[ThirdTerm]

The Manhattan Project was a joint Anglo-American project codenamed Tube Alloys and in a section of the Quebec Agreement, Britain and the US agreed to share resources "to bring the Tube Alloys project to fruition at the earliest moment." Based on the Quebec Agreement signed in 1942 between Churchill and FDR, Churchill was consulted on the use of the atomic bomb at Potsdam and he gave his consent to Truman, who subsequently gave the green light after consulting his military advisers. But Churchill's opinion counted most for the young president who had just been promoted accidentally with FDR's death and he had not been informed about the Manhattan Project when he was the vice president. Moreover, the use of atomic bombs prevented the Soviets from entering the war against Japan by ending the war swiftly. Stalin would have demanded further territorial concessions from the West after occupying the northern half of Japan.

It is agreed between us
First, that we will never use this agency against each other.
Secondly, that we will not use it against third parties without each other's consent.
Thirdly, that we will not either of us communicate any information about Tube Alloys to third parties except by mutual consent.
http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cgi-bin/FRUS/FRUS-idx?type=turn&id=FRUS.FRUS1943&entity=FRUS.FRUS1943.p1231&q1=tube%20alloys

[Jihsan]

The OP [redacted - SD] who cannot see the pitfalls in their own agenda before typing.

I don't mean the source as in the location of article on cyberspace. I mean the actual discussion and quotation by people in high authority who played a major part creating History as we know it.

People such as: Dwight Eisenhower, Admiral William Leahy – the highest ranking member of the U.S. military from 1942 until retiring in 1949, General Douglas MacArthur, Assistant Secretary of War John McLoy, Under Secretary of the Navy Ralph Bird, General Curtis LeMay, The Vice Chairman of the U.S. Bombing Survey Paul Nitze, Deputy Director of the Office of Naval Intelligence Ellis Zacharias, The commander in chief of the U.S. Fleet and Chief of Naval Operations, Ernest J. King... Etc.

But... you knew exactly what I meant and just wanted to waste amount of web-space in terms of characters I used to reply on this forum?

[feihua]

But... you knew exactly what I meant and just wanted to waste amount of web-space in terms of characters I used to reply on this forum?

I am a typing fool with bad habits.

That said, I do not think those are relevant facts from credible sources. They are irrelevant facts from credible sources.

Here is the biggest mistake every time this argument comes up:

Thousands of innocent civilians were killed.

The Japanese government does not even see it that way.

The Japanese government, as stated before and as will be stated again, was intent on making conscripts out of arguably the entire population. Males had until the age of 12 to be reasonably innocent, and females had a couple more years allotted to them.

In those citizens view, yep they were innocent. In the eyes of the government of Japan: nope, they were soldiers and were going to be used as soldiers.

Now, personally, I am split on this. I think nuclear weapons are cool and can be used, but I don't like 'em. And my papa-san worked on the Manhattan Project so I have this odd thing in my family history that makes it look like perhaps I should argue for the use of the weapon, although I would not despite how cool they are.

But it remains in the eyes of the Japanese government, their citizens were not innocent.....although much in the way the Russian government couldn't find innocent men at Stalingrad.

To this day, no one can step on Iwo Jima because it is so effin' dangerous. That is just a small island that still needs to be cleaned up. It is very hard to imagine how fucked up Kyushu would be with mines and leftover grenades if an invasion had taken place.

I have been to the Peace Museum(s) and they are friggin' depressing. I am glad there are not many of them.

Here is a picture of the what they call the hypocenter of ground zero in Nagasaki taken from the window of my love hotel room:


They are comfortable with how things worked out.

Here is Nagasaki this century:



People are comfortable even with innocent bystanders.



I am certainly comfortable when I go to Nagasaki.

No one exploded another one on any people so I think the world has learned a lesson.

Personally ABSOLUTELY personally I am glad they were dropped. My family was firebombed by the father of one of one of my best friends, and perhaps firebombed by my own father. My family survived being firebombed by my own family. Imagine that. That last picture above is what I got to take, and also take home with me, because the war ended as soon as it did.

The website is not correct. My father went skeet shooting with those credible sources. He went skeet shooting with LeMay. There is a very good reason he wanted to be in the air. That is where the war would end if it was going to end.

[Rei Murasame]

Worrying about the staggering loss of life (sympathy) of their enemy would have been the last thing on the minds of U.S leaders/service men.

Indeed. That is very clear.

But Jihsan, some people just want to have peace and any price so that they can enjoy the simple things in life, and so it's almost useless to have that argument with them. You and I approach life from a perspective rooted in the destiny of a people (an interesting parallel, despite how we are culturally different in many ways), where things like suicide bombing and sending out boys to fly sacrificial missions can make rational sense, but to the people on the other side it will never make sense.

And that is the root of the misunderstanding in this thread. It's almost like 'martial races' having an argument against the rest, and the rest will not be able to understand it.

Furthermore, in order to assuage their own guilt (although I don't know why they even have any guilt), Americans seem to want to Japanese people to thank the United States for making big enough explosions that would allow Japan to rationalise its own surrender at the time that it did. That makes sense if the person speaking is American and guilt-ridden, but to anyone else it makes no sense since from Japan's perspective America should not have been winning anyway.

I like to make the comparison to that of the Palestinian situation under Israeli occupation, or of the American sexual assaults in Vietnam. What did they used to say? They used to say to them, "It would go easier for you and you would be hurt less if you don't struggle". There is no text-based or verbal argument that can be had when they bring that logic.

It is the logic of someone who is already committed to fighting you physically, and you can see it in this thread in the way that the western posters start out by saying more or less that America had a war to fight and was determined to get the unconditional surrender of all Axis countries and dominate the globe, and that it was up Japan to decide in what way it wanted its people to be slaughtered: the protracted way or the short way. There is no room for Japanese perspectives in that.

