Kawaii
Japanese Art before the nukes:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Dream_of_the_Fisherman%27s_Wife
this post was submitted on 17 Aug 2025
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I mean... It was essentially the occupation that did it. The Americans effectively colonised Japan after the war, wiping away the previous culture and going "No, you believe THIS now. You get to keep the Emperor because I'm feeling nice, but if there's a part of your culture I don't like, I'm getting rid of it whether you like it or not".
...Turns out there was quite a lot of Japanese culture at the time that needed wiping out, and the Americans were very effective at doing it.
It's kinda interesting how two different approaches to conquering ex-authoritarian states concluded. In Germany, it was all about collective guilt and confronting the German people about the holocaust. In Japan? Not so much. They kinda just swept all those atrocities under the rug with a "That was the old me! This is the new me, right? I did what you wanted Mr America! I'm on your side now!". Maybe it was the fact that Japan was conquered wholesale by the US and could be put together as a more cohesive front against the Communist Chinese, whereas Germany was split into two and needed to be kept in line to avoid any grumblings about being Communist?
it wasn't the occupation that did it, the first anime was released in 1917. japan had been making anime for decades before ww2.
Sure if you want to broaden the definition to "anything that has ever been animated in Japan ever" then sure they've been doing anime for decades, but the stuff we would colloquially call 'anime' generally kicked off after the war, inspired by American culture. The signature 'anime' style is directly inspired by Disney cartoons, and it wasn't even called anime until the 60s.
This reminds me of the graph showing nuclear fallout from Chernobyl in the air and the presence of Hentai.
Or the crime activity in Chicago vs yoghurt sales in Norway.
There is something about these cross-eyed anime girls that makes me irrationally angry…
the japanese had been making anime for decades before ww2, the first anime film having been released in 1917.
shouldn't it be Kaijus after the nukes
Maybe we should nuke the rest if the world too
my god they mutated, but also they modernized, honestley check the history of any country, usa for example: racists who stole a continent > overconfident military bozos who want to steal continents
No, it's even better that they evolved into another species, although they went a bit overboard. But Japanese girls might taste good though I'm not sure.
Why are you looking at me like that? Haven't you seen your real self in the mirror?
Sometimes it's not you who's looking for a job, but the job that's looking for you. And sometimes the job isn't the best, and you'll be like a walking dead man who's still breathing, even though you'll only be a little over 40 and you'll feel like you're 80.
Anyway, I was just joking. :3
Just a few days ago, it hit me on some new level that we fucking NUCLEAR BOMBED a country. TWICE.
We are literally the only country that has done that. And it's just sort-of this fun footnote of history. "Fine, maybe that was a whoopsie, but blah blah blah something about land invasion blah blah blah. Our baaaaad!"
I mean tbf, while I do hate how civillians die from it, it was mostly the imperial japanese government's fault.
The japanese soldiers were committing massacress on my homeland (China) and if the US hadn't nuked japan, a lot more people would've died by the hands of those imperialist pigs (the soldiers i mean, I have nothing against japanese civillians). It would've takes months and perhaps years to actually invade japan, all that while japan commits mass rapes, pillaging, looting on my homeland. I mean national pride and "honor" is a strong thing in many East Asian countries, even in current timeline, we still had a lot of Japanese Holdout, without the nukes, Japan would've not surrended for many years and all those years of suffering for all those people in occupied areas by the imperial japanese military around Asia. And even with the first nuke, they didn't fucking surrender until the US had to do it again.
RIP to the innocent civillians at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, but its their government's fault for waging this war of destruction.
In the last days of WW2, the Japanese military were getting children to make sharpened bamboo spears and training those children to attack American soldiers on sight. The elderly and women were told that they should kill themselves before potentially coming under American control.
The Japanese civilian population had been indoctrinated into the belief that western soldiers were absolute monsters who would carry out unspeakable acts on them should they become prisoners (ironic considering the IJA/Ns actions during the conflict).
In the battle of Saipan, hundreds of mothers leapt from cliffs with their babies in their arms to evade capture, men would slit their children's throats and booby trapped the bodies to injure Americans and then themselves fought relentlessly, before mostly killing themselves or being killed to prevent capture.
The level of blood shed at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unprecedented but it did in fact save untold Japanese civilian and American soldiers' lives.
Crucially, even after the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima Japanese High Command still refused to surrender.
*edit: all you 4edgy5me America Bad commenters really need to do some reading about Japanese atrocities during the Pacific War here are some suggestions:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanjing_Massacre
I wonder when, if ever, this narrative will finally be laid to rest. Perhaps, as long as the US military exists as a globe-spanning hegemon, we will always have to hear some version of this story.
