The following is from Masayuki Takayama's column in the latter section of today's Shukan Shincho.
This article also proves that he is the one and only journalist in the postwar world.
It is a must-read not only for the Japanese people but for people worldwide.
The Atomic Bomb is Fun
The recent war against Japan was a series of "it wasn't supposed to happen" situations for both Roosevelt (FDR) and Churchill.
The beginning of Pearl Harbor was not supposed to be like that either.
The Japanese had hit FDR's trap, a decoy U.S. fleet placed at Pearl Harbor, just as ordered.
In addition, the idiot ambassador delayed the ultimatum, making the attack on Pearl Harbor a "sneak attack."
He played a brilliant villain, and I would like to commend him, but the damage to the U.S. fleet was so great that it "could not have been" as it was.
There is an explanation for this.
The U.S. war has long been modeled on the Alamo.
First, the enemy kills U.S. civilians.
At the Alamo, 250 people were killed, and they attacked Mexico under the guise of "Remember the Alamo" or a just war.
The same thing happened in the Spanish-American War.
The Spanish didn't set it off, so they blew up Maine themselves and shouted, "Remember Maine," to declare a battle.
This time, he cornered Japan with an oil embargo and invited them to Pearl Harbor to rampage as they pleased.
But there were concerns.
According to military critic Fletcher Pratt, "Japanese people are short-sighted and grow up being carried on their backs, so their semicircular canals are weird, and they can't dive bomb."
Even if the U.S. fleet were decoyed, the Japanese planes would be so screwed up that not a single casualty might occur.
FDR prayed for a disaster on par with the Alamo, but his fears were unfounded.
Japanese planes sank the Arizona with horizontal bombing and dive-bombed and torpedoed other ships, killing 2,400.
He had killed so many of his people through his deceit.
FDR declared war on Japan in Congress, muttering, "It wasn't supposed to be like that," according to Hamilton Huish's "Roosevelt's Responsibility for Starting the War," translated by Soki Watanabe.
Churchill also underestimated the Japanese military.
He dispatched the state-of-the-art battleship Prince of Wales to defend the British colonies in Asia.
On the second day of the war, the unsinkable ship was quickly sunk by Japanese planes.
Churchill chewed his navel, saying, "It wasn't supposed to happen that way."
Japan's Zero Fighter was no match for fighter aircraft from Britain, the United States, Germany, or the Soviet Union.
The Zero fighter easily destroyed even the B17, a U.S. heavy bomb that had never been dropped.
The British lost Hong Kong and Singapore, and the U.S. lost the Philippines.
FDR had no idea that MacArthur was such a coward.
Thus, the Japanese liberated the colonies of Asia, which had been a valuable source of revenue for Western nations.
Again, FDR made the excuse, "It wasn't supposed to happen."
However, the United States also had some lucky surprises.
Oppenheimer's Manhattan Project.
There were no excellent scientists in the United States.
It was impossible to manufacture.
In Europe, there were many good Jewish scientists.
Then Hitler purged them.
The U.S. got 2,000 scientists with little effort.
Making a nuclear bomb was considered dangerous work.
Gunpowder was used.
The tools were purposely made of beryllium, which does not electrify.
And when they tried it, it was straightforward.
According to the U.S. Department of Energy, "Uranium-type bombs explode without fail, so there is no need for prior testing."
The plutonium type, which can be mass-produced cheaply, is difficult to construct for detonation, so the experiment was conducted at Alamogordo.
For some reason, the movie "Oppenheimer" only shows the biggest climax of the test in a crude special effects film.
Truman was ready to go, and when he rode into Potsdam in high spirits, he found that Japan was already on the verge of surrendering.
Truman hurriedly made a trick to obscure the Emperor's status and stall the surrender until he could drop two atomic bombs on Japan.
The film carefully creates the fiction that "Japan, a brutal nation that was killing the people of Asia, would not surrender until two atomic bombs were dropped.
Then comes the news of the bombings.
The sight of the Japanese people, who were so overjoyed to hear that our atomic bombs had killed tens of thousands of people, was much more frightening.
2024/4/12 in Kyoto