Which is why all these threads always go the same way. It is literally the same thing as having a thread about the Intifada. Jews would just come in the thread and write, "look what you have done, making Israel have to kill Palestinians, because you refuse to surrender". It makes no sense to me or you, but in their moral system it does.

[fuser]

I will repeat it last time, the bombs made no sense whatsoever. Japan was ready to surrender and their only wish was to keep their emperor but allies wanted total surrender and dropped the bomb only to let Japan have their emperor anyways.

So, basially

Without bomb Japan surrenders and keeps her Emperor. (no need for invasion)
With bomb Japan surrenders and keeps her Emperor. (no need for invasion)

So, what exactly changed by dropping the bomb?

Absolutely nothing.

[Decky]

So, what exactly changed by dropping the bomb?


Absolutely nothing.

It did accomplish one thing. The yanks made the Soviets shit themselves.

That was always the reason for dropping the bomb, it had nothing to do with the Japanese. As you pointed out the axis cowards were already about to surrender.

The Yanks just wanted to do something to worry the Soviets and didn't care how many civilians they had to slaughter to do it.

[feihua]

Operation Ketsugo

This is the plan of the Japanese Army on how to continue the war after the battle of Okinawa.

Japan was not going to give up following the battle of Okinawa.

Japan surrendered because of atomic bombing. It was not going to surrender and had no plans to surrender.

Meanwhile, the Japanese had their own plans. Initially, they were concerned about an invasion during the summer of 1945. However, the Battle of Okinawa went on for so long that they concluded the Allies would not be able to launch another operation before the typhoon season, during which the weather would be too risky for amphibious operations. Japanese intelligence predicted fairly closely where the invasion would take place: southern Kyūshū at Miyazaki, Ariake Bay, and/or the Satsuma Peninsula.[20]

While Japan no longer had a realistic prospect of winning the war, Japan's leaders believed they could make the cost of conquering Japan too high for the Allies to accept, which would lead to some sort of armistice rather than total defeat. The Japanese plan for defeating the invasion was called Operation Ketsugō (決号作戦 ketsugō sakusen?) ("Operation Codename Decisive"). The Japanese had secretly constructed an underground headquarters which could be used in the event of Allied invasion to shelter the Emperor and the Imperial General Staff.
Kamikaze [edit]

Admiral Matome Ugaki was recalled to Japan in February 1945 and given command of the Fifth Air Fleet on Kyūshū. The Fifth Air Fleet was assigned the task of kamikaze attacks against ships involved in the invasion of Okinawa, Operation Ten-Go, and began training pilots and assembling aircraft for the defense of Kyūshū where the Allies were likely to invade next.

The Japanese defense relied heavily on kamikaze planes. In addition to fighters and bombers, they reassigned almost all of their trainers for the mission, trying to make up in quantity what they lacked in quality. Their army and navy had more than 10,000 aircraft ready for use in July (and would have had somewhat more by October) and were planning to use almost all that could reach the invasion fleets. Ugaki also oversaw building of hundreds of small suicide boats that would also be used to attack any Allied ships that came near the shores of Kyūshū.

Fewer than 2,000 kamikaze planes launched attacks during the Battle of Okinawa, achieving approximately one hit per nine attacks. At Kyūshū, because of the more favorable circumstances (such as terrain that would reduce the Allies radar advantage), they hoped to get one for six by overwhelming the US defenses with large numbers of kamikaze attacks in a period of hours. The Japanese estimated that the planes would sink more than 400 ships; since they were training the pilots to target transports rather than carriers and destroyers, the casualties would be disproportionately greater than at Okinawa. One staff study estimated that the kamikazes could destroy a third to half of the invasion force before its landings.[21]

Naval forces [edit]

By August 1945, the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) had ceased to be an effective fighting force. The only major Japanese warships in fighting order were six aircraft carriers, four cruisers, and one battleship, none of which could be adequately fueled. They could "sustain a force of twenty operational destroyers and perhaps forty submarines for a few days at sea."[22]

The IJN also had about 100 Kōryū-class midget submarines, 250 smaller Kairyū-class midget submarines, 400 Kaiten manned torpedoes, and 800 Shin'yō suicide boats.

Ground forces [edit]

In any amphibious operation, the defender has two options for defensive strategy: strong defense of the beaches or defense in depth. Early in the war (such as at Tarawa), the Japanese employed strong defenses on the beaches with little or no manpower in reserve. This tactic proved to be very vulnerable to pre-invasion shore bombardment. Later in the war, at Peleliu, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa, the Japanese switched strategy and dug in their forces in the most defensible terrain.

For the defense of Kyūshū, the Japanese took an intermediate posture, with the bulk of their defensive forces a few kilometers inland from the shore: back far enough to avoid complete exposure to naval gunnery but close enough that the Americans could not establish a secure foothold before engaging them. The counteroffensive forces were still farther back, prepared to move against whichever landing seemed to be the main effort.

In March 1945, there was only one combat division in Kyūshū. Over the next four months, the Imperial Japanese Army transferred forces from Manchuria, Korea, and northern Japan, while raising other forces in place. By August, they had 14 divisions and various smaller formations, including three tank brigades, for a total of 900,000 men.[23] Although the Japanese were able to raise large numbers of new soldiers, equipping them was more difficult. By August, the Japanese Army had the equivalent of 65 divisions in the homeland but only enough equipment for 40 and only enough ammunition for 30.[24]

As seen in the map below, Allied forces, at the time, estimated Japan had 350,000 troops. The above quoted material shows Japan actually possessed "a total of 900,000 men."

