[the-dude]

This reminds me of a video I stumbled across on YT : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eMq-fApmzts

This guy alleges that the US were 'kind' on Japan (only light tribunal?) after the war because they wanted to acquire the bio-warfare knowledge of the Japanese.

And the Japanese tested bio-bombs.

[retrac]

This is a constantly changing area of history, so we're on shaky ground. The diaries of the chamberlain to Hirohito were only published a couple years ago, for example. They implicate the emperor deeply in war-time decisions in a way that contradicts the post-war narrative of a hapless well-meaning buffoon misled by his underlings.

I suspect the real reason is close to the usually accepted story, though. Millions of Japanese thought the emperor was a living god. That's how many Americans viewed it then. It's a useful interpretive lens even now.

If the Emperor concedes and surrenders, all of his legitimacy transfers to whoever the Emperor says to listen to. MacArthur got the unofficial title gaijin shogun -- foreign Shogun, the shogun being the military dictator who ruled pre-Meiji Japan, in the name of the Emperor.

Dépose or kill the emperor and all bets are off. What would be institutionally legitimate in its place? How long to construct it? When you have an entire administration in place, it'd be awfully tempting to whitewash the imperial institution. Which is exactly what MacArthur did. Speaking of which, the personality of Douglas MacArthur dominates this whole topic. He had carte blanche. Complete unlimited authority. And he exercised it, often in ways not anticipated in Washington. He was an eccentric man and quite opaque as to his decision-making.

[wrp]

> ...the post-war narrative of a hapless well-meaning buffoon...

It was clear from the start that the Emperor's involvement was being whitewashed. The Australian judge at the Tokyo trials, William Webb, argued publicly that Hirohito should be prosecuted, but it seems he could gather no political support. Since the trial, several books have covered this ground. This article by one such author gives a bit more context on the politics of the trials. (https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-11-12/tokyo-trial-70th-anni...)

[csense]

I wonder why we didn't try the same thing in the War on Terror?

Capture high-ranking Islamic clerics, give them a choice: "Go on TV and explain to everyone that Allah's will is for all good Muslims to throw down their weapons and surrender to the Americans. If you refuse, we'll put you on trial for war crimes."

[1] In this post I'm not taking a position on the morality or legality of the US taking such an action, either in WW2 or the War on Terror. I'm merely noting that:

- The US did this sort of thing with the Emporer in WW2, and it seemed to work.

- The US didn't do this sort of thing in Afghanistan / Iraq, and those wars were definitely same kind of overwhelming success story that WW2 was. (I don't dispute some key objectives were obtained: Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were eventually killed; and there has no been 9/11 level terrorist attack on US soil since 9/11 itself.)

[bluepizza]

> quite opaque as to his decision-making

Genuine question: I thought it was well understood that his decision making was guided by a fear of Russian expansion, and that conservative measures (such as keeping the Emperor in place and several important politicians) were aimed at quickly reestablishing the country to avoid communist impetus from arising. Is this not the case?

[retrac]

Yes, you have it right. Japan collapsing politically would invite Soviet "aid" in the occupation of Japan. A partition like Germany was to be avoided. I just meant that you won't find anything from MacArthur clearly explaining it that way, as his retconned history, which became the accepted history, had a largely blameless imperial institution, so no justificatiom for its retention was really necessary.

[kfrzcode]

Sorry, how does history change?

I think perhaps the narrative, the evidence on-hand, primary sources, etc. could all be considered and as a body of historical evidence we could say the understanding from our perspective continues to evolve; but there's no world in which the history changes. Events, causality, arrow of time, etc.

[simple-thoughts]

History is not the past - it’s the study of documents from the past. So history changes for two main reasons (1) the uncovering of documents that were not previously available for study and (2) new, more convincing synthesis of the existing body of documents.

[daemoens]

I think you are being too pedantic about the word “change”. No one assumed he meant someone went back with a time machine and literally changed history.

[xvilka]

We would never know if that happens though.

[twelve40]

they had to quickly repurpose it to be used in the next big thing with whatever tools did the trick, so makes sense

[WeylandYutani]

Same happened with Western Germany. The de-nazification campaign didn't go very deep. Hell just look at von Braun.

[mytailorisrich]

The US had invaded Japan, they did not need to be "nice" to acquire any of Japan's knowledge.

My understanding is that the US were worried about the communists and Japan's stability in general and decided not to unduly rock the boat.

