OK. I'll watch my tone.
Plumage
It seems like you hold the view that Japan wanted to conquer "half the world" and all of the sudden decided to attack Pearl Harbor, that the imperial Japan was an evil empire which was controlled by a merciless dictator, and American military was the liberator of all Asia. I am in “no way” approving what Japanese military did in WWII, but this view is very one-sided.
First of all, Japan did not want "half the world". Yes, it had ambitions for the dominance in China and south east Asia. But many western countries also had the same interest, and US was not the exception. The tension between Japan and US increased through the years, and US started an oil embargo to impede Japanese dominance in China. Japan tried to negotiate, and were going to cease all military action in China in return for lifting the embargo. President Roosvelt was well aware of this, he even knew exactly how much Japan will compromise through information from the intelligence agency. But instead of negotiating, he sent Japan what it considered an ultimatum. And 10 days later, the "surprise". Wikipedia says that the head of the War Department Henry L. Stimson wrote in his diary "how we should maneuver them [the Japanese] into the position of firing the first shot without allowing too much danger to ourselves." 10 days before Pearl Harbor. The war on the Pacific was essentially a conflict between Japan and US over the dominance in China and south east Asia. Japan might have been more aggressive, possibly too aggressive even in the 30s' standard, and an attack is an attack so it deserves retaliation, but notion of Japanese "surprise attack to conquer Asia" was merely a tactic the administration used to bring US into the war, like "weapon of mass destruction" was.
Secondly, even though Japan's democracy was deteriorated severely after the start of Sino-Japanese war in 1937, Japan was a democratic country before that period by the standard of the era, and comments like "The emperor attacked Pearl Harbor" "Hirohito should have stopped the war after such and such" are completely unrealistic. Emperors in Japan had been mostly symbolic, and if you knew Japanese history, you would know he did not have such power. So when Japan lost and US invaded it, most Japanese people did not consider them as the liberator. Asian countries might have been happy that Japan lost, but then US itself was one of the countries that attacked and invaded them, and many western countries started wars against them after WWII to reclaim their former colonies.
I repeat, for the second time, I am not rebuking the use of nukes itself. There was a certain circumstance and I believe Truman did his best for the best from his point of view. But saying "It was a right thing to do" "I would do the same if I went back in time" will not be accepted in Japan. Try saying that to some Japanese people and you will look like a complete racist to them, you might as well call them gooks. Even if nukes were necessary, how hard was it to drop one on top of Mt. Fuji, or in a middle of Tokyo bay? It would have made virtually the same effect in terms of encouraging the surrender and preventing Russia's involvement in the invasion. But instead, 2 different types of nukes, one plutonium and one uranium, were dropped on top of a half million civilians. Swarm of American researchers went into Hiroshima and Nagasaki as soon as Japan surrendered, and a large number of bodies and body parts are taken as "samples" from their family's hand and sent to the states. It was also banned to publish or broadcast anything that mentioned the atomic bombs and their victims.
If burning hundreds of thousands of civilians alive like the photo below and cursing survivers' lives for life by severe burns and cancers is not inhumane to the extreme, I don't know what is.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/co...mb_002.jpg
Edited: 2009-05-31, 8:05 pm
but it seems like the bureacrats in the american and Japanese governments sure have been, especially with the Japanese government ignoring the pleas of its citizens to remove these troops, so that rapes and murders of civilians are stopped.