Interesting to see the difference in writing style back then. Lots of long sentences. Kind of the opposite to the LinkedIn-style writing we see today, spitting out as many sentences and paragraphs as possible. Like you can see the generations' attention spans in their form of writing.
Been watching some old movies lately and its amazing to watch simple scenes stretch on for five minutes or more. Its almost like there was nothing else to do.
Long sentences are fine if your value form over communication.
Marking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.
A surprising number of the people of Hiroshima remained more or less indifferent about the ethics of using the bomb.
Unsurprising for the time given the context.
While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time.
The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.
This piece made a big impact on me when I read it like five years ago, and if I recall correctly there was a young doctor there who was one of the few interviewed who stated that the bomb's use was possibly a war crime. He did like 48 hours in the hospital as thousands upon thousands of burned and dying walked from afar to the completely overrun clinic.
Yes, I understand that Japan gave up, not so much because of the bomb, but mostly because of the Soviet invasion and capture of Manchuria (and the implied threat of an invasion of the mainland), after the war in Europe had been won.
But I still struggle to understand the Japanese mentality. Were they OK with the prospect of city after city being atom- or fire-bombed, so long as no ground invasion occurred?
I think the other thing to keep in mind is the cultural differences in how the West vs East think about government and the individual.
After living in Asia for a while, having political discussions with the people who live there, and exploring the differences in governance there, it’s not surprising there was indifference. You see this spectrum of though across many Asian countries from the authoritarian ones like China to the more democratic like Singapore.
Unlike the West which has a history of the relationship of the individual with the government and its leadership, Asia is much more influenced by Confucianism.
While people like to describe it as “what is good for the group versus what is good for the individual” I think that’s not an accurate description. It’s much more of a belief that governance happens “up there” and isn’t relevant to a commoners life.
The Eastern view of government is much more hierarchical and detached from the individual than in the West. There is strong sense that any one individual is not that important overall and that governance is a realm of the upper class, with the lower class on the receiving end rather than where power originates.
So for someone in Japan, the decisions during the war and the consequences thereafter are not theirs to judge or influence, only theirs to endure. There is a sense of fate and inability to change what happens, so it’s not really worth spending time thinking about.
The singular horror of this event really is so difficult to describe, definitely one of the low points of human history which we must vow to never again repeat, under any circumstances.
"The work was originally published in The New Yorker, which had planned to run it over four issues but instead dedicated the entire edition of August 31, 1946, to a single article"
TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
The atrocities that the Japanese military committed, consistently and repeatedly and combined with their attack on pearl harbor, meant that Americans of the time on the front lines had few qualms or issues with dropping the bomb.
Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand.
Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
If anyone thinks that dropping the bombs was unnecessary, I would recommend reading Barrett's 140 Days to Hiroshima: The Story of Japan's Last Chance to Avert Armageddon:
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
The Americans had already bombed Tokyo into ruins five months prior, killing at least 100,000 people and leaving a million homeless. It was the most violent air raid in history, doing more damage than either of the atomic bombings. The Japanese did not surrender.
The point of Hiroshima was not that the USAF could destroy a city, because they had already done that sixty-seven times over the preceding year, but that they could now do it with a single plane and a single bomb. They specifically selected a city which had never been raided before so it would be clear that all the damage had been done by the new weapon.
The Japanese were used to watching hundreds of American bombers destroy a city overnight. Now they had to fear a raid in which hundreds of bombers destroyed hundreds of cities overnight, and then the war would be over because their society would no longer exist.
Honestly, I think the Japanese deserved it. If you see the war crimes committed by the Japanese in World War II, you will know that the atomic bomb was right.
Warning: although much of the graphic medical condition of the victims of the blast are blurred out, it is still a very sad look at the effects of this weapon.
They choose photos from shortly after the bomb is detonated of some of the victims. They then use interviews and … photogrammetry? … to explain some of the effects on the unfortunate people.
Here’s an extraordinary piece that focuses on the stories of the ordinary lives of the real people surviving 64 kilo enriched uranium exploding above their head yielding a blast of approximately 15 kiloton TNT which caused a fireball with a diameter of 370m that had the same surface temperature as the sun (source: Wikipedia). And here we are, the intellectually curious people of the internet, above all interested in offsetting these tragedies to some other suffering statistics. Why can’t we help but look away from human suffering inflicted by war, even if there’s a moving long read focusing on real people presented to us? And who does this thinking serve?
Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
Would you let someone beat you to death? Would you let them beat your children to death? If you shot them or stabbed them or hit them in the back of the head with a shovel, would you say it was ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ or would that be a symptom of the 'same thinking'? War is terrible, but it is pretty naive to lament Hiroshima as if it existed in isolation, and not in the context of an aggressive imperialist Japan epitomized in the rape of Nanking. While these things need to be explored and looked at, we also need to recognize that death camps and genocide were happening every day the Nazis and Japanese empire were still fighting.
