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allodial
10-22-15, 01:15 AM
Why Didn't the Japanese Develop A Deep-Seated Hatred Against Americans After the U.S. Dropped Atomic Warheads to Obliterate Innocent Civilians?

(It seems to go hand in hand that the U.S. military was opposed to the bombing (which may have been a UN joint effort) and that the Japanese were positively surprised at the good treatment by the U.S. occupying power.)

(What follows are various answers from the question posed on Quora (https://www.quora.com/Why-didnt-the-Japanese-develop-a-deep-seated-hatred-against-Americans-after-the-US-dropped-atomic-warheads-to-obliterate-innocent-civilians):)


I suggest you read the book, Embracing Defeat by John W. Dower. To give a brief answer to you question, is along the same lines as Mr. Sawyer. However, there is a more deeper meaning to the Japanese attitude after the war.

To begin, Japan was a nation of starving people. When the Emperor announced to the population that Japan surrendered, he also noted that they would need to, "endure the unendurable and bear the unbearable." To many, that meant slavery, oppression as in the same manner as the Japanese treated their captured nations during the war.

The chief concern for the Allies was to ensure that Japan would never be aggressive again. The arguments for the time was to either abolish the Chrysanthemum Throne and setup a republic like the US or retain the Emperor with limited power. What MacArthur, and any many of this staff who were stationed in Asia before the war, knew that the Emperor would need to remain, that rebuilding Japan is a noble goal, and to create a government that was more in line with the US/UK political system.

When the US began occupying Japan, the first order of business was to get food to the people. Second, many groups suppressed during the war years were allowed to express themselves without censorship and retaliation. Finally, once the new constitution was in effect, especially passage of Article Nine (THE CONSTITUTION OF JAPAN), the country began to recover, and the people developed a nature of gratitude toward the US.


The question presumes that the people being bombed were innocent, and that hatred and revenge are the most normal human reactions under such circumstances. Both assumptions are obviously false.

In the sense of being enthusiastically part of the war effort, mobilized to fight, and fully willing to kill and die for the Japanese emperor, few if anyone in Japan was innocent during the war. I have met numerous people in Japan who have talked about their wartime experiences and related how even as young elementary students they were marched and trained for war, using wooden guns in the place of real ones, and how they would have followed orders to kill invading American soldiers with sharpened sticks when the time came. Some of them even had a chance to act this out in real life. For example, near where I used to live, a US plane was shot down during the war, but the pilot was able to parachute out to what he presumed was safety. However, the people in the village saw his parachute go down. They cornered the US airman in a field and bludgeoned him to death. The body was then buried in a secret location to cover up what they had done.

The Japanese nation was prepared to fight to the end, and only gave up resistance when ordered to by their emperor. In that important sense, no one was innocent. They may have been duped by their government and its propaganda into supporting the war, but they were just as much part of the war effort as the men serving in the field, and saw themselves in that way.

Given how the Japanese army behaved in the Philippines, China, and other countries which it occupied or tried to occupy, it is highly doubtful that the US military did anything the Japanese military would not have done if they were trying to occupy the US, or if they had had the ability to take the war to US shores. As Sherman said, "War is hell." Right or wrong, the US military was just doing what it thought it had to do, and most Japanese people realize this.

At the same time, the question ignores the role of the Japanese military and political establishment in dragging Japan into the war to begin with. Putting aside the morality of Japan's wartime aims, it was Japan's failed political and military strategy, more than anything else, which resulted in the bombings and defeat. The overwhelming feeling within Japan after the war was that these men were to blame for what happened--not the Americans.

Finally, the most unproductive notion on earth is blind hatred. The Japanese nation was nearly completely destroyed during the war, and for some years afterwards hunger, poverty, unemployment and homelessness were a fact of life for many Japanese. They did not have the time and energy to hate--they had to spend their energies on building a new life for themselves and their children. America was an integral part of this rebuilding. Without American aid, many people in Japan would have starved to death. In the light of all these things, it would be foolish to continue on living according to past grievances.

Once I was walking in the countryside and I met an old Japanese farmer. We began to talk and for some reason he related to me how he had been strafed by a US plane during the war while he was working on that same plot of land. He pointed to his body where he had been hit, and then noted that everything was OK now. When we parted, he actually thanked me--as an American--for coming to Japan and for loving his nation. From what I can tell, his attitude is far from unusual among the Japanese. War is a terrible thing, and terrible things happen in war, but one has to move on from the past and build a bright future.

Update: What is so often missing from discussions about the bombing of Japanese cities is context. Here is a link to a video regarding the Japanese bombing of civilians in Guangzhou in 1939: China in WW2 - Terror bombing didn't start in Europe in 1939 (https://www.facebook.com/chinaww2/posts/860283157363984). Whether this justifies US bombing of Japanese cities is an open question. However, it demonstrates something of how Japan prosecuted the war, and Japanese expectations of how war should be fought. Certainly, in Okinawa and the Marianas, both Japanese soldiers and civilians expected no mercy, and were prepared to fight to the bitter end or to kill themselves rather than surrender, once resistance became impossible.

If one ignores the context, US actions during the war seem unreasonable and the Japanese seem to have been victimized by US barbarity. However, in context, the US desire to end the war by bombing cities rather than sacrifice untold numbers of troops in a full-scale invasion (an invasion that would have also resulted in even more horrific civilian casualties, given Japan's unwillingness to surrender) seems both natural and reasonable. All of the older Japanese people I have talked to fully understand this point. Alas, it appears that this point has been lost upon many younger Japanese and a great many foreigners.


I lived in Japan from 1984 to 1987. At that time foreigners were relatively rare, even in Tokyo. One day I was taking someone sightseeing at Asakusa Sens?-ji. An older Japanese man, in his 70s? came up to me, he was drunk (and had an open can of sake in his hand). He told me that after the war he thought he would be a slave*, they had lost the war. But the Americans rebuilt Japan, they couldn't believe it. He thanked me, he thanked America he kept on thanking me for rebuilding Japan, and talked about what America had done for Japan. He went on like this for a long time. He wasn't crying, but he was quite emotional.

This was not an isolated experience, when I mentioned this to other foreigners I knew in Japan, they all said, "oh, yes, that happens." That wasn't the only time I had this experience.

Yes, there are still ultra-nationalists in Japan who hate the US, who hate the victors, who want the emperor restored as the god-head, who want Japan to re-arm, etc. etc. As far as I can tell, they are a small minority.

Chex
10-22-15, 03:51 AM
I know you were speaking about Japan but China's Selling Tons of U.S. Debt. Americans Couldn't Care Less by Daniel Kruger (http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-10-18/china-s-selling-tons-of-u-s-debt-americans-couldn-t-care-less-)

Is this going to be follow the leader?