[082349872349872]

see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reverse_Course

[discardedrefuse]

There's some interesting analysis of WWII that posits that the nukes were completely unnecessary. Stalin was poised to invade Japan from the north so the US had to act fast.

https://foreignpolicy.com/2013/05/30/the-bomb-didnt-beat-jap...

I don't know how accurate this is, but its a good read.

[refurb]

One piece that is always missing in these arguments is - what was the alternative? Blockade Japan into submission? Is hundreds of thousands of Japanese civilians dying of hunger better than being killed by an atomic weapon?

[hutzlibu]

How about exploding the bomb in the sky, visible from the emperors palace and the whole city?

Or using it against an actual military target.

The message would have been clear, we can annihilate you if we want and you don't surrender. But they choose to go against the civilian population simply, because they wanted the data, of what a bomb does to a city. And that by that time bombing civilians was already pretty normalized anyway, so trying to save civilian life simply was not an issue.

[refurb]

I mean, the Allies literally bombed a major city with the first atomic weapon and Japan was like "yeah, not going to surrender". Then after the 2nd bomb, it still took days and a Soviet invasion to get them to surrender.

I'm not sure a demonstration would mean much if destroying a entire city didn't convince them.

[discardedrefuse]

The article I posted covers this (the section called Scale). When put into context, the destruction of Hiroshima just wasn't that impressive. We had already leveled 66 Japanese cities with conventional bombs. Hiroshima may have been a technical / scientific feat, but the end result paled in comparison to what we had already done before.

[daemoens]

The issue with this argument is that neither the bomb nor the imminent Soviet invasion ended the war. The bombs were certainly one of the largest factors that ended the war, but it also wasn't the sole factor that ended the war.

[bluepizza]

This is 1945, before the decades long alliance and best friendship between US and Japan, before Internet, computers, and most electronics. Americans can't even read the signposts in the streets, let alone find and interpret the results of extremely secret operations.

[Larrikin]

Are you implying that in 1945 there were no people who spoke Japanese and English and Japan itself didn't have decades of emmigration to all parts of the world? The US committed one of its greatest crimes against humanity during the war against the huge number of Japanese Americans in the US.

[the_optimist]

Which crimes are you referring to? Which war are you referring to?

[HWR_14]

He's referring to the US government rounding up US citizens of Japanese descent and moving them to camps during WWII. It was a horrific thing the US government did. Unfortunately, because humans can be horrible, I would disagree it was one of the greatest crimes against humanity in history.

[fuzzfactor]

Good observation.

1945 was about halfway between now and when slavery was still widely accepted as the norm since time immemorial.

Statistically you would have to expect attitudes of what amounts to "humanity" to have only been about halfway from slavery to what there is now. Anything considered more modern would only have begun to exist to a much smaller extent at the time.

[hackerlight]

That doesn't make sense. The US won and Japan lost, the US could have taken whatever information they wanted to.

[brnaftr361]

That makes sense in a vacuum, but if some of, or all of the principal actors of a given institution run a tight ship it's entirely probable that there are various unknown secrets to which only they are aprised. There's nothing that forbids some key officer from literally burying information in a completely undocumented spot. In such a case, if the buried treasure is of any value whatever, it becomes a point of leverage. Some artifact that could be lost to the world forevermore or discovered, hinging on some nefarious negotiation.

Not to mention the reality that aside from some sense of justice, allowing any of these people their freedom is probably irrelevant in the larger scheme of things. Which is to say that it's a gambit for valuable, empirical knowledge which for all intents and purposes, I would surmise, couldn't be elsewise obtained due to the moral standards of the West, or some theatrics which will have little consequence.

[DocTomoe]

Documents have a habit of burning to ashes if they have a chance of becoming evidence.

What this is referring to is the relative immunity Unit 731 got post-war in exchange for research results being handed over, which is a well-known historical fact.

[bluepizza]

It does make a lot of sense. In the most basic terms, almost no American spoke Japanese, let alone at a scientific level. Collaboration would be at the essence.

But I think the greater point that you are missing is that you can't walk over a country of 150 million people and achieve total power. Without large doses of good will, collaboration, and soft power, resistance gets in the way of every single goal an occupation has.

[bouncycastle]

> almost no American spoke Japanese, let alone at a scientific level.

Nonsense. Quote "the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) trained and graduated nearly 6,000 linguists—the majority of whom were Japanese Americans." Source https://encyclopedia.densho.org/Military%20Intelligence%20Se...

[meitham]

This doesn’t change any of your points but records show Japan population around half that of the US during WW2, roughly half the number you mentioned https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Japan