Abe losing to his demons - The Japan Times
After the commemorations for the atomic atrocities at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe has a few days left to contemplate what he will say about war and peace on the 70th anniversary of Japan’s defeat and surrender. “I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds,” Robert Oppenheimer, father of the atomic bomb, wrote, quoting from the Bhagavad Gita, about the bombs. But war is also death, and World War II saw too many atrocities and too many leaders with blood on their hands. Altogether, up to 85 million people died in the war, including 3. 3 million Japanese. Before the dropping of the atomic bombs, there was the massacre of Nanjing, with over 200,000 Chinese dead according to the International Military Tribunal for the Far East (Japanese estimates are considerably lower), or 300,000 according to China. the Shoah (or Holocaust) slaughtering six million Jews, plus the murder of five million non-Jews by the Nazis. battles for Iwo Jima (nearly 18,000 Japanese dead and 7,000 Americans) and Okinawa (149,193 Japanese civilian deaths, many of them enforced suicides or human shields, 77,166 Imperial Japanese soldiers, and 14,009 American troops, plus about 600... The year before he died, I talked at length to Group Captain Leonard Cheshire VC, who had flown as the British observer in the aircraft accompanying the one that dropped the second atomic bomb on Nagasaki. Source: www.japantimes.co.jp
