Should the atomic bombs have been dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

World War II General WWII Discussion
#141

In one sense.

In another, the Americans have reaped what they sowed by nuking Japan. It made Japan a resolutely anti-war society, notwithstanding the potentially dangerous retrograde elements that yank my chain (and China’s and a lot of other places’). The Americans have made several attempts to get Japan to renounce or ignore its ‘no war’ constitution, starting a few years after it was instituted.

Article Nine. Early in the occupation, MacArthur identified the abolition of war as a critical principle to be included in any revision of Japan’s constitution. MacArthur drew on the idea of a world without war expressed in the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. However, the no-war provision as it appears in the final constitution is very much a negotiated principle, going beyond American mandate or authorship. MacArthur stipulated that Japan would abolish war as a sovereign right of the nation. War would be renounced as a means to settle disputes and as a means to preserve security. Japan would not have the right to build or maintain a Japanese Army, Navy, or Air Force, and would relinquish the right of belligerency (Gordon: 104). This wording would have denied Japan the right to use military force for any reason, including defense. In the February 1946 draft constitution, Charles Kades, chair of SCAP’s constitutional committee, deleted the reference to national defense, but broadened the prohibition against military forces and supplies.

Once in their court, Japanese Diet members debated the clause, particularly its implications for national defense. Many within the Diet argued that this meant Japan could not defend itself from attack. Others countered that the right of national defense was irrevocable and so Article Nine could not prohibit it. Still others cautioned that the Pacific War had been waged in the name of national defense. Some argued that Article Nine would keep Japan out of the United Nations by precluding Japan from contributing to international peacekeeping and thus, be ultimately self-defeating. While politicians argued, the Japanese people embraced the no-war provision. John Dower suggests that they did so because Article Nine offered this devastated, defeated people a positive national result from the war. While they might be proud of little in their recent national past, Japanese could be proud to lead the world in outlawing war (398).

Following months of debate, the final version of the “no-war” clause came from Japan’s House of Representatives:

Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation and the threat or use of force as a means of settling international disputes.

In order to accomplish the aim of the preceding paragraph, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the state will not be recognized.

Most analysts agree that the failure to clearly define national defense left the meaning of Article Nine open to debate for all time. Article Nine’s ambiguity came into play almost immediately with the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, and then again with the Korean War. In the Cold War context of a regional communist threat, U.S. and Japanese governments interpreted Article Nine to support rearmament for national defense.

Currently, Bush and his morons have been pushing Japan to take a greater stake in fighting Bush’s bogey of “tourism”.

It’s a pity that George the Stupid and other national leaders weren’t limited by constitutions similar to Japan’s.

I was watching a docu regarding the ‘Comfort Girls’ which was very annoying, particularly as they interviewed former Japanese soldiers that had made use of them, and they were now saying how much they had respected these girls. Not the same story as the girls themselves told. Some of these former Comfort Girls confronted Japanese tourists, many of them young females, and explained the situation to them. The Japanese women broke sown as they heard about the atrocities commited against the girls.

http://www.abc.net.au/austory/transcripts/s351798.htm

The comfort women issue ain’t always as simple as it’s made out to be.

There are complex issues about Japan’s colonial exploitation of Korea to WWII and, much as modern Korea and other nations might wish to deny them, unpleasant realities about families selling girls into sexual slavery or just selling them without concern for where they might end up. It still goes on, otherwise a lot of bars in Asia wouldn’t have 10 year old sheilas out the back for ugly fat Aussies and other Westerners to fuck. Bastards!

There’s some excellent papers by feminist writers (not nutcase man haters but good historians and social analysts) on this, including one Korean writer. I’ll see if I can find one.

