World war II is truly the most horrifying, jaw dropping event in history. It's hard to imagine that in the span of 6 years only, we had pearl habor, stalingrad, kursk, the holocaust, the nanking massacre, and two nuclear bombings.
Let us not graze over the Manila Massacre or the Rape of Manila.
我们别把马尼拉大屠杀或者“马尼拉强奸”给漏了。
RyukXXXX468 赞2025/7/22
And unit 731 and Bataan Death March and Comfort Women.
还有731部队、巴丹死亡行军,以及慰安妇问题。
DucksAreMyFriends253 赞2025/7/21
Unit 731 isn’t talked about enough. Most people have never even heard of it. When it comes to inhumanity it’s hard to imagine anyone can out-Nazi the Nazis, but Japan somehow managed it and I’m forever changed after learning about it.
People also like to forget that the first Nation to carry out aerial bombing campaigns against cities full of civilians in the Second World War wasn't Germany or the Allies, but Japan in China going back to before the Nazi's invaded Poland.
There is a reason a lot of Asian cultures around Japan don’t have found opinions of Japan.
日本周边许多亚洲文化圈的国家对日本没啥好感,这是有原因的。
CompetitiveGood260125 赞2025/7/21
first saw this as part of a video in 1976 as part of grade 8 social studies in canada
1976年我在加拿大上八年级社会课时,第一次在视频里看到这个。
FunkyTomo7749 赞2025/7/22
Same.... It's wild how many people have never heard of the cruel ans sadistic Unit 731.
我也是……真离谱,居然有那么多人没听说过残忍又变态的731部队。
[已删除]40 赞2025/7/22
What's really sad is that we didn't prosecute those pieces of shit. We gave those assholes immunity basically because we wanted to look at their info to see if anything was worthwhile and most of it was just torture.
I understand the reasoning. Why imprison a few people when you can get a countries worth of advanced military and scientific secrets from them. We did the same with nazis and the space program. And I assume a ton of other stuff.
I work for a local board of education in Japan. The way they teach the history of WW2 here can only be described as “bullshit”. The average Japanese person wouldn’t believe you if you told them Japan committed war crimes. Somehow you’d be mistaken, it was probably the “Chinese” or “Koreans”… (I actually had an old guy tell me that) I’ve seen sixth graders spend entire semesters drawing swastikas, writing random gibberish about loving Russia, I’ve even had one 5th grader make an imperial Japan flag and wave it in my face while gleefully screaming JAPAN JAPAN JAPAN- they face no consequences. It’s not seen as a bad thing, they just “love history”.
Then there was Chiune Sugihara, a Japanese diplomat who, against orders, gave Jews in Lithuania thousands of transport visas to Japan. They fired him after the war but eventually some of the Jews he saved found him and gave him an award.
If memory serves, John Heinrich Detlef Rabe was the German ambassador to China in the years leading up to WW2. He is credited with leading the effort to establish the “safe zone” in Nanjing when the Japanese overran the city’s defenses. He and his family lived in severe poverty after the war and so the Chinese in Nanjing crowdfunded, sending them the equivalent of $26k today plus a monthly food package.
如果没记错的话,约翰·海因里希·德特勒夫·拉贝(John Heinrich Detlef Rabe)在二战前夕是德国驻华大使。他主导建立了南京“安全区”,当时日军正疯狂突破南京防线。战后他和家人生活极其困窘,南京市民众筹救济他们,给他们汇去了相当于现在2.6万美元的钱,还定期寄食品包裹。
Vanillabean7330 赞2025/7/22
Why do you guys always have to resort to calling Unit 731 “worse than the Nazis?” Are you really unable to convey the horror of those Japanese experiments without diminishing the unimaginable scale and barbarity of Nazi-perpetrated crimes? You can speak to the horrors of Unit 731 by using descriptive language or referencing survivors’ testimony. Saying that they “out-Nazied the Nazis” is lazy and, frankly, uninformative.
Well almost the entirety of my father’s family was wiped out during the Holocaust and his dad, my grandfather, was one of only 3 survivors in a family of 13 (8 of his siblings and both parents murdered)—and he only survived because he was lucky enough to be a young man in good shape so they rerouted him from Auschwitz to a labor camp where he stayed until he was eventually liberated. So I understand very deeply on a personal level the inhumanity of the Nazi crimes. Calling Unit 731 a step up in barbarity from the Nazis is saying a lot, and I mean it. It isn’t meant to downplay the severity of Nazi crimes, it’s meant to emphasize *just how horrible Unit 731 really was*. It’s not a competition, but it does kind of seem like Japan thought it was and wanted to win.