The Japanese did not formally decide to stake everything on the outcome of the Battle of Kyūshū, but they concentrated their assets to such a degree that there would be little left in reserve. By one estimate, the forces in Kyūshū had 40% of all the ammunition in the Home Islands.[25]

In addition, the Japanese had organized the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs. Weapons, training, and uniforms were generally lacking: some men were armed with nothing better than muzzle-loading muskets, longbows, or bamboo spears; nevertheless, they were expected to make do with what they had.[26][27]

One mobilized high school girl, Yukiko Kasai, found herself issued an awl and told, "Even killing one American soldier will do. ... You must aim for the abdomen."[28]

Volunteer Corps [edit]

In March 1945, the cabinet of Japanese Prime Minister Kuniaki Koiso passed a law establishing the creation of unarmed civil defense units, Volunteer Corps (国民義勇隊 Kokumin Giyūtai?). With the assistance of the Taisei Yokusankai political party, the tonarigumi and Great Japan Youth Party, units were created by June 1945.

The Kokumin Giyūtai was not combatant, but working unit for fire service, food production and evacuation. All male civilians between the ages of 12 to 65 years, and females of 12 to 45 years were members. They received training on fire fighting techniques and elementary first aid.

Reformation as Militia [edit]

In April 1945, the Japanese cabinet resolved on reforming Kokumin Giyūtai into civilian militia. In June, the cabinet passed a special conscription law, and named the militia units Volunteer Fighting Corps (国民義勇戦闘隊 Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai?).

The Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai would be organized, if the allied landing unit close to the Japanese homeland. Governors of Prefectures could conscript all male civilians between the ages of 15 to 60 years, and unmarried females of 17 to 40 years.[1] Commanders were appointed from retired military personnel and civilians with weapons experience.

Combat training sessions were held. But, the Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai was primarily assigned to support tasks such as construction, transportation and rationing.

The Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai was intended as main reserve along with a "second defense line" for Japanese forces to sustain a war of attrition against invading forces. After the allied invasion, these forces were intended to form resistance or guerilla warfare cells in cities, towns or mountains.

28,000,000 Combat Capable [edit]

Some 28,000,000 men and women were considered "combat capable" by the end of June 1945, yet only about 2,000,000 of them were recruited when the war ended, and most of them did not experience combats due to Japan's surrender before the Allied invasion of the Japanese home islands. The Battle of Okinawa took place before the formation of Volunteer Fighting Corps. [3] At this stage of the war, the lack of modern weaponry and ammunition meant that most were armed with swords or even bamboo spears.

Within Japan proper, the Kokumin Giyū Sentōtai were never used in combat, except in South Sakhalin (the Battle of Okinawa occurred before its formal inception). And the similar units organized in Japanese exterior provinces were used in battle. The units in Chosen, Kwangtung and Manchukuo sustained heavy casualties in combat against the Soviet Union during the Soviet invasion of Manchuria during the last days of World War II.[4]

The Kokumin Giyūtai was abolished by order of the American occupation forces after the surrender of Japan.

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/is ... ompton.htm

General MacArthur's staff anticipated about 50,000 American casualties and several times that number of Japanese casualties in the November 1 operation to establish the initial beachheads on Kyushu. After that they expected a far more costly struggle before the Japanese homeland was subdued. There was every reason to think that the Japanese would defend their homeland with even greater fanaticism than when they fought to the death on Iwo Jima and Okinawa. No American soldier who survived the bloody struggles on these islands has much sympathy with the view that battle with the Japanese was over as soon as it was clear that their ultimate situation was hopeless. No, there was every reason to expect a terrible struggle long after the point at which some people can now look back and say, "Japan was already beaten."

A month after our occupation I heard General MacArthur say that even then, if the Japanese government lost control over its people and the millions of former Japanese soldiers took to guerrilla warfare in the mountains, it could take a million American troops ten years to master the situation.

That this was not an impossibility is shown by the following fact, which I have not seen reported. We recall the long period of nearly three weeks between the Japanese offer to surrender and the actual surrender on September 2. This was needed in order to arrange details: of the surrender and occupation and to permit the Japanese government to prepare its people to accept the capitulation. It is not generally realized that there was threat of a revolt against the government, led by an Army group supported by the peasants, to seize control and continue the war. For several days it was touch and go as to whether the people would follow their government in surrender.

The bulk of the Japanese people did not consider themselves beaten; in fact they believed they were winning in spite of the terrible punishment they had taken. They watched the paper balloons take off and float eastward in the wind, confident that these were carrying a terrible retribution to the United States in revenge for our air raids.

We gained a vivid insight into the state of knowledge and morale of the ordinary Japanese soldier from a young private who had served through the war in the Japanese Army. He had lived since babyhood in America, and had graduated in 1940 from Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This lad, thoroughly American in outlook, had gone with his family to visit relatives shortly after his graduation. They were caught in the mobilization and he was drafted into the Army.

This young Japanese told us that all his fellow soldiers believed that Japan was winning the war. To them the losses of Iwo Jima and Okinawa were parts of a grand strategy to lure the American forces closer and closer to the homeland, until they could be pounced upon and utterly annihilated. He himself had come to have some doubts as a result of various inconsistencies in official reports. Also he had seen the Ford assembly line in operation and knew that Japan could not match America in war production. But none of the soldiers had any inkling of the true situation until one night, at ten-thirty, his regiment was called to hear the reading of the surrender proclamation.

