Some very good points. It wasn’t the only factor, but I think the ultimate willingness of the US to allow the continuation of the Emperor and Japanese government, and to work through them for demobilization and reconstruction [Army and Navy Ministries being "First Demobilization Ministry and Second Demobilization Ministry" is my fave bureaucratic sidenote of the time], and MacArthur’s often criticized cosying up to the Emperor, played huge roles in quashing coup attempts and resistance talk. The Japanese may have coopted the US in some ways, and never quite acknowledged all their vices, but they accepted the huge ideological changes the US ultimately put on them to a large degree and still live with them even when I think they’re nuts, and in return the US got to coopt the imperial government and its public credit to get the job done.

Pretty smart, as such things go. There was no option for that in Germany. If the July plotters had won in 1944, a Japan-like scenario would still have been the absolute best case scenario they could have had, if that. Otherwise, forget it.

Interesting you highlight the role of the China connection in American attitudes to Japan. The role of that particular overseas American community in shaping American policy and public opinion is largely forgotten now. The American romance with pre-Communist China played a huge role in events. Much easier now to just say well the Americans must have hated Japan because they were racists. Sure, but not so clear as all that.

And, yet… It could have gone entirely the other way.

One of the things that most people discussing this miss is that a key component to the whole thing working out the way that it did was that the Japanese capitulated, and then stayed capitulated. There was no legacy of ongoing insurrection; no irredentist forces out in the countryside ambushing American forces or fighting the government.

This is probably a key reason why the Occupation went the way it did–Japan did not engage in fantastic resistance fantasies, the way that the Arabs and the Afghanis did. If the Japanese had gone in for things like what the Iraqi regime remnants did, I suspect that the whole effort to get them back on their feet would have gone to hell in a handbasket, and in very short order.

Just like the fact that there was no prolonged invasion to harden attitudes against Japanese civilians, this factor gets left out of a lot of people’s ideas on the matter. Had Japan gotten what the Japanese military wanted, a prolonged Gotterdamerung against invading troops, I would wager that the actual result would have been far different than the one we actually got, and the response would have been, at best, utter American indifference to the famine that was stalking Japan. We would have let them starve to death, and probably helped the process along with judicious bombing and destruction of Japanese fishing and transportation assets.

The Japanese managed to do a convincing “roll-over surrender” move, and won the battle for American hearts and minds. It could have very easily gone the other way, and to a degree that is horrifying to contemplate.

If you want a solid idea of what American public opinion was on the matter, and an understanding of it all, you should go back into the stacks and dig through the pre-WWII magazines and books on the Orient, then follow them through the war itself. The whole thing becomes very illuminating–My Grandmother’s family had ties to the Methodist missionary community in China, and there were a lot of very influential members of that community who were agitating against the Japanese activities in China and Korea, going back to the 1920s. You can feel the attitudes hardening, as you read up the decade-plus period leading into the war.

The whole thing gets very little attention in our histories, but the pressure put on Roosevelt via the varied missionary groups to China really made the war happen–Absent that pressure, I doubt that anyone would have cared, or done a thing about it.

I’m torn on some of the moral questions of the Pacific War and America’s responses to it, then and after.

For example, I appreciate that the attack on Pearl Harbor would appear to be ‘dastardly’ [IIRC FDR used the word] in the era of the Kellogg-Briand Pact and the League, and especially in a nation whose Secretary of State could have said of espionage that, “gentlemen do not read each other’s mail.” And I do not precisely deny that it was duplicitous, and not in keeping with selective contemporary practice about declaring war.

Still, the notion that all wars were declared formally in advance was never universal, and was then extraordinarily recent. And opening a war with a surprise attack on a military target perfectly capable of defense isn’t exactly in the same order as doing the same with a civilian target. [As it happens, when 9/11 back then was compared to Pearl Harbor, I thought that rather an insult to the Japanese, among others.] And all that would be true even if it hadn’t been a heightened period of political tension between the US and Japan when forces should have been more alert, and if the Japanese hadn’t actually been trying to deliver a declaration. That and the ostensible horror that it was a Sunday, as though Sunday should have been significant to Japanese.

