My late mother-in-law agreed. She was a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing who maintained that without it, Japan would not have surrendered, even though everyone knew the war was lost.
I believe that the average Japanese civilian of that time had no influence on the course of their government, which was a de-facto military dictatorship nominally headed by the Emperor.
Guilt? The generation that started that war is dead. The people who lived in Japan immediately after the war suffered years of poverty. My wife’s uncle was believed to be dead, and turned up in 1949 after being held as a POW for 4 years by the Russians. He was a conscript who was grabbed up by the Imperial Army. His alternatives? Probably execution at the hands of the Secret Police if he didn’t serve.
The government that started that war is gone. It’s neither reasonable nor productive to try to judge the past through the enlightened multicultural standards of today.
