they were the first uses of nuclear weapons and from a single bomb certainly, but an unprecedented scale of devastation that was never seen before, and has never been seen since? I’m not so sure.
The firebombing of Tokyo is reported to have killed somewhere in the region of seventy-five thousand people at a go, likewise the firebombing of Dresden is estimated to have killed between twenty-five and thirty-five thousand civilians. And that’s not taking into account things like the homes destroyed and tens of thousands of people who managed to survive made destitute.
The fact that the US did not immediately leave but eventually helped reconstruct the economy of Japan after WW2 has helped Japan come to terms with what the US did.
The Japanese still have not come to complete terms with their own role in WW2. With the current government structurally playing down the sometimes scandalous / attrocious role their country played during the occupation of some countries and their poor treatment of POW’s.