Gotta see what happened to Hong Kong after the Battle of Hong Kong. Everyone that could leave did, those that stayed were subject to an extremely brutal regime. There was a fraction of the population remaining, they had to completely switch to Japanese all of a sudden, plus all the other extremely horrific atrocities they were known for at the time. It wasn't even considered a valuable target. Similar to Pearl Harbor in the view that people couldn't have expected it. So the allies abandoned it after the initial battle.
Manila Massacre is a great example of there being no good side in war. Either you died because the Japanese raped and killed you or you died because the Americans shelled every building they came across indiscriminately.
War is truly the worst imaginable thing ever. There is the old saying that “war is hell” but it isn’t true. War is worse.
战争真的是世间最糟糕、最可怕的事情了。
有句老话说“战争就是地狱”,但这不对。战争比地狱更糟。
ItsMrChristmas46 赞2025/7/23
"War isn’t Hell. War is war, and Hell is Hell. And of the two, war is a lot worse. (..) There are no innocent bystanders in Hell, but war is chock full of them – little kids, cripples, old ladies. In fact, except for a few of the brass, almost everybody involved is an innocent bystander."
No....it acknowledges that the good guys did bad things to get rid of the bad guys for a good purpose.
不……这只是说明为了达成正义的目标,正义的一方也干过缺德事儿。
SIumptGod258 赞2025/7/22
The people in Hiroshima at the time of the explosion were later looked down upon by outsiders, I can’t remember the term they were referred to as. Fucked up.
当时在广岛挨了原子弹的那些人,后来被外人瞧不起,我记不起那个专有名词叫什么了。真特么操蛋。
rask0ln78 赞2025/7/22
maybe hibakusha or genbaku otome?
是不是被爆者(hibakusha)或者原爆乙女(genbaku otome)?
AdAvailable370667 赞2025/7/21
Yeah it’s hibakusha
对,就是被爆者。
cocaine_jaguar35 赞2025/7/21
What does that mean exactly?
具体是什么意思?
TrueKyragos120 赞2025/7/21
Literally, "bombed person" or "nuked person", "hibaku" specifically referring to the atomic bomb.
字面意思就是“被炸的人”或者“被核平的人”。“被爆(hibaku)”特指原子弹爆炸。
cocaine_jaguar23 赞2025/7/22
All good answers, thank you
回答都很到位,谢谢。
rask0ln36 赞2025/7/22
survivor of bombing or someone affected by radioactivity
爆炸幸存者,或者受放射性影响的人。
AdAvailable370667 赞2025/7/22
It was a discriminatory term that was used after the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki due to the misunderstandings surrounding radiation poisoning at the time. The average citizen didn’t know if it would contagious or not, so people would be afraid of and would purposefully avoid those damaged by the radiation
They also thought you could pass down the effects through your genetics. So even the children of people who were bombed were stigmatized.
而且他们还觉得辐射会通过基因遗传。所以即便是被炸者的孩子也会被贴上标签,遭受偏见。
[已删除]84 赞2025/7/22
So, this happens due to a flash burn. The intense thermal radiation of a nuclear explosion only lasts for a second or two. During that time, it burns everything in line of sight. But different colours absorb different amounts of heat - white reflects most, and black absorbs most. The pattern on the skin reflects the pattern of the cloth the woman had been wearing at the time. tldr: pattern because cloth.
Wow I see a lot of comments with bad takes. You can feel sympathy for this woman AND realize that the atomic bombings were the best choice to cause the least amount suffering. Sadly this woman and thousands other people like her had to suffer so that MILLIONS of other people may live. To the people who have no sympathy for this woman remember, she is a person too and could have been you if you were born in a different place and time. And to the people who say that America was evil and that this is one of the worst war crimes of all time, tell me this, would you rather this woman suffer through the atomic bombing or would you rather her and her entire extended family be shot dead in a land invasion because some Japanese soldier handed her a rifle and told her to go defend their "honor".
