4 ms·

My ancestors fought in WWII. Hiroshima is plagued by shallow reading

18 points by cs702 1y ago

theletterf 1y ago
https://archive.is/20250808195317/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/08/world-war-ii-hiroshima-history-memories/ https://archive.is/20250808195317/https://www.washingtonpost...
GauntletWizard 1y ago
https://archive.ph/8DTod https://archive.ph/8DTod
arrowsmith 1y ago
My ancestors also fought in WWII. So did most people's — it was a world war, after all. Does this author think that having ancestors who fought in WWII makes him special, or his opinion more valid?
- nine_k 1y ago
  It makes his ancestors opinion, which he mentioned, more valid.
- mhh__ 1y ago
  No but it's very high status amongst affluent dinner party types in the west to communicate in these entropyless parochialisms.
- polotics 1y ago
  Well you know what, none of my ancestors fought in WWII... So, visiting the Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo, I was quite shocked by the interpretation of history on the walls there, that was stating that Japan had been strangled of any resources access by the West, and had to attack Pearl Harbour as a desperate measure of self defense. Taking pictures was forbidden but I took one anyways, and some older Japanese man accosted me, asked for my nationality, I answerer truthfully being from a smaller southern european nation, and he laughed in my face clearly thinking that country name meant hilarious inferiority. This was in 2006, not so long ago. A Large black bus was loudly spewing out extreme-right propaganda outside. Left that country, thought about their birth rate...
PaulHoule 1y ago
... it drives me crazy that there is a drumbeat over this every year in the US, which feels some real guilt over this and has had some reconciliation of it with Japan whereas people in China, Korea and elsewhere in Asia are 1000x angrier about what Japan did to them than how Japan is angry with the US and where there has been much less reconciliation. Sometimes I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud spread over atomic energy.
- nine_k 1y ago
  Believe it or not, there are people who think that a world without nuclear warheads and the MAD equilibrium [1] would be safer. This is despite the documented history of several millennia of such world existing, and being plagued with constant wars fought with conventional weapons. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
  - TimorousBestie 1y ago
    I’m a bit confused by your phrasing. Isn’t our world also plagued by constant wars fought with conventional weapons?
    - nine_k 1y ago
      It is, but these are much smaller-scale. The border between France and Germany has seen full eighty years of peace, which that land probably did not see since the time German and French nations formed. It's hard to imagine a full-on war between two countries possessing nuclear weapons, because it would be suicidal for the attacking party, so e.g. India and Pakistan remain at peace.
  - PaulHoule 1y ago
    There are nuclear weapons and then there is nuclear power. I think fear over nuclear weapons is weaponized to keep us dependent on fossil fuels. People weren't so worried about "world wars" prior to 1900 or so because they didn't have fossil fuels to drive/sail/fly around.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
bell-cot 1y ago
True. And this short article barely scratches the surface of the region's pre-WWII history - even major turning points like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthqua... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact
nine_k 1y ago
Beside that, I like the idea that the nuclear bombing saved numerous lives of the Japanese, who did not have to experience and die in fire bombings or being recruited to fight on the streets, in the fields, and in the mountains. The battle of Iwo Jima [1] can serve as an example how bloody such fights might be. In 1945, the Japanese Empire was training schoolchildren to fight with bayonets and sharpened bamboo logs, to make them part of land defense operations. The nukes made the emperor surrender and prevented all that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima
- ohdeargodno 1y ago
  "Nukes made Japan surrender" is a lie americans keep repeating to make themselves feel good about what is probably one of the most horrible mass civilian casualty event of the last century. Every single serious researcher, both at the time and today agree that Japan would have surrendered. Every single event, document, information points this way. Justifying nukes with "we could have done something worse" is... an incredibly american thing to say, yes.
  - gerikson 1y ago
    The US had already firebombed many Japanese cities with conventional weapons, causing death and destruction on the scale of Hiroshima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194... Using the atom bomb was just making an existing policy more effective, because you could flatten a city with one bomber instead of ~300. The bombs didn't cause Japan to surrender. The bombs plus the Soviet declaration of war, invoking both the almost certain defeat of the Kwantung Army on the Asian mainland and a grueling defense against both the Soviet Union and Western allies contributed too. And the surrender was almost stopped by a coup at the very last minute.