#142

Here’s excerpts from one Korean writer I had in mind. The whole paper at the link is worth reading. It shows that American troops were using much the same system after WWII as Japanese troops did during WWII. Only the Yanks were on the good side. :wink:

Seen from an anti-Japan, nationalist perspective prevalent among activists especially in South Korea, the comfort women issue is simple and clear: Japan as a colonial power exploited Korea’s human resources by rounding up tens of thousands of young unmarried girls and women to be used as military sex slaves. Seen from a more global perspective, however, the issues involved in the comfort women case are complex, running the gamut from the problem of ‘militarized prostitution’ to that of sexual slavery based on gender, age, social class, and ethnicity. Coerced sexual labor, i.e., sexual slavery, was inflicted primarily upon lower class young females of colonial Korea by imperial Japan during the Asia-Pacific War,(6) but not every former comfort woman had been forcibly drafted by the state power. In addition, while teenage Korean maidens from impoverished families constituted the overwhelming majority, relatively older Japanese prostitutes, and primarily lower-class women of colonized Taiwan and other occupied territories were also used as comfort women during the “Fifteen Year War” of aggression pursued by imperial Japan, starting from the Manchurian invasion in 1931 to its unconditional surrender in 1945.

At the core of the contestation over the representation of the military comfort women as sex slaves versus licensed prostitutes(7) lies the issue of state responsibility in forced recruitment of comfort women and the maintenance of the comfort system. On a deeper level, however, many of the central issues around sexual violence in warfare and its relationship to the cultural constructions of gender and human sexuality–more specifically heterosexuality–in patriarchal societies, are being called into question, including the masculinist sexual culture and the perennial question concerning the proper relationship between prostitution and the state. The Rest & Recuperation program for the U.S. soldiers during the Vietnam War was a recent example of a state institution looking after the physical needs of military men.(8) In fact, there still exist thousands of prostitutes in the kijich’on, the U.S. military camptowns in South Korea, and the Korean media used to refer to them as wianbu (“comfort women” in Korean).(9)

She’s still running the predictable feminist “prossies were victims of states / military etc” line but there’s a long history of Koreans (and plenty of others) selling their daughters to sex agents.

More delving into the past needed.

#143

I realise I’m drifting this topic, but I think it’s worth putting this stuff up. I’ll leave it to mods to split it or not.

From the Association for an Unbiased View of History website http://www.jiyuu-shikan.org/

Testimony 2: SUMITA Tomokichi, former engineer belonging to the 6th Regiment, 6th Division of the Imperial Japanese Army

Mr.Sumita kept notes of interviews with 15 Korean, Chinese, and Russian comfort women he had met during military duty in the Chinese continent and Manchuria beginning in 1938. He was curious as to how they became comfort women, and writes that their human dramas were all strikingly similar. Korean and Chinese comfort women had been all sold into prostitution to Korean or Chinese dealers. The following is a typical account.

He writes that he happened to visit a restaurant in Hankow in December of 1938, where he was greeted by a woman about 30 years old whom he had assumed to be a Japanese, since she seemed to speak the language well. However, she told him that she was a Korean, whereupon he asked her if she knew anything about “comfort stations”, since he was curious.
This lady told him that she was from north Korea,near the Russian border. The area is poor, and there was no way for many families to subsist but by selling their daughters at about age 17 or 18 to Korean dealers. There was a wide network of such dealers, called “Zegen”.
This lady told him she was sold by her parents at age 18 for a total of 380 yen (300 yen, plus 80 yen to cover her father’s debt), to a Korean dealer. She was taken with 15 other women to Shanghai three days later, to work at comfort stations operated by Koreans. When the first Shanghai incident broke out in February 1932, the Japanese military became a good customer.
Later, the lady married a Korean from Hankow,who happened to visit Shanghai. She had been in Hankow since February of 1938, and had come to know many Chinese.
After the onset of the Sino-Japanese war, she heard that the activities of Zegen, to buy and send young women to become prosititues for the Japanese army, increased.
The lady told him that there was also a Chinese secret organization, “Honpan”, which also gathered women with methods similar to Zegen. She said that at the comfort stations, each woman had to entertain 25 to 30 men per day, without rest, and very poor food. Many contracted venereal diseases, and there were cases of suicide. There were more women from north Korea than south, probably because there is less work in the severe climate.

