Imminent: 70th observance of the Hiroshima atomic bombing. Will you take note?

Wednesday, August 5, 2015, 9:45am PDT: Later today, my family and I will attend an observance of the 70th year since the A-bombing of Hiroshima, Japan in 1945. Due to the time difference between Southern California and Hiroshima, Japan,SoCal attendees are asked to arrive by 4pm sharp. The actual time of silent prayer and/or meditation is at 4:15pm PDT, which corresponds to 8:15am, Thursday, August 6, 2015 in Hiroshima. Here is the program announcement for that gathering: www.psr-la.org...

Of the mainstream media stories on the Hiroshima A-bombing I have seen recently in the USA, all appear to have either incredibly superficial knowledge of the Hiroshima bombing, especially so for its aftermath, or are deliberately spinning a safe US version of those events. I include in that category the current articles online (HuffPost) by historians and other US academics who are promoting their own books.

Have any ATS contributors around the world seen competent coverage this month of this difficult subject? Thanks for reading.

a reply to: Uphill
Hey Ide like to see a 'safe' version of how America dropped TWO huge fuggin weapons of mass destruction on a civilian population, bearing in mind that America has never been on the #ty end of a bombing campaign.

a reply to: Uphill

This bronze Buddha was melted by heat from the Hiroshima bomb. Bronze melts at around 1600 degrees F. The temperature on the ground beneath the exploding Hiroshima bomb reached about 7000 degrees. Hiroshima Peace Museum, Hiroshima, Japan. November 13, 1984.

Photo Gallery

Japan is in the process of nuking our entire West Coast with Fukishima radiation with no end in sight. I would say they got even and then some.

a reply to: ClydeBuilt


Let's see.
A couple hundred thousand dead Japanese or,

A couple hundred thousand dead G.I.s because of an invasion.
A million dead Japanese.
www.historylearningsite.co.uk...
Results may very.
Russians invading from the north splitting Japan in half like germany.

You want a list of war crimes committed by the Japanese in China and the Philippines?
They didn't deserve mercy.
they also had a chance to surrender after the first bomb but decided not to. Pride....
they knew they had lost months before and still refused to surrender.

do I feel bad for the innocent that suffered? Yes
But I still say it saved more lives than it ended.

a reply to: Bluntone22

You want a list of war crimes committed by the Japanese in China and the Philippines?

War is a crime. Justifying it even worse.

originally posted by: intrptr
a reply to: Bluntone22

You want a list of war crimes committed by the Japanese in China and the Philippines?

War is a crime. Justifying it even worse.

If only pithy comments prevented war from happening.

a reply to: Uphill ... leaving now to attend that ceremony (parking will be challenging), but thank you for the diversity of your replies. Later this week I will discuss in this thread the deficiencies of the recent media accounts I have seen so far.

Be aware of the 1998 book The Myths of August by former US Interior Secretary Stewart Udall, the first historical account to incorporate many newly declassified US government documents related to the Hiroshima bombing: rutgerspress.rutgers.edu...

Here is part of a survivors story,
more at

www.abc.net.au...


Just before 8.15am Tomiko arrived at her school, Minami Takeya-cho.
Her classmates were already lined up outside for assembly. Then
everything changed, as if the world stopped. The atomic bomb
exploded above Hiroshima, only 1,800 metres from where Tomiko
was standing."I was in the midst of the bright, bright light. I felt as
if the sun dropped on me. Then the blast, strong blast attacked me.
I found myself under the rubble of the school. I was not sure how long
I was unconscious.

"I was in the darkness, I couldn't see anything. No-one was there.
No teacher, no student at all. No-one. I was worried because I was
the only one still alive. About 320 girls were on the playground and
10 teachers but there was nobody, they just disappeared and left me
in the darkness."My skin was peeling off and hanging down from my
neck and then my clothes, my back was burnt and the clothes were
just tattered and hanging down. The skin on both legs was peeling off.
You can imagine as if socks were inside out and open.
My leg was like that, all the skin on my legs was peeling off and hanging down.
Pieces of glass were speared into my head. For the first time I looked at
my wounds and I became sick, vomiting. At the same time, I felt so thirsty.
I wanted to get water, trying to find water, but there was none"I saw many
refugees crossing the bridge, like me all of their skin was peeling off.
It was so heavy for them, they were walking with holding their arms like this,
their skin was hanging down. There were dead bodies and dying people
floating on the river. I saw them, they were floating..

