I hope this is not another hollywood movie's compassion for Japanese

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I would hardly call "Letters from Iwo Jima" "sympathetic" to the Japanese.

It was certainly very sympathetic to the plight of the individual soldiers caught in this war, just like it's sister movie, "Flags of our Fathers" captured the hardships suffered by the Americans. But the Japanese government in this movie was portrayed (rightly so) as a tyranical war machine that brainwashed its soldiers to fight battles it could not win. Hell, they even included a scene where a patrol man brutally shot a family's dog in front of the children.

Even the main Japanese officer we see in the movie was clearly against Japan's involvement in the war, and was seen as participating solely out of a sense of duty.

Meanwhile the brutality of the Japanese was pretty well captured when we see the battle from the western side in Flags of Our Fathers.

In reply to andyp1, you are completely wrong in your assessment. The bombs were most certainly justified for a great many reasons. These reasons are summed up and thoroughly investigated in the book “Downfall: The End of the Imperial Japanese Empire” by Richard Frank. While Mr. Frank definitely had a point of view he was arguing, the thoroughness and balance of his research is beyond question. His major points were that:
1) Japanese engineered famines, slave labor, military actions, mass murder etc. were claiming the lives of upwards of 300,000 people in the occupied territories per month.
2) Due to the destruction of Japanese infrastructure and the resultant inability of the Japanese government to move food to the cities, the Japanese government itself estimated that 1,000,000 Japanese would have starved to death by December 1945.
3) The Japanese had no real cultural concept of surrender
4) The firebombing had not secured a surrender, but had succeeded in devastating Japan’s production of war materiel.
5) The diplomatic communiqués, when read in context indicated that even the “peace faction” in Suzuki’s cabinet was nowhere near ready to accept surrender as an option before the second bomb was dropped.
6) It was Suzuki who publically refused the Potsdam Declaration in a radio address made in the open and picked up by the US, not the US refusing peace (contrary to the comment made by “F. Hugh Seekay”. How can you be taken seriously with an alias this juvenile?). In fact, Truman repeatedly offered peace, each time being rebuffed until after the second bomb.
7) The Japanese were anticipating the US invasion of Kyushu and were rapidly reinforcing the island creating a situation ripe for biblical casualties on both sides.
8) Even after the second bomb was dropped on Nagasaki, a major coup d’etat was attempted by military officers to stop the surrender and fight on. If the Imperial household had not been so successful in hiding the surrender broadcast recording, it would have succeeded.
9) America was facing a serious time pressure to end the war and prevent a partitioning of Japan with Russia (which wanted Hokaido).

The truth is that the war was killing massive numbers on both sides and it was going to get worse without a quick surrender. Even a few months would have resulted in millions more dead. The first bomb was not enough to bring the Japanese militarists to the table, and it did in fact require a second one to provide the “peace faction” with enough momentum to secure the Emperor’s support. So andyp1, yes, it took not one but two atomic bombs, the fire bombings of major cities, and extremely bloody military action to end the war. Yes, the bombs were justified, especially if you can take your contemporary moral judgments out of the picture and put yourself into the shoes of the men making some of the most difficult decisions in history. Millions upon millions of innocents were saved by the terrible deaths of between 200,000 and 300,000 Japanese. They were the aggressors. It should be noted that several of the millions saved were other Japanese.

So Misty Cloud, swet531 and Darvidd are both very correct in their assessments with the exception that there were many more atomic bombs in production with a new one being produces approximately every 5 ½ days. Read the book, it is one of the finest pieces of historical research I have ever read.
Also, by the way, Misty Cloud is referring to the JAPANESE right wing, who are constantly trying to revise their nation's role in WWII.

