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After the Bomb
- TremendousJudge 3y ago>American B-29 bombers dropped leaflets all over the city, warning us that Nagasaki would ‘fall to ashes’ on August 8. The leaflets were confiscated immediately by the kenpei (Imperial Japanese Army) Yikes. Imagine living in a situation where the government of your own country has as much care for your life as the enemy.
- cafard 3y agoWasn't Nagasaki a secondary target, chosen because the first was clouded over?
- nvy 3y agoThey dropped leaflets stating "some or all of the cities named" would be destroyed in the coming days.
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoWhat else did you expect? It was wartime. Controlling the propaganda and information and not letting the enemy direct their narrative was something each government wanted to fully own regardless of the outcome to civilians, even the allies: The Londoners were told that the V2 rockets landing on their heads were "gas explosions" because it was better for population morale them not know the enemy has such advanced long range strike capabilities as that would increase fear and lower morale and we're less likely to support long time war attrition with this knowledge. Same with the Japanese, why would they parrot the enemy narrative to the population, especially that until after the bomb blast was examined, Japan didn't believe that the US already had a nuclear weapon so soon.
- chmod600 3y ago"especially that until after the bomb blast was examined" The first bomb had already been detonated in Hiroshima a few days prior. They had radio. Are you saying they still felt the threat was not credible?
- FirmwareBurner 3y agoI was talking about the first bomb.
- chmod600 3y agoAlso, that was the second bomb, so it was a very credible threat.
- kerkeslager 3y ago[flagged]
- kouru225 3y agoWhat is nationalist about this comment?
- kerkeslager 3y agoThe inability of the poster to imagine their own country doing something similar. If you don't like my current-day example, perhaps you'll like this more relevant-to-the post example: https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/15fka53/telling_the_true_story_a_thread/ https://www.reddit.com/r/WhitePeopleTwitter/comments/15fka53...
- TremendousJudge 3y agoNo, no I do not. Not everybody on the internet is from the US you know.
- kerkeslager 3y agoFair enough. Given the US-centric nature of HN it was an educated guess, but I was wrong. So which perfect country do you live in?
- nvy 3y agoOh just give it up already. No country is perfect, got it. There are shades of morality. Got it. Prejudice exists. Got it. Welcome to the realizations most of us attain in our teens. The sanctimonious, smug, self-righteous tone you adopt is so tiresome and you're not revealing anything anyone here isn't already aware of.
- kerkeslager 3y agoAs opposed to the comment, "Yikes. Imagine living in a situation where the government of your own country has as much care for your life as the enemy." ...which you're defending as if it isn't smug, self-righteous, tiresome, and obvious?
- ecf 3y ago> ‘What did I do to the Americans?’ she would often say, ‘Why did they do this to me?’ Seems like they don’t blame their government all that much
- skulk 3y agoImperial Japan was something else, truly. I just finished Dan Carlin's six-part Hardcore History series called "supernova in the east" which covers a lot of context in an attempt to help people like us understand the zeitgeist in Japan at the time. I can't recommend it enough.
- V0rtexV0xter 3y agoIt's crazy to think people actually lived through this.
- RetroTechie 3y agoEven crazier that a number of people were a victim of the bomb on Hiroshima, and a few days later also got hit by the bomb on Nagasaki. And some of them even lived through that.
- chmod600 3y ago"‘What did I do to the Americans?’ she would often say, ‘Why did they do this to me?’" I could imagine a German thinking the same thing during conventional bombings.
- foogazi 3y agoOr a Jew on Kristallnacht, or Chinese in Nanjing
- Affric 3y agoIt’s easy to say “I was a three year old and did not deserve this” but this is what happens in a total war, 3 year olds are rarely the primary targets of bombing but when the scale of conflict is so great their moral weigh becomes a rounding error compared to those who would use them as a shield. At the start of the war civilian bombing campaigns were unthinkable. By the end they were standard operating procedure. There hasn’t been a daring war since. Now everyone knows the costs. No one is safe.
- Affric 3y agoOn reflection I think I have read too much into this one small quote inside the article.
- ChainOfFools 3y agoFor that matter in 2023 every single day there is probably at least one three year old whose daddy (or mama) is abruptly taken away for any one of a number of reasons completely opaque to a toddler. Some parents disappear by blind chance, but mostly it happens because some other adult strangers decided that their father or mother needed to be ripped away from them and put in a box somewhere. The child did nothing to deserve this, but has to live knowing one of the most important people in their lives is rotting away in a cell instead of pushing them on the swing or teaching them to make spaghetti or just being there to help stabilize the family even if it's only financially. It's a wonder that we don't have more instances of anger-fueled violence against prosecutors, defense lawyers and judges by children whose lives were deeply scarred by their deliberately harmful actions. And before the obvious remarks come about how these parents could have been abusive to the child or deadbeats or otherwise fall far short of being the parent the child needs, well no shit. The appropriately shallow answer to such a shallow remark is that not all convictions are deserved, but this argument is beside the point. The child doesn't comprehend what happened, all they know is the trauma. Trauma for which, if it had happened to anyone else under similarly innocent circumstances would be grounds for millions in damages for the psychological harm caused, but in this case society just collectively shrugs "huh. well that's too bad I guess." And goes about their day.
- chmod600 3y ago"Later, we discovered that the bomb was dropped a few meters away from my sister’s school." I suppose modern precision-guided bombs are an improvement for humanity. Wars are mostly between military targets these days.
- IE6 3y ago> I suppose modern precision-guided bombs are an improvement for humanity. Wars are mostly between military targets these days. Unfortunately this is not always the case - I am not sure if this is an issue with the ability of precision-guided bombs to hit a target reliably or the assumed lack of concern for the non-military victims that the bombs will impact.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoWhat is the date of this Time posting?
- ShrugLife 3y agoGood question, and something I was wondering as well. Wayback machine says it was first indexed in 2017, so I'd go with that.
- ChrisArchitect 3y agoRight, full project this content is from https://www.1945project.com/ https://www.1945project.com/ is a documentary project created by Haruka Sakaguchi and published on August 6, 2017.
- WirelessGigabit 3y agoIn the source code there is a line that says ,"contentPublishedDate":"2017-08-05T15:26:11+00:00"