[quote=@Dinh AaronMk]
<Snipped quote by Sanctus Spooki>

Off the subject at hand, but I want to add to this:

One of the factors over the decades that lead to bomb-related suicides was that those who survived were often physically scarred severely. So much so that these people were deemed an entire new class of human being third-rate in Japanese society. They were considered like lepers in antiquity; to be ostracized and separated from mainstream society because they were ugly and mutilated, they also represented an injury to something deep within the Japanese self-image. Telling them to fuck off and relegating them to some far-away corner of Japanese society was the best way the majority of the nuclear-unafflicted population could cope with them existing.

Of course, this means these groups got the shit end of the stick by all accounts. Taking up jobs and positions that would keep them from the public eye, not allowed in stores - or at slow or no business hours if it all - and relegated to ghettos. The problem for many of these individuals - more so the kids, who were constantly berated in school for having severely burned faces - was immense. In the years after the bombs they chose the dignified exit in suicide. The issue was so great, that Japanese author Kenzaburō Ōe lamented something along the lines of, "At least Japan is a society that does not believe in the western dogma, that there's no dogma against suicide" (I'll need to find the full passage).

As for us: we chanted the same mantra over the years to validate the nukes - or the entire bombing campaign of Japan in general, the fire-bombing of Tokyo actually killed more than Hiroshima and Nagasaki - that we've convinced ourselves it was the only option and everyone from bomber command to Eisenhower stuck to their guns, aided by the safety of slowly revising invasion death tolls ever higher to support the bombing (alternatives included having simply showed off the bombs effects before a Japanese delegation alongside members of the young UN to force their hand [Japanese military command would have never surrendered to the bomb], or waiting for the Soviets to play their hand in Manchuria/have had their name on the document demanding Japanese surrender to spook them, the Japanese were ardently terrified of the Soviets). But this entire paragraph is also off the original topic; oh well.

[/quote]

Pretty much agree with all of this, I left out the Tokyo bombing simply because a lot of people are unaware of the total devastation caused by it - Honestly the pictures are more shocking in some ways than the two cities nuked, the nukes left rubble as far as the eye can see. A lot of tokyo was just plain gone after the fires were finished,


[@catchamber]

K