To confirm this story, Mr.Sumita visited a comfort station for the first time in January 1939. A comfort woman who called herself “Yaeko” told him she was from north Korea, and was sold four years ago for 370 yen (250 yen plus 120 yen family debt) to Zegen. She was now 22, and the operator of the comfort station was a Korean couple who were both 42. She said that she had received no health check-ups.
Mr.Sumita notes that around this time, the general rate for non-commissioned officers for one hour was two yen. He had paid the money, but when her story was over, he told her he had a stomach ache and left the room. Mr.Sumita writes that he never had a sexual relationship with a comfort woman for fear of contracting VD.
He was stationed in Changan, Hupei Province from August 1939 to Feb.1940.
Here, he interviewd two more Korean comfort women, whose stories were similar. They had also been taken away from their homes by Zegen. Later, in 1941, he was sent to Manchuria. About once or twice a month, he was sent to Halpin on military business, where there were Russian, Chinese, and Korean comfort women. The rate was three yen for Chinese and Korean women, and five for Russian. One Russian comfort woman told him that she applied to become a comfort woman to help her family, and swore that none of the Russian women had been sold by fellow Russians. Mr.Sumita writes all those he interviewd were consistent in telling him that Zegen in Korea and Honpan in China were involved in gathering comfort women.

http://www.jiyuu-shikan.org/e/database3.html

Actually, maybe we should have a separate section on men, sex, and war. I’ve got a great picture somewhere of American servicemen queued up along streets in Honolulu waiting for their three minutes of fun (one to undress, one for the biz, and one for a wipe and dress again). Not to mention how the Americans ran the prossie system in Hawaii and oppressed the shelias there who gave some of their boys their only taste of pussy before dying on some miserable island or as their ship or plane sunk below them in the middle of nowhere.

#144

Just in case anyone thinks comfort women were remotely like the current Asian bar girls, here’s some of them posing with an American soldier after they ended up in American hands.

Not a happy snap.

Here’s the article that expands on the picture. The Seoul Times

comfort women.jpg

#145

More feminist comment here.

http://www.japanfocus.org/products/details/2063

In case anyone thinks I’ve gone soft: If women aren’t entitled to comment on women being raped by men, then who is?

#146

Some of the complexities in the Korean comfort women issue.

The gendered aspect of Korean nationalism is especially evident in the public debate surrounding the comfort women. Hyunah Yang shows that the discourse on the comfort women has resulted in the reinforcement of patriarchal nationalism, as the women are perceived as having soiled the dignity of the nation instead of addressing the elusive guilt and complicity coming from native Korean men who acted as intermediaries to force, coerce and trick the women to ‘enlist’.[11] Similarly, Bruce Fulton looks at literary representations of military prostitutes in the genre of kijich’on [camp town] fiction and find that the women are used as an allegory for a subordinated Korean nation provoking uneasy feelings of masculine humiliation.[12] As Chunghee Sarah Soh rightly points out when commenting the comfort women issue, Korean women have indeed repeatedly paid the price to ‘save the nation’ and act as ‘patriots’ with their bodies as they have been sent away as tributes or gifts to please dominant powers.[13] Soh sees this as a result of a binary classification between what she calls those women who, to marry, were socialised to be selfless wives and devoted mothers, and those women who, to date, were recruited and trained to entertain and offer their bodies. With a long history of being a vassal under Chinese, Japanese and American imperialism and governed by the Confucian concept of serving the great [sadaejuû], this concerns court ladies to the Mongols, tributary women [kongnyô] to the Ming emperor, captives [hwanhyangnyô] to the Manchu dynasty, comfort women [chôngsindae or wianbu] to the Japanese, war brides and military prostitutes [yang’gongju] to the Americans, and kisaeng girls to foreign businessmen and tourists.

My bold.

http://wwwsshe.murdoch.edu.au/intersections/issue11/hubinette.html

#147

I have a couple of pics of Comfort Women with a friend of mine. They had been liberated, and one can see the look of relief and sense security on their faces as they link his arm. They say a picture speaks a thousand words, these girls have been through it. They weren’t all sold into sexual slavery, many of them were duped into it. The Japanese articualrly liked to recruit Korean women because of their reputation for virginity.

