Why’s the menu in English?

The Soviet Union had already invaded Manchuria and annihilated the Kwantung Army. We can argue tit for tat about which part of the final days of the Pacific War contributed the most to the final surrender of Japan. It’s clear though that no single part of that was enough and it was the combination of the firebombing of Tokyo and Osaka, the destruction of the remaining IJN fleet strength at the Battle of Tsushima, the Soviets invading Manchuria, Korea and the Northern Islands, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Although there are records of some of the civilian government campaigning Hirohito and Koiso for unconditional surrender, the main war cabinet still refused and preferred the path of a final confrontation.

I think it’s impossible to say if the atom bombs hadn’t been dropped whether they would have in fact surrendered, given that all the other things listed above were true after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki and they still were arguing for a negotiated settlement when no opposing force (USA, Commonwealth or Soviet Union) were prepared to accept anything less than an unconditional surrender.

Also, if you want more details on the extraordinary level of depravity by Japanese soldiers during the Second Dino-Japanese War and the wider World War 2 I can recommend reading Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Japan’s Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Gold and Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka, all of which contain first hand accounts and then you can try comparing and contrasting by accounts of those carried out by Allied forces in the conflict and give me your false equivalence then.

👍🏻

It’s literally the trolley problem writ large. Do you kill a few hundred thousand civilians to prevent the deaths of probably several million.

Just as an aside, due to the use of slave labour from nearby concentration camps and the horrendous conditions at the Mittelwerk factory that an estimated 12,000 people died making V1s and V2s, more than the estimated 9,000 people that died as targets.

In the last days of WW2, the Japanese military were getting children to make sharpened bamboo spears and training those children to attack American soldiers on sight. The elderly and women were told that they should kill themselves before potentially coming under American control.

The Japanese civilian population had been indoctrinated into the belief that western soldiers were absolute monsters who would carry out unspeakable acts on them should they become prisoners (ironic considering the IJA/Ns actions during the conflict).

In the battle of Saipan, hundreds of mothers leapt from cliffs with their babies in their arms to evade capture, men would slit their children’s throats and booby trapped the bodies to injure Americans and then themselves fought relentlessly, before mostly killing themselves or being killed to prevent capture.

The level of blood shed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unprecedented but it did in fact save untold Japanese civilian and American soldiers’ lives.

Crucially, even after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japanese High Command still refused to surrender.

*edit: all you 4edgy5me America Bad commenters really need to do some reading about Japanese atrocities during the Pacific War here are some suggestions:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zhejiang-Jiangxi_campaign

The fact you don’t know what ODD means is odd to me.

I knew I did it wrong in high school

Got born ugly?

No referencing Big Bang Theory meme

I remember the first time I saw the phrase “streaming video” was a website called “teen steam” (which I desperately wanted a credit card to access) in the late 90s / early 2000s.

I’m sure you can guess what the content of that site was and I was sure that “streaming” was some new sex act I had yet to discover and wanted very much to find out. Sadly I was too young, too poor and logged onto the Internet in the school library at lunch time so it was always going to be a long shot.

Leopards Fuck Gently

• Forced collectivisation of an entirely agrarian economy.

• Industrial policy that encouraged small scale iron smelting in homemade furnaces causing huge environmental damage.

• Agricultural policy that ordered the extermination of sparrows who then couldn’t keep insect populations down causing catastrophic damage to crops.

• Brutally cracked down on any dissenting voices, including scientists who happened to point out the potential flaws in Maos plan

• Contrary to OPs post, covering up the mistakes afterward and blaming outside influences and counter-revolutionaries rather than the failure of central policy.