I want to give my thoughts to answer a few comments in this thread. If the atomic bomb was first developed by the Japanese, they wouldn't have hesitated to use it just like the USA did. Does it make it more right? Absolutely not, but as a Japanese friend put it: "it's war".
If the war went on, Operation Cherry Blossom would have gone underway and we would probably still be dealing with bubonic plague decades later.
And, as other pointed out, if a land invasion occured, millions more would have died. The atomic bombs weren't even the deadliest events of the war—see the firebombing of Tokyo.
Many comments here defend the decision to bomb Hiroshima. Atomic bombs today are 80 times more powerful than the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima. I find it difficult to defend a decision to drop an atomic bomb that powerful on a city of millions of inhabitants. No matter what war crimes have been committed.
Japan was giving up, but it wasn't a white majority population country. Hence the atom bomb was used to show the soviets America's new toy. & after that the world changed.
the bombs should have never been developed or even dropped.
Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians.
It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union.
As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender.
None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely.
IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.
It’s pretty wild how small the numbers are relatively speaking to the significance we ascribe to the event. Under half a million. Compare that to the recent USAID changes (10m+ expected) - which barely stayed in news cycle for a week.
Japan had ample reason to fear the Red Army. Which, in overrunning Manchuria and surrounding areas, had just proven Japan's assessments of Stalin's resources and capabilities to be disastrously wrong.
So, from the Japanese PoV - if they didn't surrender, how many weeks would it take for the Red Army to conquer the Japanese home islands? They were under no delusions about the brutality of a Soviet occupation.
I get that people have this fascination for what happened at Nagasaki and Hiroshima, but was it really worse than the incendiary bombing of other cities?
These were all horrific events only meant to harm civilians. The whole bombing campaign was and I feel that focusing on these two cities makes us underestimate the dimension of the tragedy.
There's a lot of argument about whether or not the bomb should have been dropped, and that debate will go on forever.
And while the following is not as important as the decision to drop the bomb, I think the decisions to publish "Hiroshima" and how it was published (especially in 1946) is very much worth understanding. This was not a story the US Government did not want to get out.
The US military/government tried to hide many of the facts about what happened at Hiroshima/Nagasaki for various reasons (military secrecy was one, but I think hiding the true impacts of the horrors of the bomb from the American (and world) public was the big one.)
I believe we humans have reached a point where, materially at least, everyone could live in reasonable comfort and there would be no space for wars. Yet we seem to often behave as if we're still hunting for sustenance and living in caves, having to carve out our survival.
I don't have any inclination toward socialism or communism, nor do I have an answer for how this system we live in can be changed for the better, but if we don't at least consider that there must be alternatives, we'll keep living in a world where something as absurd as war continues to be considered normal.
39 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 55.2 ms ] threadMarking it on attention span makes it sound like convoluted and rambling sentences were universally good in the first place. I'd argue the contrary for a magazine or news outlet.
While people far from Japan made much of the uniqueness and power of a single bomb destroying a single city for those on the ground it was just another single city destroyed overnight by bombing .. the 73rd such city destroyed in a relatively short duration of time.
The destruction and death in Hiroshima was on par with the destruction and death in Tokyo when that was firebombed.
But I still struggle to understand the Japanese mentality. Were they OK with the prospect of city after city being atom- or fire-bombed, so long as no ground invasion occurred?
After living in Asia for a while, having political discussions with the people who live there, and exploring the differences in governance there, it’s not surprising there was indifference. You see this spectrum of though across many Asian countries from the authoritarian ones like China to the more democratic like Singapore.
Unlike the West which has a history of the relationship of the individual with the government and its leadership, Asia is much more influenced by Confucianism.
While people like to describe it as “what is good for the group versus what is good for the individual” I think that’s not an accurate description. It’s much more of a belief that governance happens “up there” and isn’t relevant to a commoners life.
The Eastern view of government is much more hierarchical and detached from the individual than in the West. There is strong sense that any one individual is not that important overall and that governance is a realm of the upper class, with the lower class on the receiving end rather than where power originates.
So for someone in Japan, the decisions during the war and the consequences thereafter are not theirs to judge or influence, only theirs to endure. There is a sense of fate and inability to change what happens, so it’s not really worth spending time thinking about.
Linked there is also a related article from 1985
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/1985/07/15/hiroshima-the-...
TO OUR READER: The New Yorker this week devotes its entire editorial space to an article on the almost complete obliteration of a city by one atomic bomb, and what happened to the people of that city. It does so in the conviction that few of us have yet comprehended the all but incredible destructive power of this weapon, and that everyone might well take time to consider the terrible implications of its use.
The Editors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hiroshima_(book)
Truman famously called Oppenheimer a "cry baby" when Oppenheimer expressed doubt. Truman had spent the past decade dealing with the war in his capacity as senator and vice president - seeing the effects it was having first (or second) hand.