Nobody wins a war .
One side only loses more than the other ....

Lest we forget , and turn our world into this nightmare !

I remember every year.

What makes the 70th anniversary so special?

Does it make the deaths, somehow, more horrible?

The world remembers well enough, I think, since they've not been used since. Which is a good thing.

It's pointless to argue the necessity, or lack of. Thoughts and opinions are far too well entrenched to ever change.

The war is over. Let the dead lie in peace. Remember them, but don't use them as some sort of pawn in a contest.

I don't usually click on photo gallery links that possibly containgruesome photographs.
The OP's link goes to hyperlinked list you can text search.
"model" is only found twice on this page though.

a reply to: Uphill

I think it's a significant anniversary and at this time a reminder of past mistakes , hundreds of thousands of civilians killed , some quickly , some slowly , all horrifically.

The spin put on the event is typical of history being written by the victor , it is a sad blot on our history but one that needs to be remembered if we are not to make the same mistakes.

a reply to: Uphill

What would you consider competent coverage? How much coverage do you think this particular atrocity should receive?

I think most people have a good grasp of what happened that day. Nuclear bombs are devastatingly powerful, and are something I wish would never have been created.

In this particular case however, most experts agree that more lives were saved in the end with the use of those nuclear weapons.

it's not like they didn't know it was coming, leaflets were dropped over all targets considered. Japans leaders were warned about the weapon, they knew they were going to lose the war. to continue to fight was foolish, to not give up after the first bomb was dropped was insane arrogant pride. the fault lays squarely on the emperor's and his adviser's shoulders.

as horrible as it was, fact is that millions of lives were saved due to the dropping of the bombs.

a reply to: Uphill

Here's to
Hiroshima, nagasaki, fukushima.



I've taken more than notice.

a reply to: Bluntone22

No, it would have been more like a million dead GIs.

The Rape of Nanking, the horror after the fall of the Philippines, their biological experiments, vivisection, the Bataan Death March, Korean "comfort women", their treatment of POW's and all their other atrocities EARNED them a visit by the Enola Gay.

My dad was a bomb loader and help load the bomb, but at the time he did not know ... i800guswho.blogspot.com...

a reply to: GusWho August 24, 2015 --- Since your dad was an eyewitness to some of the events related to those bombings, it may be of interest to you to know that The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has a new article on the Nagasaki A-bombing containing many previously unknown facts: thebulletin.org...

Monday, August 24, 2015: Apologies for my being slow to reply ... I was in a non-internet-accessible location for a few weeks, and am about to go to another non-internet site, but just overnight this time. I have read all of the posts and replies on this thread. Thank you all for participating.

Radarloveguy, thank you for that survivor story excerpt. It is a vivid reminder that without access to such memoirs, it's much harder to make sense of, or to forgive, or certainly to heal from such a history, for anyone, regardless of the point of view one uses.

My conclusions and responses so far:

1. Danke, for example, asks, "what would you consider competent coverage?" Goretex, for example, reminds us that "the spin on the event is typical of history being written by the victor..." Agreed, so "competent coverage" by journalists includes a review of at least the major different perspectives on the A-bombings. Competent coverage also includes an awareness of the the longterm US censorship of much material related to these bombings and their aftermath. Interestingly, some US censorahip continues even in 2015 ... I have uncovered a number of books of survivor accounts that are still unavailable in the USA. And how many people know that some books on this subject are still seized at US Customs points of entry into the USA as of 2015? The problem with a US information blackout on any subject is that it makes it difficult to even begin a conversation on that censorship, which is apparently the point of that censorship. An academic book (published at a Swedish university) documents much post-1945 US censorship of such materials, in that case referring to the seizure of manuscripts and the prevention of publication.

On the issue of the competency of media coverage, I therefore conclude that biased and incomplete US reporting of the A-bombings and their aftermath is still the norm. Sadly, this pattern extends even to new US academic books on this subject, the exception being The Myths of August, by Stewart Udall. Udall, for example, uses newly declassified US government documents to pinpoint which US official ordered both A-bombings (Hint: It wasn't Truman).

...My replies are to be continued ... bye for now.