a thoughtful web.
Good ideas and conversation. No ads, no tracking.   Login or Take a Tour!
comment

That sounds very interesting, to say the least. May have to pick it up. Will be of a piece with my recent Ellsberg reading, which discusses the decision to drop the bomb in pretty good detail. Ellsberg concludes, as have many others before him, that the bomb was unnecessary and can only really be understood as a warning shot to the Soviets, given how splendidly our targeting of civilians was already going in Japan. I read Making of Modern Japan, but that book, as informative as it was, doesn't really distill the proximal reasons for Japan's behavior in WWII; it focuses more on the bigger historical reasons. I've as yet not found a really good text on WWII from the Japanese perspective. Is this it?