All that to say, the reaction to Pearl has always struck me as a level of outrage understandable in the moment, although very much a product of American culture, but which was unnecessarily prolonged into the postwar discussion.

To be honest, I’m not sure what I’m getting at here. I suppose for me that was a symptom of one kind of over the top US approach to the war, and that I’m OK with it as a rhetorical device as long as the people saying it aren’t overly internalizing it.

Similarly, and in the same spirit, Halsey [IIRC] proclaiming that after the war Japanese would be spoken only in hell. If he actually thought Pearl would justify a response like that, it’s too much. And if the US had pursued a policy of genocide against Japanese in the Pacific, that would have been too much.

On the other hand, as a piece of motivational war rhetoric I’m fine with Halsey’s comment. It was a war on the grand scale and for the most profound goals, and there was no need to dance around that. Men had to be rallied to fight Japan under the harshest of physical and mental conditions and against one of the toughest, most skilled, and most vicious battlefield enemies. They weren’t an army of mercenaries fighting an 18th century cabinet war. Same with all the racist content of the battlefront and homefront. Total war is what it is. There’s only so racist America’s war effort can be considered when it was being carried on with and in support of Chinese and Filipinos. I’m sure plenty of American soldiers were bigoted or at least condescending to their Asian allies [and imagine what went on in the latters' minds and private quarters], but the really harsh language and violence was pretty targeted against the actual enemy people. I may not like that as a peacetime way of life or as the normal mode of your average military action, but there are times when the fact that the enemy is the enemy and the nature of the war overcomes all that.

Or to sum up, the Americans of that day may have overreacted to Pearl compared to what it was, they may have used language that would get you expelled from grade school today, and they may have gone full-Hun in sending back skulls of slain enemies for decorations, but they never pursued an exterminationist policy against Japan.

If anything, the US occupation remains one of the most generous things ever done by any nation to another in the immediate aftermath of victory.

http://www.historynet.com/book-review-japans-secret-war-japans-race-against-time-to-build-its-own-atomic-bomb-robert-k-wilcox-wwii.htm

Further VERY STRONG confirmation comes from the enormous resources put into the ultra long range submarine that Japan built carrying only three airplanes. They only military use for such a vessel would be if it carried nukes.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I-400-class_submarine

It would be a lot easier to argue that most of history is mass migrations and the associated wars, our relatively short period of the concept of Westphalian sovereignty being an exception rather than the rule.

Also, AFAIK the policy vs Imperial Japan was “unconditional surrender” and not “extirpation”. The long term effects of nuclear fallout are vastly overhyped, for example see https://pics.me.me/hiroshima-detroit-1945-2013-proof-that-democrats-in-power-are-19228927.png

Not only is it morally questionable, it’s completely ahistorical. Overwhelmingly, wars were (and are) essentially skirmishes between two contestants: maybe a couple of big battles, followed by some negotiated rearranging of outer territories according to the consensus relative power betwixt them.

A reasonable policy would have been to beat the Japanese out of the Pacific, take every one of their islands, kick them out of Manchuria, and leave it at that. Negotiate a peace with many concessions.

I wish that these military strategist people had a better moral sense. It’s going end in tears for us, sooner or later.

And we had all already accepted mass, city-destroying aerial bombing as legitimate.

But I have periodically wondered if anyone else was left who would make the argument that it was Truman’s job to worry about American and Allied lives first and foremost. Glad to not be the only one.

I have heard it said that he should have worried more about Japanese civilian lives, given the Allied personnel would all be military members. Military/combatants versus civilians is certainly an argument I can understand, but I only the once heard it applied in such a border- and nationality- and indeed side-neutral way.

Sometimes I don’t get folks these days.

“If they saved even one Allied life…”

The Army’s job was to kill the enemy. The A-bombs let them do their job more efficiently with less loss of life. Our lives, not the enemy’s.

They didn’t want to get nuked, they should have left Pearl and Manila alone.

There is a very good German movie about Dresden, which I reviewed and used as a springboard for discussion, here:

https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/7260.html