The culture known for literally putting death before dishonor with practices like hari-kiri would not, by any stretch of the imagination, go softly into surrender.
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On August. 6, 1945, an atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima by the B-29 bomber Enola Gay, searing the center of the city for a fraction of a second with a heat of 300,000 degrees centigrade.
“On the 70th anniversary of the end of the war, I bow my head deeply before the souls of all those who perished both at home and overseas”, Abe said in a 25-minute address delivered live on national television.
The planning committee for the US invasion expected that “operations in this area will be opposed not only by the available organised military forces of the Empire, but also by a fanatically hostile population”.
At the same time 32 million Japanese braced for war. They would fight until the last man, bearing whatever weapons they could muster, from bamboo spears, to antique cannons, to machine guns. The proclamation, which radicated Japan’s crimes of aggression during WWII and determined the principles under which Japan is required to behave after the war, is an important document for laying the foundation for the post-war world order and safeguarding peace in Asia and the rest of the world.
“I’d been stationed near Calcutta and we were on a sort of a holiday at a beach near Bombay when it happened, when we’d heard about the bombs being dropped”.
But he said Japan took the wrong course in going to war and that, across generations, Japanese must squarely face their country’s past.
In recent years John has participated in a number of official commemorations to remember all the servicemen and women who paid the ultimate sacrifice for their country, most recently travelling to Belgium to mark 100 years since more than 54,000 soldiers lost their lives during three battles in Ypres.
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Japanese Emperor Hirohito, accepting the Allies’ Potsdam ultimatum, declared an official end to the fighting on August 14, 1945.