I would say so. It was found out after the war that the different branches of the Japanese military either didn't believe it was a nuclear bomb or couldn't believe the US could have made more than one bomb due to the struggles of making one in the Japanese nuclear program. The main point of the atomic bombs was to try and break their morale by basically saying that they could be annihilated if the US wanted it. So basically the Japanese government thought it was a fluke the first time.
I won't so quickly agree that they were the "Best" option. but they definitely a *reasonable* choice considering the circumstances and most alternatives.
The best option would be that no one dies but due to the Japanese government's refusal to surrender it sadly wasn't one that was on the table and i would say that out of the two remaining options it was the least terrible making it the "best". not that I liked that it had to happen of course.
It’s such a American propaganda myth that it was the best choice. The only reason they chose that option is because they got a new toy and they wanted to try it out. History discussions always seems to leave out the fact that a peace treaty and surrender were already being negotiated before the bombings. But without fail every time an image like this shows up Americans run in and try to argue that the bombs absolutely had to be used and you shouldn’t feel sympathy.
Dropping the bombs saved lives. Over 250,000 were dying every month in China alone under Japanese rule. Also, forcing a Japanese surrender and avoiding an invasion is estimated to have saved 4 million lives (1 million US soldiers and 1 million Japanese Army & Navy combined and 2 million Japanese civilians).
I feel like that is an easy way to describe the fact that two cities full of innocent people were wiped from existence and others suffered for decades.
It would've been dozens of cities of innocent people if the bombs weren't dropped.
如果没有投下炸弹,数十个城市都会有无辜者。
Chichi23020 赞2025/7/22
And imagine that this is basically nothing compared to what others went through from these bombings. The stories from these bombs are like things you'd imagine only existed in thematic depictions of hell.
People walking around with skin hanging from their arms…. begging for water….. hell on earth.
人们走路时胳膊上挂着皮肤……乞讨水……人间地狱。
Strange-Audience-71720 赞2025/7/23
That’s wild
太离谱了。
CaramelMachiattos13 赞2025/7/21
American trying everything to justify dropping nuclear bombs. They should reflect a little more.
美国人为了给扔原子弹洗地真是啥招都用上了,确实该好好反省一下了。
levitikush10 赞2025/7/22
Why are there always morons in the comments saying the atomic bombings weren’t justified? They 100% were. Read a damn book people.
评论区里怎么总有些蠢货说原子弹炸得没道理?那绝对是有道理的。都去读读书吧,真是够了。
Trotsky_Enjoyer7 赞2025/7/23
The atomic bombings of Japan were the most cruel ONE-TIME events in human history (by that I mean a single act carried out, not like the entireity of the holocaust) and it pains me to know that they were completely unecessary to end the war. Japan was already on the brink of surrender and the Soviets invading Manchuria sealed the deal, the only rhing America wanted to achieve with those nukes was to scare the Soviet Union.
If WW3 happens there won't be anyone left to feel sorry for
真要打起第三次世界大战,到时候连个能感到难过的人都不会剩下。
Horror_Dot42133 赞2025/7/22
With burns like that she’s probably dead by now, if not from the radiation than from old age. Really makes you think
受了那么严重的烧伤,她现在恐怕早就不在人世了,就算没死于辐射也该老死了。真是让人感慨。
V1lorix2 赞2025/7/21
If someone is interested, read Manga called "Barefoot Gen" about Hiroshima and life in Japan at that time
有人感兴趣的话,去读读那部叫《赤足小子》的漫画,讲的是广岛以及当时日本的生活。
Positive_Worker_34672 赞2025/7/22
Omg I read the safest story about little girl who got cancer as a result of the bomb she wanted to complete 1000 paper birds before she died but ending not getting to finish her classmates made the rest for her funeral
Damn, at first, I thought that was a dope ass tattoo. Sad times those were.
靠,我一开始还以为那是纹身呢,做得挺酷。那个年代真是太悲惨了。
Northern_student1 赞2025/7/22
I don’t know what category this falls into but, in our age of conspiracy and misinformation I’ve never seen anyone deny the horrors of atomic weapons. I don’t know what that says about humanity or the power of the atomic bomb.
From what I've watched in documentaries, we used a lot of atomic bomb victims as guinea pigs to study the effects of radiation. That and we didn't publicly release the information for a while.