The picture of the Japanes lining up to take their turn is particularly poignant, as all of these virgins would be placed in a hut and truckloads ould be delivered to them. The Japanese just went through them one at a time. Not the best way for a girl to loose her virginity. What was especially brutal - if any one thing can be considered as being more brutal than the rest - was the way the girls were disposed of if they caught any diseases. The japanese would sperate her from the others and shoot her by placing a rifle in her vagina. As if it was her fault that she had been infected.

#148

Perhaps more because they held them in contempt, as they did the Chinese and everyone else who wasn’t Japanese. Another bad consequence of 19th century colonialism run by an extraodinarily arrogant medieval power with 20th century weapons. Not unlike some Islamic tools running around today.

The picture of the Japanes lining up to take their turn is particularly poignant, as all of these virgins would be placed in a hut and truckloads ould be delivered to them. The Japanese just went through them one at a time. Not the best way for a girl to loose her virginity. What was especially brutal - if any one thing can be considered as being more brutal than the rest - was the way the girls were disposed of if they caught any diseases. The japanese would sperate her from the others and shoot her by placing a rifle in her vagina. As if it was her fault that she had been infected.

The Australians, and British, had field brothels in North Africa. There’s nothing much in official documents about them, but I doubt they were all staffed with energetically patriotic Australian and English sheilas lying back and thinking of England.

I’ve come across a few official fragments, and some comments to me from a few blokes who were there, that make it pretty clear that some of our blokes were probably fucking children. Local Arab or whatever children.

I can see why these things aren’t recorded officially.

We mightn’t be too clean, either.

The North African prossies were probably recruited through similar local systems to the Japanese, but not disposed of in the same way if infected.

The Australian / British medical inspections were rather more intelligent than the dumb shit the Japanese often did. Their idiotic attachment to ‘spirit’ held that all sicknesses were a result of deficient ‘spirit’ in the soldier. It was no accident that their field hygiene was so poor and that their rates of avoidable illness were so high. They were first rate morons in some respects.

#149

You are right, we have moved on, what we are now discussing deserves its own thread. However, for reasons of continuity, I shall continue here.

As I am a man blinded by morality, I hear your outrage. It is matched by my own. Having been raised to oberve chistian virtue, I am deeply moved by the plight of the Comfort Women and others.

To begin, I think the road long between the recruitment of prostitutes, to move from one brothel to work in another, and the systematic enslavement of thousands of young innocent women and girls by means of kidnapping and confidence tricks from all over Asia and Polynesia. How those women were treated is galling, and it doesn’t take much interpretation of the photo image you have posted, to see how their vulnerability was abused (It’s not much unlike the one I previously mentioned, but at least they were smiling a s they felt safe).

I have indeed visited many bars(brothels) in my time. Simply because practically every bar, in certain places had its girls. However, I hasten to add that I never made use of their service, but I was not averse to buying them a beer or even a meal. Quite often, I would be the only person in the bar with the girls, because everyone else was occupying a room with another one. What I used to frequently hear from them was " You are good boy, Johnny!" And so, I would listen to their story, and it was never a happy one.

Sadly, most of these third world and ex-colonial countries are very male dominated societies. A girl can very easily become an outcast; she can be raped or raped and made pregnant, or fall in ove and made pregnant and then abandoned, or her father may have died and she becomes the breadwinner for her mother and siblings - the reasons for these girls turning to prostitution are legion. The crux of the matter was always the same, if they did not prostitute themselves, how would their families survive, to that I had no answer. Not, given the society and circumstances in which they lived.

The Brits would have covered up their brothels in places such as North Africa, those were the times and that was how things were done, and there was probably less consideration for the prostitutes as much for racial reasons as any. However, for the most part, there was no brothel for the frontline troops, particularly in South East Asia. The shear scale of what the Japanese did, bears no comparison to anything the allies might have done, not that I condone or apologise for what the allies did.