    - opo 1y ago
      >The bombs didn't cause Japan to surrender. According to Togo they did: >...Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo’s account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...
tenacious_tuna 1y ago
> For Japanese casualties, the predictions were essentially limitless, since the plans included bombing every city in the invasion’s path with the tactics used on Tokyo. Viewed through this pitiless lens, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only saved 100,000 American lives but also forced Emperor Hirohito to surrender, saving millions of Japanese lives and turning the country into a bastion of democracy and one of America’s most valued allies. This keeps being repeated. The US's own survey corps concluded that the nuclear bombing was unnecessary for ensuring a Japanese surrender, and in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Bombing_Survey#Atomic_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Bombin...
- maratc 1y ago
  > in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia. Assuming you mean USSR, who declared war on Japan on August 8th 1945, we need to believe someone used a time machine to travel to the future before they authorized the first atomic strike on August 6th?
- mixmastamyk 1y ago
  May be, but hard to prove either way without an A/B timeline test. "Military historian Gian Gentile disputed this counterfactual, stating that testimony from Japanese leaders in USSBS interrogations supported the likelihood of Japan continuing the war beyond November and December 1945. Gentile stated that survey authors chose not to publish such evidence, as it challenged their conclusions."
- delichon 1y ago
  The command at the time had fresh memories of the suicidal resistance from Wake Island to Okinowa. You can imagine the large impression all of the bodies made on them. It must have been hard to convince them that the rest of the Japanese were different, and to bet so much on it.
  - sandinmyjoints 1y ago
    Yeah, the parent comment is interestingly and carefully phrased -- it is not claiming that the decision makers at the time could have known that Japan (according to this one report, anyway) would have surrendered without the bombings or invasion, but rather that since it is the case they would have (again, according to this report), that people should not claim the decision to bomb saved lives.
jcranmer 1y ago
Some pretty gross historical inaccuracies here, in an opinion piece trying to tell people to be mindful of historical context: > One of the last rooms of the museum next to the shrine contains a long, well-illustrated explanation — in Japanese and English — of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and it makes a pretty convincing case. I hadn’t realized how steadily Roosevelt had cut off Japan from copper, from American scrap steel, then from oil. ... the US cut those off because of Japan's invasion of China. It's actually a pretty gross whitewashing of Japanese history, the same reason why China and Korea are so frustrated at Japan: Japan constantly pretends that the only thing it did wrong was lose WW2. Blaming the US for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor is exactly the same kind of thing as blaming Ukraine for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. > Americans weren’t exactly innocents on this score, since we had taken the bases that the Japanese attacked in December 1941 — Hawaii and the Philippines — from the unraveling Spanish and British empires. Uh... the British Empire didn't unravel until after WW2. The Philippines were taken from the Spanish. But Hawaii was a fully independent kingdom, and even after the sugar interests sponsored a revolution that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and then begged to be annexed by the US, the US dithered and only annexed it a few years later when the Japanese were making a move to annex Hawaii instead.
- 1659447091 1y ago
  > The Philippines were taken from the Spanish Spain got $20 million and trading access for the Philippines.
TimorousBestie 1y ago
I think it’s possible to deplore both the war crimes committed by the Japanese and the war crimes committed by the Americans. I don’t see the need to compare one to the other, to pretend to solve some impossible utilitarian equation that demonstrates either dropping the bomb was right or dropping the bomb was wrong. Too much discourse on this topic depends on whatever happened in those counterfactual timelines that in any case we can only imagine and cannot observe. The important thing, which gets lost in the endless unresolvable discourse on blame and responsibility and ethics, is not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.
eska 1y ago
I have wondered about this for a long time, but HN seems to talk about this topic rather often for a tech site. Why is this the case? I don’t think this is the right place for such discussions and they never lead anywhere.

18 points by cs702 1y ago

https://archive.is/20250808195317/https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/08/08/world-war-ii-hiroshima-history-memories/ https://archive.is/20250808195317/https://www.washingtonpost...

GauntletWizard 1y ago

https://archive.ph/8DTod https://archive.ph/8DTod

arrowsmith 1y ago

My ancestors also fought in WWII. So did most people's — it was a world war, after all. Does this author think that having ancestors who fought in WWII makes him special, or his opinion more valid?

nine_k 1y ago
It makes his ancestors opinion, which he mentioned, more valid.
mhh__ 1y ago
No but it's very high status amongst affluent dinner party types in the west to communicate in these entropyless parochialisms.
polotics 1y ago
Well you know what, none of my ancestors fought in WWII... So, visiting the Yasukuni Jinja in Tokyo, I was quite shocked by the interpretation of history on the walls there, that was stating that Japan had been strangled of any resources access by the West, and had to attack Pearl Harbour as a desperate measure of self defense. Taking pictures was forbidden but I took one anyways, and some older Japanese man accosted me, asked for my nationality, I answerer truthfully being from a smaller southern european nation, and he laughed in my face clearly thinking that country name meant hilarious inferiority. This was in 2006, not so long ago. A Large black bus was loudly spewing out extreme-right propaganda outside. Left that country, thought about their birth rate...

PaulHoule 1y ago

... it drives me crazy that there is a drumbeat over this every year in the US, which feels some real guilt over this and has had some reconciliation of it with Japan whereas people in China, Korea and elsewhere in Asia are 1000x angrier about what Japan did to them than how Japan is angry with the US and where there has been much less reconciliation. Sometimes I wonder if it's just an attempt to keep a cloud spread over atomic energy.

nine_k 1y ago
Believe it or not, there are people who think that a world without nuclear warheads and the MAD equilibrium [1] would be safer. This is despite the documented history of several millennia of such world existing, and being plagued with constant wars fought with conventional weapons. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mutual_assured_destruction
- TimorousBestie 1y ago
  I’m a bit confused by your phrasing. Isn’t our world also plagued by constant wars fought with conventional weapons?
  - nine_k 1y ago
    It is, but these are much smaller-scale. The border between France and Germany has seen full eighty years of peace, which that land probably did not see since the time German and French nations formed. It's hard to imagine a full-on war between two countries possessing nuclear weapons, because it would be suicidal for the attacking party, so e.g. India and Pakistan remain at peace.
- PaulHoule 1y ago
  There are nuclear weapons and then there is nuclear power. I think fear over nuclear weapons is weaponized to keep us dependent on fossil fuels. People weren't so worried about "world wars" prior to 1900 or so because they didn't have fossil fuels to drive/sail/fly around.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

bell-cot 1y ago

True. And this short article barely scratches the surface of the region's pre-WWII history - even major turning points like the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthquake https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1923_Great_Kant%C5%8D_earthqua... and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tripartite_Pact

nine_k 1y ago

Beside that, I like the idea that the nuclear bombing saved numerous lives of the Japanese, who did not have to experience and die in fire bombings or being recruited to fight on the streets, in the fields, and in the mountains. The battle of Iwo Jima [1] can serve as an example how bloody such fights might be. In 1945, the Japanese Empire was training schoolchildren to fight with bayonets and sharpened bamboo logs, to make them part of land defense operations. The nukes made the emperor surrender and prevented all that. [1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Iwo_Jima

ohdeargodno 1y ago
"Nukes made Japan surrender" is a lie americans keep repeating to make themselves feel good about what is probably one of the most horrible mass civilian casualty event of the last century. Every single serious researcher, both at the time and today agree that Japan would have surrendered. Every single event, document, information points this way. Justifying nukes with "we could have done something worse" is... an incredibly american thing to say, yes.
- gerikson 1y ago
  The US had already firebombed many Japanese cities with conventional weapons, causing death and destruction on the scale of Hiroshima https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_1945) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bombing_of_Tokyo_(10_March_194... Using the atom bomb was just making an existing policy more effective, because you could flatten a city with one bomber instead of ~300. The bombs didn't cause Japan to surrender. The bombs plus the Soviet declaration of war, invoking both the almost certain defeat of the Kwantung Army on the Asian mainland and a grueling defense against both the Soviet Union and Western allies contributed too. And the surrender was almost stopped by a coup at the very last minute.
  - opo 1y ago
    >The bombs didn't cause Japan to surrender. According to Togo they did: >...Meanwhile in the afternoon of August 8, before the entry of the Soviet Union into the war or the bombing of Nagasaki, the emperor met with Foreign Minister Shigenori Togo. Shortly after the war, Togo affirmed that the emperor stated the war must end at this meeting. New evidence now confirms Togo’s account that it was the atomic bomb that moved the emperor to decide to end the war. https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surrender-part-i https://www.nationalww2museum.org/war/articles/japans-surren...

tenacious_tuna 1y ago

> For Japanese casualties, the predictions were essentially limitless, since the plans included bombing every city in the invasion’s path with the tactics used on Tokyo. Viewed through this pitiless lens, Hiroshima and Nagasaki not only saved 100,000 American lives but also forced Emperor Hirohito to surrender, saving millions of Japanese lives and turning the country into a bastion of democracy and one of America’s most valued allies. This keeps being repeated. The US's own survey corps concluded that the nuclear bombing was unnecessary for ensuring a Japanese surrender, and in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Bombing_Survey#Atomic_bombing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Strategic_Bombin...

maratc 1y ago
> in all likelihood was instead to ensure Japan surrendered to the US and not to Russia. Assuming you mean USSR, who declared war on Japan on August 8th 1945, we need to believe someone used a time machine to travel to the future before they authorized the first atomic strike on August 6th?
mixmastamyk 1y ago
May be, but hard to prove either way without an A/B timeline test. "Military historian Gian Gentile disputed this counterfactual, stating that testimony from Japanese leaders in USSBS interrogations supported the likelihood of Japan continuing the war beyond November and December 1945. Gentile stated that survey authors chose not to publish such evidence, as it challenged their conclusions."
delichon 1y ago
The command at the time had fresh memories of the suicidal resistance from Wake Island to Okinowa. You can imagine the large impression all of the bodies made on them. It must have been hard to convince them that the rest of the Japanese were different, and to bet so much on it.
- sandinmyjoints 1y ago
  Yeah, the parent comment is interestingly and carefully phrased -- it is not claiming that the decision makers at the time could have known that Japan (according to this one report, anyway) would have surrendered without the bombings or invasion, but rather that since it is the case they would have (again, according to this report), that people should not claim the decision to bomb saved lives.

jcranmer 1y ago

Some pretty gross historical inaccuracies here, in an opinion piece trying to tell people to be mindful of historical context: > One of the last rooms of the museum next to the shrine contains a long, well-illustrated explanation — in Japanese and English — of how President Franklin D. Roosevelt forced Japan to attack Pearl Harbor, and it makes a pretty convincing case. I hadn’t realized how steadily Roosevelt had cut off Japan from copper, from American scrap steel, then from oil. ... the US cut those off because of Japan's invasion of China. It's actually a pretty gross whitewashing of Japanese history, the same reason why China and Korea are so frustrated at Japan: Japan constantly pretends that the only thing it did wrong was lose WW2. Blaming the US for Japan's attack on Pearl Harbor is exactly the same kind of thing as blaming Ukraine for Russia's invasion of Ukraine. > Americans weren’t exactly innocents on this score, since we had taken the bases that the Japanese attacked in December 1941 — Hawaii and the Philippines — from the unraveling Spanish and British empires. Uh... the British Empire didn't unravel until after WW2. The Philippines were taken from the Spanish. But Hawaii was a fully independent kingdom, and even after the sugar interests sponsored a revolution that overthrew the Hawaiian monarchy and then begged to be annexed by the US, the US dithered and only annexed it a few years later when the Japanese were making a move to annex Hawaii instead.

1659447091 1y ago
> The Philippines were taken from the Spanish Spain got $20 million and trading access for the Philippines.

TimorousBestie 1y ago

I think it’s possible to deplore both the war crimes committed by the Japanese and the war crimes committed by the Americans. I don’t see the need to compare one to the other, to pretend to solve some impossible utilitarian equation that demonstrates either dropping the bomb was right or dropping the bomb was wrong. Too much discourse on this topic depends on whatever happened in those counterfactual timelines that in any case we can only imagine and cannot observe. The important thing, which gets lost in the endless unresolvable discourse on blame and responsibility and ethics, is not to repeat the same mistakes in the future.

eska 1y ago

I have wondered about this for a long time, but HN seems to talk about this topic rather often for a tech site. Why is this the case? I don’t think this is the right place for such discussions and they never lead anywhere.