No contemporary historian or political scientist takes this view for granted. It is one of many, and I encourage you to read about more than the wikipedia articles about Japanese atrocities. All militaries commit attocities. This is not the point.
The argument you offer is that the United States had a moral imperative to invade and occupy the Japanese home islands. What is the justification for this? Why would this have been necessary? Everyone who has seriously studied the history knows that the Soviet Union was preparing to invade Japan and its leadership was preparing to surrender in one form or another. The bombs were dropped because the US wanted to ensure that they were the negotiating party and occupying power.
The justification to avoid further violence is extremely cynical. Nowhere in the rules of war does it say that the only way to end a conflict is to utterly annihilate your oppnent. That rule was invented by expansionist empires. You can go back to the history of Rome's wars with Greece to see this type of logic (or lack thereof) play out. It is a message. It says that we are not your equal and we will not broker any deals on equal footing. We are your hegemon and we will dictate the terms. And then we'll blame you for any atrocities we commit, and everyone will know that we did what we did in the name of peace and justice.
The Japanese attacked and brought the USA into the second world war, I mean you seem to forget that.
And so therefore it had to carry out a land invasion? Can you explain why this necessarily follows?
My man, do you have heard about the second world war? The axis, the allies? Should we just lay on our backs and let them roll over us? No, it was an unjust war started by Germany and the Soviet union, and then Japan.
What part of having Japan's military annihilated, their cities firebombed, and their population starving is "letting them roll over us"? The war was won already. Why was it necessary to carry out a land invasion?
To defeat them totally. That was their goal. You can argue about it, but it could have been not enough if a land war wasn't done. Like apeasing doesn't work, only strength.
But for that you'll have to read up a lot on history itself and more, I do not have an answer to that question, and I suspect those who pretend to, do not fully understand the question itself.
The thing all of you militarist posters have in common is you're completely convinced that you have the correct position and you manage to come off as arrogant as well. Enjoy your globe-spanning military industrial complex that wages forever wars and sanctions genocides.
Attack the idea, not the person.
Ironically I can even apply this thinking to matches of the Civilization game. In general I don't do war if I can avoid it, I enjoy just expanding my own country and trying to focus on science and culture. But whenever some country declared war on me, I would defend myself and then move on to invade the aggressor, because I saw conquest as the only way to "win" a war. And then I would think "it's so unfair that every other country now hate me just because I took some cities from the country that attacked me out of the blue".
Then one day I lost some war and the other country didn't take any of my cities. They declared war not because they wanted to conquer me militarily, but because they wanted to stop me from dominating the world in other ways (culturally for example - something I saw as pacific but that also allowed me to win the match and therefore caused others to lose)
The Soviet Union had already invaded Manchuria and annihilated the Kwantung Army. We can argue tit for tat about which part of the final days of the Pacific War contributed the most to the final surrender of Japan. It's clear though that no single part of that was enough and it was the combination of the firebombing of Tokyo and Osaka, the destruction of the remaining IJN fleet strength at the Battle of Tsushima, the Soviets invading Manchuria, Korea and the Northern Islands, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Although there are records of some of the civilian government campaigning Hirohito and Koiso for unconditional surrender, the main war cabinet still refused and preferred the path of a final confrontation.
I think it's impossible to say if the atom bombs hadn't been dropped whether they would have in fact surrendered, given that all the other things listed above were true after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki and they still were arguing for a negotiated settlement when no opposing force (USA, Commonwealth or Soviet Union) were prepared to accept anything less than an unconditional surrender.
Also, if you want more details on the extraordinary level of depravity by Japanese soldiers during the Second Dino-Japanese War and the wider World War 2 I can recommend reading Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Japan's Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Gold and Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka, all of which contain first hand accounts and then you can try comparing and contrasting by accounts of those carried out by Allied forces in the conflict and give me your false equivalence then.
There's no false equivalence. There is no equivalence at all. There's absolutely no point trying to figure out the most atrocitiest world power. Atrocities do not justify further atrocities.
In terms of whether the bombings were justified or not, I don't think it's impossible to say. Same with the firebombings, which were carried out under false pretenses of total warfare hypotheses that were later disproven.
There was talk of doing a nuclear demonstration in Tokyo harbor before the decision to annihilate two cities was undertaken. Yes, these were decisions made with limited information and lack of 20:20 hindsight, but that doesn't mean they weren't war crimes or that the people who made them aren't mass murderers. This kind of zero-sum my atrocities vs. your atrocities thinking is an intellectual dead end, but it's great for justifying American exceptionalism.
There are absolutely zero circumistances under which it is acceptable to bomb, let alone nuke, civilians.
👍🏻
So the US should've just allowed imperial japan to continue massacring my compatriots in China? Fuck that. Its sad that civillians had to get caught up in the death tolls, but I'm on the side of the US and the allies when it comes to WW2.
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