But it's not something that was clearly, undisputably wrong. Yeah, perhaps negotiations would've yielded something, particularly if the Emperor had been allowed to remain in power. But that might've just led to Japan rebuilding their military might, not unlike Germany between the two World Wars. The war needed to be ended, and Japan, though desperate, would not have given up until the very bitter end, imo. And a conventional invasion and bombing campaign would've ultimately yielded more loss of life on both sides, this I believe even more strongly. The A-Bomb was a horrible thing to unleash on the world, but so was the firebombing of Dresden, so was the rape of Nanking, so was the Bataan death march, and the Greater Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. The bottom line is, this was a war where civilians were legit targets too, that was the de facto rule.

Plenty of awful stuff went down in that war and in the years leading up to it, formal apologies are not forthcoming, nor should they be, necessarily. Is killing people that way worse than firebombing them? Is it worse than starving them to death with a blockade?

And the Holocaust is on an entirely different level, I worry about Delete Me bringing it up like that, being as how he's German.