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.
There is something about these cross-eyed anime girls that makes me irrationally angry…
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!"
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?
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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)
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Bombing Japan = good?
It's literally the trolley problem writ large. Do you kill a few hundred thousand civilians to prevent the deaths of probably several million.
But thats dishonest. It assumes that:
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The nuking of Japan was the reason they surrendered
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The nukes were gauranteed to make then surrender.
Like would it still have been justified if Japan hadnt surrendered? Then youve committed an atrocity for no reason.
Or what about if it was a different atrocity? Would tourturing a few hundred thousand Japanese to death be justified for the same reason?
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I used to think along the lines of this too until I visited the Hiroshima Peace Memorial where they tell you about all the ways the US min-maxed the bomb to kill as many people as possible and did it truly as an experiment.
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As someone from the country that's been conquered by japan: absolutely yes.
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The Japanese civilian population had been indoctrinated into the belief that western soldiers were absolute monsters who would carry out unspeakable acts on them
We nuked them twice after carrying out a campaign of what we cozily referred to as "moral bombing", where we targeted civilian populations to kill the families of soldiers.
We ARE absolute monsters.
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France nuclear bombed Algeria lots of times and nobody makes such a big deal of it.
Maybe because instead of dropping them on cities they dropped them in the Sahara desert?
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For what it's worth, SeeU is South Korean, not Japanese.
These kinda memes tend to rely on passive prejudice and ignorance to hit.
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the japanese had been making anime for decades before ww2, the first anime film having been released in 1917.
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.
Same happened to culture in western countries, it just looks different and feels natural to us.
Someone tell trump nuclear weapons are DEI and removing them will get him his Nobel peace prize!
Someone tell him they're underaged girls and he'll go...fuck them? I don't know, I didn't think the analogy through, but he's a pedophile.
shouldn't it be Kaijus after the nukes
Must have hit the pixel limit for the month.
Yeah, sure. Let's forget about Unit 731, genocide policy in China, union with nazi Germany, annual Yasukuni shrine rutuals, Shintoism, sick nationalism, etc.
https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202408/15/WS66be00dea3104e74fddba322.html
https://virtualworkersofamerica.com/japans-obsession-with-nazi-related-anime/
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