Wikipedia:

Over 50% of Tokyo was destroyed by the end of World War II.[citation needed] The Operation Meetinghouse firebombing of Tokyo on the night of 9/10 March 1945 was the single deadliest air raid of World War II;[2] greater than Dresden,[13] Hiroshima, or Nagasaki as single events.[14][15]

http://www.japanfocus.org/-Cary-Karacas/3474

In Search of an Apology

In 2007, an extraordinary apology by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō appeared in print. It begins with an acknowledgement that Japan’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians living in the Nationalist Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing beginning in 1938 violated international law and gave the United States a justification for its own devastating incendiary raids on Japan’s capital. The prime minister also admits that, by not capitulating to the United States once defeat became inevitable, the Japanese government essentially permitted the firebombing of Tokyo and thereafter the rest of urban Japan in 1945. To show the sincerity of its apologetic stance toward Tokyo air raid victims, the state agreed to provide financial compensation to survivors and bereaved family members, conduct a comprehensive survey of the dead, and build a memorial both to honor them and to serve as a reminder that the air raids had occurred. The letter exists only as a suggested template, however, written by plaintiffs who sued the Japanese government seeking such an apology and compensation of 1.23 billion yen (approximately $15 million).1 In March 2007, sixty-two years after the catastrophic Great Tokyo Air Raid forever changed their lives, 112 survivors and bereaved family members announced their intent to sue the government for redress. The following month, the plaintiffs, the oldest of whom was eighty-six and whose average age was seventy-four, filed the suit with the Tokyo District Court.2

Standing on the courthouse steps as the lawyers explained their case to assembled media, one plaintiff, clutching memorial tablets as he spoke, remembered how he searched in vain for his parents’ remains for four years after the firebombing. Another, whose parents, siblings, and right arm were all claimed by the air raids on Tokyo, expressed her hope that the lawsuit would reveal the discrimination that she and others endured long after the war ended.3 The lawsuit may be seen as the latest collective effort – and certainly among the last, given the advanced age of the participants – on the part of Tokyo air raid survivors and bereaved family members to call attention to the “forgotten holocaust” of March 10, 1945, that destroyed much of Tokyo’s built-up area, killed an estimated 100,000 people, injured at least 40,000, and displaced one million.4 It also assumes its place among the many other redress cases brought in the last couple decades by a variety of groups in and outside of Japan – including atomic bomb survivors, former sex slaves (‘comfort women’), forced laborers, former prisoners of war, civilian internees, colonial veterans, and war orphans (zanryū koji) – demanding state compensation for war-related suffering.5

[Jihsan]

But Jihsan, some people just want to have peace and any price so that they can enjoy the simple things in life, and so it's almost useless to have that argument with them. You and I approach life from a perspective rooted in the destiny of a people (an interesting parallel, despite how we are culturally different in many ways), where things like suicide bombing and sending out boys to fly sacrificial missions can make rational sense, but to the people on the other side it will never make sense.

And that is the root of the misunderstanding in this thread. It's almost like 'martial races' having an argument against the rest, and the rest will not be able to understand it.

Nice to see Rie on the same level and can appreciate where I'm coming from. Also, you're completely correct when earlier, you side this topic was going to be difficult because we're engaging with people of a different mindset and different upbringing. It may be justified from their point of view, as they've been reading History written by people who have their own ideology, taught by people with a particular bias maybe. The fact that they cannot acknowledge that major historical events, that have changed the course of History, such as this, can also be completely unjustified from another perspective, a view which should be taken into account because the people against the U.S narrative are part of the culture, the "enemy" who suffered... is astounding. Is it the American arrogance kicking in? I will leave you with this quote.

"History will be kind to me for I intend to write it" ~ Sir Winston Churchill

Thousands of innocent civilians were killed.
The Japanese government does not even see it that way.

They are comfortable with how things worked out.

How can you debate this?

This is implying that Japan had no intentions to protect their Empire, their Interest (whatever it may be)

[Powerup]

There is no problem nuking Japan. They were at war and Japan would do anything they could think of to kill the enemies with no principle whatsoever. The Japanese would not hesitate at all to drop the nukes if they had any. You'd better nuke these psychos when you had the upperhand.

[feihua]

feihua hanashimashita: Thousands of innocent civilians were killed.
The Japanese government does not even see it that way.

feihua also hanashimashita: They are comfortable with how things worked out.

How can you debate this?

This is implying that Japan had no intentions to protect their Empire, their Interest (whatever it may be)

You are the one who is supposed to debate it, not me.

It is not part of a debate from me.

We have to cut down on some of the noise first......you are using the words "their Interest" and then saying "whatever it may be" acknowledging it is just a catch all for you.

That out of the way, You are saying my words imply Japan had no intentions to protect their Empire.

I have strong doubts my words imply that.

HOWEVER

Yeah......I am in doubt that Japan had strong intentions to protect what was left of their Empire. And I am not convinced at this point that you have paid much attention to what I posted.

Japan had strong intentions to fight to the death. Fighting to the death is not about protecting an Empire.

Japan as you know it
as I know it
as the world knows it
from that war
is g o n e.

That Empire is gone.

That government no longer exists. That Empire you speak of does not exist and has not existed for a very long time.

That government took very little effort in taking account of their own citizens and property during the firebombings. That is why Japan often gets sued by the citizens of Japan regarding World War 2 whereas the same citizens do not attempt to take other countries to account for the damage and deaths created by the firebombings by the USA.

I do not think you are aware of what I am mentioning.

It does not appear you read the following that is still posted above:




By August, they had 14 divisions and various smaller formations, including three tank brigades, for a total of 900,000 men [on Kyushu].

Although the Japanese were able to raise large numbers of new soldiers, equipping them was more difficult. By August, the Japanese Army had the equivalent of 65 divisions in the homeland but only enough equipment for 40 and only enough ammunition for 30.

The Japanese did not formally decide to stake everything on the outcome of the Battle of Kyūshū, but they concentrated their assets to such a degree that there would be little left in reserve. By one estimate, the forces in Kyūshū had 40% of all the ammunition in the Home Islands.

In addition, the Japanese had organized the Patriotic Citizens Fighting Corps, which included all healthy men aged 15 to 60 and women 17 to 40 for a total of 28 million people, for combat support and, later, combat jobs.





Japan is indeed comfortable with how things have worked out. It is a much better country. It is a much safer country. It is a different government. It has a greater amount of respect in the world. It has no need for war. It will not assist other countries in carrying out war.

There is a big effin' reason people live as long as they do in the very place that created the greatest amount of casualties: the stress factor is zilch compared to other countries.

The debate is for you to do. I wouldn't advise it. Shrugs. I am nonetheless game for it happening.

I mean, what on Earth are you looking for? You want to talk about vivisections in Fukuoka? I worked at Kyudai where those vivisections took place. I lived next door to what was the POW camp at Hakozaki. Do you know what Hakozaki is famous for? It is famous for being the very location that green tea was introduced to Japan. Was such a cultural landmark protected by the Empire you speak of? It was a pit turned into a POW camp that fed soldiers to the University of Kyushu for doctors to dissect. At that location, I know where a man's liver was removed and served charcoal grilled with soy sauce. That was no early war capture. It involved US forces. What is this Empire you speak of that was protected? It is gone. Records are gone. Even the doctor that performed that vivisection and denied it year after year after year lives to this day in Fukuoka and operates a ob-gyn clinic. This is how we know of these details when these records from the Empire are gone along with the Empire. These are confessions. Are you actually going to contradict first hand accounts?!?

With what?!?

In that map of Kurume.....Iizuka......Fukuoka......I know more people than I have ever met in the USA. A great deal more and that is quite a large number considering what I did in the States before moving to Japan. I am speaking of thousands, not hundreds. Tens of thousands. Not once have I ever come across a local who said "Saa, zannen desu ne. That bomb was not needed because after Okinawa we thought the Red Cross was going to show up."

I will show you quite easily how the war was continuing. I can connect you with people from families that feared for their lives greatly not because of invading US forces but because the government was requiring them to join in the fighting. And what choice did they have for they were not going to be shipped out - the war was coming directly to their homes. Look at a satellite map of Kyushu on GoogleEarth. Look at the mountains. Those cannot be crossed except through valleys or the only few and very few roads that progress towards Fukuoka. The tunnels that are present today were not present then. Perhaps one third of those roads did not exist. The only way to get to Fukuoka was going to be town to town as they exist in the valleys. They were not going to be defended with much ammunition at all. They were going to be defended by citizens simply to slow down the enemy and inflict casualties. Suicide is not about protection. Suicide is to inflict damage.

That is my home. Those are my friends. And hardly anyone moves in Japan. These people can only count two locations as homes they had in their entire lives. These communities have been in place for at least four generations with many exceeding that number. No one was bullshitting me they wished the war to continue. No one has bullshitted me thinking they were going to be excused after the defeat in Okinawa.

GoogleEarth has not yet had the ability to let the cars map the streetview of Japan. Give it some time. I will have no problem showing you bunkers and machine gun nests that exist today, covered up in weeds, near Kurume. I will show you treelines along mountains surrounding the valley of Iizuka that blazed in the summer of '45 to clear the way for the POWs in Keisen to build the bunkers and machine gun nests before they were to be exterminated immediately prior to the landing of the US forces.

There was no war there on the ground but it was expected, and it was prepared and waiting. What do you want? First hand accounts from POWs in Fukuoka who were quite aware the war would be continuing?

That war was Not over in Okinawa. It is foolish to think it was, but you are the one who wants to debate that.

How can I debate what?

I am not debating a damn thing. Yet, I will entertain one if that is what you want to initiate. And I will repeatedly provide examples of how the claim that Japan was going to end the war without the bombs being dropped and without the invasion of Kyushu as being total nonsense.

It is amazing you cannot accept the evidence already presented. It is not surprising, however.

[Rich]

In 2007, an extraordinary apology by Japanese Prime Minister Abe Shinzō appeared in print. It begins with an acknowledgement that Japan’s indiscriminate bombing of civilians living in the Nationalist Chinese wartime capital of Chongqing beginning in 1938 violated international law and gave the United States a justification for its own devastating incendiary raids on Japan’s capital. The prime minister also admits that, by not capitulating to the United States once defeat became inevitable, the Japanese government essentially permitted the firebombing of Tokyo and thereafter the rest of urban Japan in 1945.

If Japan's bombing in 1938 violated International law then America and Britain's bombing must have violated it a hundred times over. Really this is such drivel. By this token Americas bombing was illegal and their leaders should have been hung for it. According to this international law the Japanese government had absolutely no jurisdiction to permit the fire bombing of Tokyo.

The truth is that international law is worthless garbage. Unless there is consent by all the regimes of the jurisdiction and a common court system is agreed above the participating States. If two states have sufficient understanding, sufficient moral commonality to be able to agree on rules of war then they shouldn't be fighting against each other in the first place. War is not like lawn tennis or cricket where we can agree on rules and an umpire. it may have been different when monarchs ruled Europe and all belonged to one big family. Are the Palestinians allowed to use nuclear weapons? Of course not. Would we ever agree that the fire bombing of our cities was legitimate. I mean after America had led the murder of over a million Iraqis under sanction America couldn't accept that 9/11 was fair play. Despite the fact that BIn Laden made an open declaration of law. The c**ts whined about Pearl Harbour because the declaration was a few hours late and then the c**ts had the fucking audacity to whine about 9/11 when the declaration of war had come five years earlier. Every fucking attack against Western Liberal States is always denounced as immoral. So why should our enemies even try and comply with our ridiculous codes of law. We'll never grant them legitimacy.

[feihua]

Rich, I have no idea how citizens of Tokyo managed to sue the government in this regard.

It is indeed a bit bizarre.

According to this international law the Japanese government had absolutely no jurisdiction to permit the fire bombing of Tokyo.

I think you mean the American government had no jurisdiction to permit the fire bombing.

Here is the rest of that issue:

The Path Leading to the Lawsuit

A central figure in the lawsuit is its lead plaintiff, Hoshino Hiroshi, who experienced the March 10 raid as a twelve year old. While escaping the flames with his mother and siblings was hellish enough, Hoshino focuses on the resulting scenes of devastation when he explains, in relation to the firebombing of Tokyo, his commitment over the last few decades to being a “memory activist.”6 As he walked through devastated neighborhoods to find out about the safety of relatives, he passed a multitude of dead bodies, including mothers holding their children, most burned beyond recognition. The state’s mobilization of Hoshino to assist with the collection of corpses for burial in temporary gravesites further forced him to face the ultimate result of the United States’ decision to embrace what geographers have referred to as both “place annihilation” and “urbicide” as a form of warfare against Japan.7

In the mid-1990s, Hoshino, in collaboration with the Yanagihara neighborhood association leader and bereaved relatives still living in the area, began a small-scale project to produce a map of the Yanagihara district of Honjo Ward (now Sumida Ward) as it existed before being obliterated by the firebombing, and to collect the names of killed residents. These actions led to the formation of the Association to Record the Names of Tokyo Air Raid Victims (Tōkyō Kūshū Giseisha Shimei no Kiroku o Motomeru Kai), which began a project to compose an extensive list of names of the dead from Tokyo’s wards destroyed by the March 1945 firebombing, an activity that the Japanese government, both in the wake of the air raids and throughout the half-century after its occurrence, had failed to do.8

Working from a small office located above a dilapidated Sumida Ward coffee shop, Hoshino and a few other air raid survivors encouraged neighborhood residents who personally knew of people who had died in the firebombing to complete an “Air Raid Victim Report.”9 In addition to naming the dead, the report encourages witnesses to write reflections about the deceased and to indicate the victim’s specific place of residence prior to the firebombing. To focus on the place of death was in most cases a near impossibility due to the severity of the firestorm and the fact that most victims – those not among the many taken by currents into Tokyo Bay and beyond after they had jumped into canals and the Sumida River to subsequently perish – were quickly buried in mass graves. Leafing through the approximately 8,000 reports that the group collected, now placed in binders lining the shelves in the association’s office, the observer is struck by the fact that the March 10 raid victims overwhelmingly fall into one of three categories: adult females, people over fifty, and people under ten years of age. Not infrequently, a long list of names, indicating the death of most or all of an immediate family, dominates the individual report. In a typical example, one lists a thirty-two year old female named Haru, followed by her seven year old daughter Ayako, six year old son Takashi, and four year old son Atsushi.10

A handful of private citizens, however, did not have the financial and human resources required to undertake a citywide and countrywide search for information about tens of thousands of air raid victims. As such, Hoshino campaigned to compel the Tokyo Metropolitan Government to take over the project. After he raised the issue in the local media and successfully petitioned ward assemblies and other local legislative bodies to pass resolutions calling for it to do so, in 2000 the Tokyo Metropolitan Government officially took over the task and by 2005 had gathered approximately 76,700 names of individuals killed in all raids on Tokyo.11 Those names now fill a couple dozen “books of the dead” that occupy the interior of a controversial monument constructed for air raid victims in Sumida Ward’s Yokoamicho Park.12

Hoshino Hiroshi’s work as a memory activist continued with the formation of the Association of Bereaved Family Members of Tokyo Air Raid Victims (Tokyo daikūshū giseisha izoku kai) in 2000. Consisting of around 700 members, the association began meeting annually the following year. Air raid survivors, bereaved relatives, and war orphans recalled their experiences through participating in group discussions, recreating maps of their neighborhoods as they existed before being destroyed, and taking memorial walks in which they visited significant areas such as Koto Ward’s Kinshichō Park, site of a mass grave holding over 12,000 bodies until the late 1940s.13

The meetings also became a forum in which participants criticized the Japanese government’s treatment of those killed, injured, orphaned, and otherwise affected by the raids. Discussion of the government’s failure to provide relief for air raid victims dominated the 2004 annual meeting, and throughout 2005 the association began preparations for a lawsuit by assembling a pro bono legal counsel composed of over one hundred lawyers “from Sapporo to Okinawa” and collecting written statements from potential plaintiffs whose lives were affected by the March 10, 1945 firebombing.14 Given that over six decades had passed since the event, the vast majority of the 112 plaintiffs, comprised mostly of air raid survivors and relatives of firebombing victims, were children at the time of the raid. About half directly experienced the firebombing, and most of the remaining plaintiffs were among the roughly quarter million children who, evacuated from Tokyo beginning in 1944, lost family members in the firebombing. The individual plaintiff reports, important documents in and of themselves in that they convey the catastrophic impact of the firebombing at the scale of the family unit, show that the March 10 raid affected people in a variety of ways. The most obvious are physical injuries, the deaths of family members, and the destruction of private property. Many plaintiffs also mention the lingering effects of PTSD, prolonged impoverishment, and discrimination faced throughout the postwar period.

