Meh. Details!

As someone from the country that's been conquered by japan: absolutely yes.

It's literally the trolley problem writ large. Do you kill a few hundred thousand civilians to prevent the deaths of probably several million.

more like least path of resistance to peace.

In context, against the Imperial Japanese Government, unfortunately, yes.

Yes, when you grow up deep inside the imperial bubble.

When the US nuked Japan, almost everyone in my homeland (China) knows what's coming next. It maked the end of a terrible age of war, and era of subjugation by inperialists. The japaneese invaders are soon gonna be gone. It was a huge relief.

Then when the news of japan's surrender hits the news, there was celebrations throughout China. And I'm sure those in Korea and various Southeast Asian countries would also be celebrating that.

It would've taken months and possibly years for the US to do a non-nuclear attack of japan, and that would've allowed them to continue doing massacres across Asia. Civillians shouldn't have to die for the crime of their government, but there were not many options, and this was the lesser evil.

Bombing Japan == horrific but better than the alternatives we had.

Though even then there were variables.

https://blog.nuclearsecrecy.com/2015/08/03/were-there-alternatives-to-the-atomic-bombings/

The Japanese attacked and brought the USA into the second world war, I mean you seem to forget that.

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)

The Soviet Union had already invaded Manchuria and annihilated the Kwantung Army. We can argue tit for tat about which part of the final days of the Pacific War contributed the most to the final surrender of Japan. It's clear though that no single part of that was enough and it was the combination of the firebombing of Tokyo and Osaka, the destruction of the remaining IJN fleet strength at the Battle of Tsushima, the Soviets invading Manchuria, Korea and the Northern Islands, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Although there are records of some of the civilian government campaigning Hirohito and Koiso for unconditional surrender, the main war cabinet still refused and preferred the path of a final confrontation.

I think it's impossible to say if the atom bombs hadn't been dropped whether they would have in fact surrendered, given that all the other things listed above were true after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki and they still were arguing for a negotiated settlement when no opposing force (USA, Commonwealth or Soviet Union) were prepared to accept anything less than an unconditional surrender.

Also, if you want more details on the extraordinary level of depravity by Japanese soldiers during the Second Dino-Japanese War and the wider World War 2 I can recommend reading Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Japan's Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Gold and Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka, all of which contain first hand accounts and then you can try comparing and contrasting by accounts of those carried out by Allied forces in the conflict and give me your false equivalence then.

So prior to the nukes Japan had just lost their entire navy, their air force, and practically all their conquests in Asia where they killed well over 20 million civilians and lost 2 million soldiers in the process.

After Hiroshima the US gave them three days to surrender.

They didn't. One of most inevitable defeats in modern history and not only did they not surrender after the first, they tried to call America's bluff, and there was a coup attempt to prevent surrender after the second.

If you'd like some reading on the Japanese militarist cult and propaganda campaigns that enabled a people to be so delusional there's quite a lot of scholarly work available.

In any event the cause of their delusional dreams was the same cause that led them to having baby-bayonetting contests in China: ethnic supremacist rhetoric functionally identitical to Nazism that told them Americans and Soviets would be doing to them what they'd just done to China, Korea, the Phillipines, and many other nations.

👍🏻

So the US should've just allowed imperial japan to continue massacring my compatriots in China? Fuck that. Its sad that civillians had to get caught up in the death tolls, but I'm on the side of the US and the allies when it comes to WW2.