Now, this isn't to say that America was right or not right to drop one or both bombs. It may "feel" like I'm saying "the Japanese deserved it for their behavior" - that's not a belief I hold, either.
I just want to provide color for why American leadership seemed so relatively unconcerned with the lives of Japanese civilians in 1945.
* https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/51089656-140-days-to-hir...
* https://www.nationalww2museum.org/about-us/notes-museum/140-...
It documents, using Japanese source material including interviews with the principals involved, the decision making process leading up to the eventual surrender.
What was most surprising to me was the reluctance of many members to surrender even after two bombs were dropped. The Emperor himself had to be called in multiple times (which was unprecedented) to ensure that the surrender was 'pushed' through. Even after the vote to surrender happened there were still machinations to overturn it: a reminder that there was a coup attempt to prevent the surrender from being broadcast:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kyūjō_incident
Why didn't they drop the bomb in Tokio then ? This surely would have been more convincing for the emperor.
The point of Hiroshima was not that the USAF could destroy a city, because they had already done that sixty-seven times over the preceding year, but that they could now do it with a single plane and a single bomb. They specifically selected a city which had never been raided before so it would be clear that all the damage had been done by the new weapon.
The Japanese were used to watching hundreds of American bombers destroy a city overnight. Now they had to fear a raid in which hundreds of bombers destroyed hundreds of cities overnight, and then the war would be over because their society would no longer exist.
From what I have read, relatively speaking, the Western European front was easier than the Eastern one and the Pacific theatre.
Warning: although much of the graphic medical condition of the victims of the blast are blurred out, it is still a very sad look at the effects of this weapon.
They choose photos from shortly after the bomb is detonated of some of the victims. They then use interviews and … photogrammetry? … to explain some of the effects on the unfortunate people.
Towards the end of the piece, the author describes a science professor who, together with his son, lays buried under the rubble of his house after the blast. He ultimately survives but reflects about laying there, thinking: “It was my first time I ever tasted such a beautiful spirit when I decided to die for our Emperor.” How fascinating this is the spin you give to such a traumatising experience. Are we really nation state citizens first, human beings second? Could speaking about the fate of the people of Hiroshima in terms as ‘necessity’ and ‘justified’ be a symptom of the same thinking? How do we get out of this?
People will say the same thing about Gaza one day.
If the war went on, Operation Cherry Blossom would have gone underway and we would probably still be dealing with bubonic plague decades later.
And, as other pointed out, if a land invasion occured, millions more would have died. The atomic bombs weren't even the deadliest events of the war—see the firebombing of Tokyo.
Japan was giving up, but it wasn't a white majority population country. Hence the atom bomb was used to show the soviets America's new toy. & after that the world changed.
the bombs should have never been developed or even dropped.
Anyway, Americans needed to show off their newly acquired nuclear capabilities. Not to Germans or to Japanese. And not to Italians. It was needed to demonstrate their superiority to Soviet Union without bombing the Soviet Union.
As someone else's here already posted out, military heads made it clear that bombing Japan was not needed for their surrender.
None else had gone that far with nuclear energy and bombs. Likely.
IMHO it was needed for something else much more political.
https://hpmmuseum.jp/modules/exhibition/index.php?action=Cor...
"The United States believed that ending the war with an atomic bombing would help prevent the Soviet Union from extending its sphere of influence."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet%E2%80%93Japanese_War
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_invasion_of_Manchuria
Japan had ample reason to fear the Red Army. Which, in overrunning Manchuria and surrounding areas, had just proven Japan's assessments of Stalin's resources and capabilities to be disastrously wrong.
So, from the Japanese PoV - if they didn't surrender, how many weeks would it take for the Red Army to conquer the Japanese home islands? They were under no delusions about the brutality of a Soviet occupation.
These were all horrific events only meant to harm civilians. The whole bombing campaign was and I feel that focusing on these two cities makes us underestimate the dimension of the tragedy.
And while the following is not as important as the decision to drop the bomb, I think the decisions to publish "Hiroshima" and how it was published (especially in 1946) is very much worth understanding. This was not a story the US Government did not want to get out.
The US military/government tried to hide many of the facts about what happened at Hiroshima/Nagasaki for various reasons (military secrecy was one, but I think hiding the true impacts of the horrors of the bomb from the American (and world) public was the big one.)
You can read about the coverup of the nuclear weapons impact on Hiroshima in the book "Fallout" by Lesley Blune: https://scribepublications.com.au/books-authors/books/fallou...
And here's a short article that I quickly googled that discusses the story behind the story using "Fallout" as a reference: https://insidestory.org.au/the-making-of-john-herseys-hirosh...
I don't have any inclination toward socialism or communism, nor do I have an answer for how this system we live in can be changed for the better, but if we don't at least consider that there must be alternatives, we'll keep living in a world where something as absurd as war continues to be considered normal.