By the way, what was happening in Singapore, at its peak, was nothing as compared with Bangkok or Manila.

#150

I take your point, but that was true of all the women they enslaved. With the Koreans, it was about their virginity. They didn’t want virgins because it would give their soldiers a thrill to be the first, but simply because virginity implied ‘clean’.

Each of these girls were placed in small cubicals containing a bed of sorts, in a hut which contained many cubicles. The trucks would roll up and the men just line up. Each soldier would go inside relieve himself and the next would follow. Imagine how a young virgin, raised with high moral virtues would be affected after thirty or forty men had just had their way with her, and knowing this was to be her life, for all she knew, from now on - absolutley soul destroying, again as can be seen in the picture.

The testament of the lady in the link I posted above was hard and distressing, but she was a play-thing of the officers, not the masses of soldiery.

#151

Japan’s militaristic tendencies alone would not have resulted in bombings of Japan if they had been sensible about choosing their opponnents.

#152

I’ve read most of the comments here I only have a small comment myself
Joseph Stalin had 15 million man army starring right down our throats and a Japan that was in a suicidal state.Guess what IT WORKED ! it ended the war and scared the shit out of Stalin as his 15 million man army could in a couple of days go up in a puff of radioactive smoke. And turned what could have been a hot war into a cold war.

Cavalry Gunner

#153

Hello!

Thanks for supporting my point that the nukes were mainly dropped for the reasons of impressing USSR.
Because many poeple here say that it did not play much role.

Regards
Igor

#154

He hE
i think it should be quite amazing infor Rising Sun.Thank you and mst Bravo for the posts.

#155

Here’s part of a review of a very good book I read on it a few years back.

One chapter, for example, describes the rough world of Hotel Street where servicemen went for liquor, souvenirs, tattoos, and impersonal three-minute sex with female prostitutes. The prostitutes, mostly white and fro the mainland, were expected to service one hundred men in a single day. They were regulated by the vice squad and exploited by their madams. But they were more than victims. Lured by fast money and temporarily backed by military brass they learned to use what little wartime leverage they had to defy local authorities and enhance their own mobility and status. By war’s end, some of th prostitutes and madams had invested substantial sums in the “legitimate” sector of Hawaii’s burgeoning commercial economy. In this case and in others, the strange circumstances of wartime Hawaii disrupted the prewar social order.

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2005/is_n1_v28/ai_16107047

Can’t locate the picture. Will post it if I find it.

#156

Found it.

Hotel Street. Brothel queues. Must have been a disappointment to get in the wrong queue when you can’t see where it’s going. Be a serious embarrassment for blokes waiting for a coffee and jam donut.

Notice shoeshine boy near top queue before it turns right. Not just knobs getting polished in that queue.

Notice also USO sign near shoeshine boy. Definitely providing services, not to mention recreation and helping morale, to the servicemen.

Looks like the fleet’s in. Hardly any soldiers.

The site this picture is on is worth a look for another aspect of the Japanese experience in war. On the Allied side.

http://nisei.hawaii.edu/page/home

#157

Mainly?

Evidence?

#158

I dod not have hard evidence. And I doubt there could be. It is more the assesment of the situation.
You see, in 1945, like never before during the war, the goverments were thinking how to shape the after war world. So it is actually very reasonable and logical that USA would want to impress USSR.

Ok. If you like I can lower down my stakes: 50% - to impress USSR, 50% - to scare Japan. Is it better?

#159

Maybe 5% to 10% to impress the USSR.

The Yanks were fighting Japan, which refused to surrender and had made great prepartions to resist an invasion.

That’s essentially why the Yanks nuked Japan. To defeat Japan.

If the Yanks really wanted to impress the USSR, they’d have dropped the first one on Moscow. Or maybe Vladivostok.

#160

And they really wanted it mate.
plan Dropshot - do you hear it?
already sice 1948 the plans of atomoic bombing of USSR were constantly developed in Pentagon.
First plan was aimed about 50-90 of soviet cities for the atomic bombing- not bad impressions for the soviets, how do you think?:wink: