I was tempted to be that faggot, cause god knows. Anime, right? But this was actually uh really cool and horrifying.

Five starring just for you sweety.

Although I would make an exception here anyway. This is actually horrific and the animation is actually decent on the frying bodies and the developing mushroom cloud.

I know, right? For once it wasn't like Grandma's slideshow of her trip to the Hiroshima detonation.

Any animes on the firebombing of Tokyo? That would be pretty moving since it made the London Blitz look downright friendly, and Dresden look downright normal.

Grave of the Fireflies features a fairly hardcore firebombing scene near the beginning, if that's what you're looking for.

DMKA is a flip-flopper.

Ask yourself that and then be thankful that we don't have to make cartoons about the invasion of mainland Japan.

Also, let's look for animes about Japan's wacky wartime exploits.

Like the 'Surprise-Sex' of Nanking.

Shit at least we did our indiscriminate civilian impersonally! That has to account for something.

And there's the Bataan Death March, and the occupation and attempted cultural genocide of Korea, oh and the whole Pearl Harbor thing, too. Fuck Japan.

Eh, it's probable the soviets would have invaded if we dragged on feet , and things may have been worse in the long run if they controlled Japan.

Maybe a longshot but at least plausible.

You niggas need to stop acting like kids fighting over who has the coolest dad, i hate this kind of discussions. The story pf pretty much every country in the world is covered in blood, no exceptions. Current civilization was formed over the corpses of other civilizations.

Also, the point of work like this, and Grave of the Fireflies, is to show things from the perspective of civilians. People in Japan were kept getting feed of just how awesome their emperor was, and that war was going well for them. Then this shit happens.

Imagine Mr Straight Talk with his palsy fingers on the button.

http://www.poetv.com/video.php?vid=45311

Uuuuhhh same.

Actually, I remember in the book Hiroshima by John Hersey, which was a collection of interviews from survivors done shortly after the blast, one that especially scarred me for life was of a man who described finding a group of soldiers sitting in a daze along a road - "twenty men...their eye sockets were hollow, the fluid from their eyes had run down their cheeks"

you're right in that the eyeballs didn't melt like they were made of wax, in reality they boiled off and exploded

I know.

Why did they have to white wash the boiling and exploded nature?

Yeah, it was pretty bad news for the air defense crews who were keeping their eyes on the sky.. I think some even spotted the parachute of the Bomb itself in the last moments.

The punchline was that there had been an air raid warning earlier in the morning, advising people to take shelter. When only three b-29s were sighted, it was assumed they were doing reconnaissance, and the warning was called off. The bomb dropped within an hour.

No, they weren't defending themselves. That's why one bomber had impunity. In any case, Captain Tibbets, I salute you. War sucks. That's what it is, right there. And it still was less devastating than the firebombing of Tokyo anyway.

the bombing of Hiroshima was the single greatest act of mass murder in history and if you defend it for any reason there is literally no depravity you could not contort yourself into apologizing for

The firebombing of Tokyo killed more than Hiroshima, and the idea was that with the option between house-to-house combat with civilians and showing off our new superweapon in order to end the war, the expected loss of life was less between Hiroshima and Nagasaki put together. If anything it's probably best that we saw the true horrors of nuclear warfare on two cities, rather than first see it in mass warfare.

It's not that Hiroshima and Nagasaki were truly justified, or right, but rather that we have learned from what happened, and no nuke has been used in war since.

Obviously, one could bring up the rape on nanking, but then we're just arguing an eye for an eye.

Oh shit it's almost like Whitewater5 doesn't know what he's talking about!

The comment Whitewater just made might be one of the stupidest things I've ever read.

hmmm Ageusiatic, factually unsubstantiated exhausted platitudes? well golly gee am i convinced

Shut the fuck up Whitewater5, you ridiculous wanker.

In context, it's very clear now that the only reason Truman's administration nuked the shit out of them is to show Russia we were willing to fuck them in the ear, and possibly as a final swing for Pearl Harbor.

It's certainly not the greatest mass murder in history, but it's definitely another example of civilians dying so that a government can pursue its diplomatic and political agenda. Whether you think that's justifiable, that's what it is.

4 stars for eyeballs melting.

Actually, rereading up on the subject again (it's been years since I've read on anything in this sector) and it looks like there might be evidence that goes directly against that. One thing was clear: Truman was withholding crucial information about his decision. Since there was clamoring among the Japanese leadership for a surrender, this information was always assumed to have been the imminence of Japan's surrender.

But, blah blah blah, point is, after reading a little about it, I'm not so sure there's really a historical consensus anymore (if there ever was). So, uh, forget I said anything. Fuck!

There were some elements of the Japanese government and military willing to surrender before we dropped the bombs, but even they were not willing to surrender unconditionally and wanted to retain the majority of the Japanese imperial apparatus after the war. Given that that apparatus started the war in the first place it could not be allowed to continue. Regardless the idea of actual surrender was in many minds completely unthinkable. Even after the Emperor himself announced surrender there was an attempt at a coupe by the military because they just could not believe that their god king would willfully accept defeat. The only thing that could end that war was total and absolute destruction of the mindset that helped start it: namely that the Japanese people were superior in all ways to everyone else and that they had not just a right but a responsibility to conquer all of Asia. We could have either done that through a massive invasion of Japan or by hoping that the atomic bomb would be the final persuasion they needed to quit. I'm glad they chose the latter.

Some argue that nukes are the only reason the world hasn't yet torn itself to pieces

So you can trace all this and WW2 back to castes of nationalistic far-right leaders who felt that the only way to secure a healthy national future was by using the military to overthrow the governments of unfriendly countries in the name of patriotism and security.

Sounds familiar. Just make sure none of them have nukes!

And yet, it probably wasn't an atomic bomb that made Japan amenable to unconditional surrender. It probably wasn't even a second atomic bomb that did it. More than likely, what made the Japanese hawks change their mind was Stalin's invasion, where suddenly a new enemy was in the picture. As others have observed, firebombings of other cities via conventional weapons were even more devastating than the atomic bomb, so it's ludicrous to believe that Japan changed its tune because they realized that America could deliver comparable devastation but with a smaller number of bombers.

I'm all for debating uncomfortable events in history, but I have a problem with framing events such that we were left with no choice but to do whatever we did, and therefore we did the right thing. We used atomic bombs on Japan because they left us no choice, we invaded Iraq because Saddam left us no choice, we wiped out the Indians because they left us no choice.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Japanese_war_crimes

Great. Let's all blame Truman and Einstein for tentacle rape and Digimon.

I'm sure compared to the real thing...this is comedy gold...

I was about to say that even people who aren't anime fans should see Grave of the Fireflies.

Whitewater5 is to whimperingly snide platitudes about war what Tinmaniac is to cat videos or DKMA is to anime clips.

Grave of the Fireflies broke me. The author wrote it as a way to come to terms with the death of his sister (he still blamed himself). The fact that it's considered a "children's movie" is just, well, what.

Barefoot Gen is worth watching. It's got a pretty optimistic message. Grave of the Fireflies is as fun as watching two children die for two hours.

"Bear in mind that the people who control these weapons generally think of them as big sticks of dynamite for killing bad guys/bringing about the Rapture."

Huh? If there's anything in the world that makes you snap out of idiocy and think rationally, it's a fucking nuclear weapon. It even made Reagan rethink things. The biggest dangers with nukes are by far mistakes and unintentional launches. The whole point of nukes is not to use them. Now that we know about nuclear winter, the chances of a nation actually launching one or several are practically nil.

Sorry to burst your bubble, but over 2000 nuclear weapons tests have been conducted around the world, some as powerful as 50 megatons, over 1000 times more powerful than Little Boy (Hiroshima's bomb). Nuclear weapons are used REGARDLESS of their "need." More tests are coming, as more and more nations go nuclear.

It's likely we won't understand just how much we have fucked up our planet and our own genetic code, cancer rates, and so on for another 50 years, but we have made QUITE the mark already.

Yes, Oswald, everything will be fine.

Same here. I'm happy to give 5 stars because it's good, anime or not.

Barefoot Gen. Another of the massively depressing and bleak post-A-Bomb anime/manga genre.

Yeah, the ones in the open close to ground zero would have been vaporized. The lucky ones. :(

I've seen pictures of walls with imprints of human bodies on them, the shadows of people who were vaporized in the blast.

The United States of America is the only country to use nuclear weapons in war.

Plenty suffered before they died.

The explosion was an air blast, so no one died 'instantly' but would have been burning alive from a fraction up to a couple seconds depending on distance from the hypocenter, before the shockwave reached them.

Possibly the only painless deaths happened to people indoors behind enough walls and floors (the infrared radiation went through one wall easy) to be protected from the heat until the shockwave and debris crushed them.

No one was 'vaporized', 4000 degrees celceus for a couple seconds doesn't do that. The shockwave simply swept away charred corpses near the hypocenter and between the speed of the winds and all the debris generated little would remain to be identified as remains even before the post explosion fires started.

Shut the fuck up you silly bitch. You have no idea of what war is really about and you should go get skull-fucked by a biker.

I'm pretty sure he was being facetious dude. Calm down.