Plaintiffs who experienced the March 10 raid concentrate on the loss of family members and the horror of the event, in particular seeing and smelling the corpses.15 In a typical example, one plaintiff, six years old at the time of the raid, writes how she became forever separated from her mother – an all too common occurrence – during the chaos of people attempting to escape the conflagration, and continues to live with the memory of witnessing mountains of bodies. One seventy-three year old plaintiff, the only one in her family to be evacuated from the capital, lost her parents and five siblings, and from then onward lived a miserable existence while working in Tokyo factories and pachinko parlors. Another plaintiff, twenty-one years old in 1945, discovered that his parents had died on a canal embankment in Honjo Ward near their home. Although a government plan had been in place for managing corpses in the event of casualties following an air raid, the state’s inability to deal with so many victims forced him to collect some wood that had failed to burn in the firestorm and cremate the bodies himself. He carried away little more than his mother’s Buddhist prayer beads and father’s gold teeth. Their stated reasons for joining the lawsuit are as varied as their wartime experiences and injuries. The plaintiffs joined in order to preserve the memory of family members killed in the March 10 raid; to express their feeling of being ill-treated by the Japanese government; to make the government admit its “war responsibility” and role in the deaths of so many people in the air raids; to express their anger at Emperor Hirohito for honoring Curtis LeMay in recognition of his postwar involvement with assisting Japan’s Self-Defense Forces; and to call for the construction of an appropriate air raid memorial and charnel house for the remains of unidentified firebombing victims. A reason given by one plaintiff points to the heart of the matter in terms of the prevalent view among air raid survivors regarding the government’s willed ignorance about the raids: “I want the state to understand how much incredible suffering was experienced.”16

Charges Brought Against the Japanese Government

Throughout a series of nine court sessions that lasted from May 2007 to May 2009, lawyers for the plaintiffs presented a number of arguments to justify the demand for compensation and an apology.17 Echoing geographer Kenneth Hewitt’s observation that the results of terror bombing during World War II “were not uniformly or randomly scattered across the whole land and society,” lawyers for the plaintiffs presented casualty estimates, damage reports, and the personal experiences of a few of the million people whose lives were irrevocably altered by the March 10 raid in order to convey a sense of the exceptionally catastrophic nature of the event.18 Thereafter, they charged that the state acted irresponsibly by failing to conduct a thorough survey of air raid casualties and to confirm the identities of the dead. A core argument is the contention that the United States, via its indiscriminate bombing of civilians in the March 10 raid, was liable to pay compensation according to Article Three of the 1907 Fourth Hague Convention - Laws and Customs of War on Land. The Japanese government, argued the plaintiffs, should be held responsible for agreeing to article 19(a) of the 1951 San Francisco Peace Treaty in which the country waived “all claims of Japan and its nationals against the Allied Powers and their nationals arising out of the war or out of actions taken because of the existence of a state of war….” Finally, plaintiffs argued that the defendant Japanese government violated numerous legal statutes, including Article 14 of the current constitution that guarantees equality under the law, by not providing financial relief to air raid sufferers while offering generous benefits to veterans and their families.

In suing the Japanese government, the plaintiffs confronted a multi-layered defense bulwark that has protected the state against an onslaught of war-related redress claims over the last few decades.19 One layer of defense meant to deter compensation claims brought by Japanese citizens is the “endurance doctrine” (jūninron), which holds that, since Japanese civilians equally experienced severe hardship during a time of national emergency, no particular group can receive special treatment from the government.20 This endurance doctrine has usually withstood significant challenges, and when the state has been forced to provide assistance to civilians for war-related suffering – such as atomic bomb sufferers – it has acted to present the suffering as exceptional so as not to open itself up to further compensation claims.21

The Japanese government’s wartime approach to its citizens affected by the war offers an important contrast to its “endurance doctrine”. In 1942, it established the “Wartime Damages Protection Act” (Senji saigai hogo-hō) to provide financial relief to civilians directly impacted by the war through the death of a civilian family member, bodily injury, or loss of personal property.22 Given the enormous damages and dislocation caused by the United States reducing most of Japan’s cities to rubble and ash three years later, it is no surprise that 920 million yen, a majority of the financial relief paid about by the state under the law’s provisions, went to over 17 million people affected by the air raids. That relief came to a complete halt in May 1946, however, when the Supreme Command for the Allied Powers abolished the “Wartime Damages Protection Act” as well as laws that provided financial assistance and disability pensions to veterans, civilian auxiliaries of the military, and their surviving families. In 1952, soon after regaining sovereignty, the government reinstated laws providing financial support to veterans and families, reestablishing the “Act on Relief to Wounded and Sick Retired Soldiers and Bereaved Family Members” (Senshōbyōsha senbotsusha izoku nado engo-hō) and passing the “Soldiers’ Pension Law” in 1953.23 The Japanese government, however, did not reinstate relief benefits to “civilian war victims” (ippan sensaisha). This fundamental shift from the wartime approach to relief did not go unnoticed. In a November 1952 Asahi Newspaper opinion piece, for example, social security specialist Suetaka Makoto argued against the development of a pension system that favored one segment of society over others – pointing explicitly to the exclusion of those orphaned and widowed by air raids – on the grounds that it created a privileged class and thereby contradicted the constitutionally guaranteed principle of equality under the law.24 While the government expanded the relief laws over the next two decades to include more military-related claims, it ignored calls to provide relief for civilian war victims. Subsequent legislative attempts to provide financial relief failed as well. In 1973, the ruling Liberal Democratic Party blocked the passage of a War Damages Relief Bill (Senji saigai engo hōan), as it did when lawmakers from opposition parties in the Diet collectively presented the bill for consideration fourteen times throughout the 1980s.25

The Court Verdict

At the very first oral proceeding in 2007, the Japanese government asked the court to reject all claims, arguing that they were merely a rehash of those made in a lawsuit brought by victims of the firebombing of Nagoya City, which the Supreme Court dismissed in 1987. The state reaffirmed its long-held stance that it is not constitutionally mandated to provide for compensation related to air raid losses, which it considers as part of overall war damages.26

The Tokyo District Court allowed the trial to continue, and in proceedings over the next two years the defendant Japanese government largely remained silent during the court proceedings. One of its few actions was to provide a brief list of war damage reports requested by plaintiff lawyers.27 Those surveys, countered lawyer Kuroiwa Akihiko, did not include an examination of the particular effects of the air raids or a coordinated and comprehensive attempt by the government to find out who was injured and killed.

