Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by mzvkxlcvd 1588 days ago
Your quotes are from the US government, my claims are paraphrasing things i learned via Japanese media while in Japan. the truth is probably somewhere in between.
2 comments

The Japanese media and text books are notoriously light on truth. You should not take them at face value.

And certainly realize that the decision to use the atomic bombs was not made in Tokyo. Their strategic use was not defined by Stalin.

>The Japanese media and text books are notoriously light on truth. You should not take them at face value.

and american media and text books are not? i think people are just uncomfortable with the possibility that the bombings may not have been justified

America academia doesn't ignore things that are shameful in it's history (despite perceptions). For my thesis in college I spent a year studying differential behaviors between Into-European colonialism and Amerindian genocide. My son (a 7th grader) is learning about chattel slavery right now.

Japanese text books generally don't mention World War II beyond "we attacked Hawaii and got unfairly nuked in return". The Japanese historical community is remarkably unengaged from international scholarship on world war 2. This has been commented on at length from the rest of the international community. It causes massive friction today in South East Asia.

You keep casting aspersions with no factual basis or external authorities.

> Your quotes are from the US government

You wrote that "Truman wanted to drop the bombs" and I've provided a quote from Truman himself that refutes this assertion. You can't have a better source to Truman's state of mind than Truman.