I am always intrigued about this subject and i will make every effort to see this film. From all the historic stuff i have watched in the past, the emperor was not as innocent as he made himself to be. All military orders would have to pass through him. He most likely gave the orders for the invasion of Asia (the theme was free Asia from the colonisers) and Pearl Harbour. He was a 'god like' figure whom most Japanese had never seen but worshipped ardently. I know why he was not sent to the gallows - if Hitler was captured alive, he would have been hung. If they had hung the emperor, most Japanese would have rebelled and formed mini guerilla groups and will attack the U.S troops on a daily basis adding further to the death toll. I very much doubt if Hitler had been executed the German populace would go bizerk (excluding the hardened Nazi members) so in a sense, it was for the best he was spared - i just wished he had regrets which followed him to the grave.

On a totally different i don't know why the American regime spared all those U731 scientist especially seeing as they carried out horrendous biological and chemical 'research' on prisoners (includes western ones too) I know they wanted to prevent their expertise from falling into the soviet hands but at least they could have tried them. I would love to see a film about this subject

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unit_731


My Voting history is secret;)

It's very discouraging to see how on one hand, we demonize the Germans during WW2 but when you read some of the posts in this thread, you see a lot of people thinking the Japanese being the victims during WW2 instead of being the aggressors. There was a very straight forward reason why the atom bombs were dropped - to stop the Japanese armies from killing more people in Asia and the Allied forces.

People who deny the Japanese War atrocities and aggression are no better than neo-Nazis who believes the Holocaust didn't happened.

The Japanese were human beings too. Considering this film is about the reconstruction of Japan, you're going to have to deal with the fact that it will not feature the one dimensional Japanese villains that you would see in movies 30 years ago.

Did they commit atrocities? Absolutely. So have the Americans, the British, the Russians, etc. Oh, and I'm pretty sure Valkyrie(a Hollywood film), Das Boot and Stalingrad have been films that depict the war from the German side.

Funny how pissed off people were at Clint Eastwood, who is a conservative republican, when he depicted Japanese soldiers as *gasp!* young men with families, normal lives before the war and dreams.

I will agree that Japan needs to refine their education system to inform their future generations on what their colonial empire did to the other nations of Asia, but if you look around the world you'll notice most countries are extremely reluctant to confront their own wrongdoings.

We Americans look the other way when someone brings up the genocide against the Natives or the colonial war in the Philippines.

Japanese killed a lot more than the Nazi's. Around 30+ million. And it was a Nazi that stopped the raping of Nanking.





Religion is regarded by the common people as true, by the wise as false, and by rulers as useful.

It is against my better judgement that I engage in this foolishly-framed discussion at all, but just from the topic title and OP's first sentence I find it absolutely necessary.

The question of the justification for dropping two nuclear bombs, an obviously important question in its own right, has however absolutely nothing to do with the title, nor even the sense of the conversation started by OP in the body of his post. US forces killed more people in Tokyo overnight on 9-10 March 1945 than they did during the day of 6 August 1945 in Hiroshima. If you are going to be concerned with justification for dire and momentous acts, start there.

I am not overly invested in that question; I am more than a little troubled by how it implies revenge. But believe me I _am_ invested in the topic of compassion for human beings. Not Japanese or Americans, nor even whites or orientals, which are NOT races at all; there is only the HUMAN race. And humans are a product of their nurture, AND their nature. You can only judge humans, if you must, one by one.

It would be a sad excuse for a human being who does not have compassion for ALL human beings. In that sense, "Letters From Iwo Jima" is a tale of humanity, just like the miniseries "The Pacific" and the movie "Flags Of Our Fathers". All three are many things, but have in common that they share a very important quality: humanity and compassion and grief.

The implication of not having compassion is that you rub your hands with glee at acts of violence you engage in against "them". It is perfectly possible to have at one time, compassion and condemnation and anger and sadness and regret. But the condemnation and anger cannot sensibly be felt against entire nations of people such as Germany or Japan or the "nation" of Islam.

God knows - _I_ know, if you must prefer it - that I am not perfect in this or any other regard, but I use my soul and my intellect to explore that imperfection and seek to minimize it.