At the final proceeding that took place in May 2009, the plaintiffs submitted a 150-page legal brief, which the government, declining to offer a closing statement, characterized as not worthy of acknowledgement. Perhaps aware of how the court would eventually rule, the plaintiffs’ head lawyer, Nakayama Taketoshi, stated that the purpose of the lawsuit was to tell the situation of the Tokyo air raids, to make clear the suffering of the plaintiffs, and to raise awareness of the state’s responsibility to deal with this war-related issue. Another attorney assumed a more combative tone by charging that the government was directly responsible for the Tokyo air raids and its resulting casualties by its continued prosecution of the war after it became apparent that Japan had lost.

In December 2009, the Tokyo District Court ruled against the plaintiffs and ordered them to pay all costs associated with the trial. It ruled that it is not possible to determine conclusively that Article Three of the 1907 Fourth Hague Convention became a part of international customary law or that it gives individuals the right to seek damages when the laws of war are violated. Then, essentially adopting the state’s long-held “endurance obligation” position, the court stated that it would set a discriminatory precedent by ruling in favor of the plaintiffs due to the fact that the almost the entire Japanese nation had suffered during the war. In another echo of previous court rulings on war-related compensation cases, the Tokyo District Court held that only a legislative solution could resolve the issue of civilians– in particular air raid victims and orphans – who might warrant financial relief for wartime losses.28

Conclusion

Given the Japanese court system’s well-established record of rejecting war-related compensation lawsuits, observers of this particular lawsuit – and possibly some of the participants themselves – did not expect the Tokyo District Court to rule in favor of the plaintiffs. Despite the ruling, however, the plaintiffs can claim to have made important progress in the overall movement to ensure that the air raids are not forgotten. Via the first major lawsuit filed by a large number of people affected by the March 10, 1945 firebombing of Tokyo, a public record exists that conveys the conviction that the Japanese government bears responsibility for allowing the air raids to take place and for its subsequent neglect and mistreatment of air raid victims and bereaved families. The lawsuit, via news coverage and public awareness campaigns that included “Peace Walks” through Asakusa and signature-gathering drives at train stations in areas particularly affected by the March 10 firebombing, also heightened public awareness. At the handful of public meetings related to the lawsuit, hundreds of participants heard from not only plaintiffs and lawyers but from lawsuit supporters that included Tanaka Terumi, executive director of the Japan Confederation of A- and H-Bomb Sufferers Organization, and Maeda Tetsuo, Tokyo representative of the Solidarity Committee for Chongqing Bombing Victims and a leading specialist on military affairs. This indicates how Tokyo air raid memory activists have formed important connections with groups involved in other redress activities and situated discussion of the Tokyo air raids in relation to Japan’s own air raids on Chinese cities and the general framework of the indiscriminate bombing of civilian populations.29

Barring a radical departure from precedent, the Tokyo High Court will almost certainly rule against the appeal currently before it. The energy being generated by the lawsuit, however, is also being directed toward a national movement that may have a greater chance of realizing its stated objective. On August 14, 2010, local citizens groups, bereaved family groups, and air raid survivors from 25 cities announced the creation of a Japan Air Raid Victim Liaison Committee (Zenkoku kushu higaisha renraku kyōgikai). Its main goal is to petition Japanese Diet members and municipal assemblies in cities affected by the 1945 air raids to support the creation of a financial relief law for air raid survivors and family members of victims, as well as to conduct an extensive survey of people killed in the air raids. Masuzoe Yōichi, during his 2007-2009 term as Minister of Labor, Health, and Welfare, stated that it was time to “deal decisively” with the issue of relief for air raid victims. Similar to the matter of compensating Korean and Chinese wartime forced laborers, the Japanese government under the leadership of the Democratic Party of Japan may prove to be amenable to actually taking up the issue if significantly pressured to do so.30 Attending the first Japan Air Raid Victim Liaison Committee was Sugiyama Chisako, who lost her left eye during an air raid on Nagoya and has labored without success since the 1970s to compel the government to pass a relief law. Reflecting the tenacity of air raid memory activists, the ninety-four year old, after telling reporters that the war has not ended for air raid sufferers, vowed not to die before the government passes such legislation.31

[Rei Murasame]

The c**ts whined about Pearl Harbour because the declaration was a few hours late and then the c**ts had the fucking audacity to whine about 9/11 when the declaration of war had come five years earlier. Every fucking attack against Western Liberal States is always denounced as immoral. So why should our enemies even try and comply with our ridiculous codes of law. We'll never grant them legitimacy.

That is so well said. I'd like to be able to actually quote this in the future, it really is like you can never satisfy the requirements.

[Thompson_NCL]

Portraying your enemies as dishonourable and immoral is a cornerstone of effective propaganda. It has nothing to do with Western Liberalism. I'd be stunned if Bush had turned around and said 'Oh yeah, this non-state actor did declare war on us five years ago, so I guess they aren't really savage murderers'. It's more bizarre that you consider your insight into the patently obvious to somehow prove something... I'm not sure what though.