Japan to recommend A-bomb photo archive for UNESCO heritage list

Great idea. While they are at it, UNESCO can complement the collection with other archives showing Japan's road to war: the Rape of Nanking, almost total destruction of Manila, the slave labor conditions along the Death Railway in Burma, etc. -- ie, the horrors that the Hiroshima bombing was aimed at ending.

The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.

While is it important to openly discuss the atrocities of war and particularly atomic war. It's also important that the revisionists textbook creators are openly honest about the causes.

As hard as they try to rewrite history and use Nagasaki and Hiroshima as evidence that Japan was strictly an innocent bystander/victim. I invite you to ask yourself this question,

If Japan had atomic weapons first, would they have used them?

The answer is unequivocally yes.

In the ideology of Japan, the bomb retroactively absolves the country of any responsibility, shame and guilt for whatever happened before. So, it's important to keep it in the world public eye. It can even be co-opted as a universal principle too - a call for world peace and the elimination of nuclear weapons - to deflect criticism that it is being cynically used for absolution. But Japan's failure to sign up to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must then be marginalised to achieve that.

This SF comfort woman statue should be in UNESCO Heritage list too.

No it shouldn't.

This statue was created not just to bring attention to Korean women, but it also included Chinese and Philippine women. Later on, watered down to include all women victims of sex trafficking. This was quite controversial and politically motivated. At the time, Mayor Lee, (Chinese) a disastrous mayor at that, always running for reelection, after a promise that he wouldn't run to be reelected, in a city with a huge Chinese population, approved this to bolster his reelection effort. It was all for naught as he died unexpectedly of a heart attack or something soon thereafter.. If we want to be fair and honest, then maybe there should be a statue erected of the victims of the Bodo League massacre.

Good, it's necessary...

TokyoLivingNov. 29  08:53 am JST

Good, it's necessary...

Not only are the horrible effects of war, particularly atomic warfare necessary (the Cold War ended peacefully because neither the US or USSR wanted a nuclear Armageddon and knew it wasn't winnable), but because we still have some numbskulls and armchair generals in America (and elsewhere) who still know zilch about it and want to 'nuke the (insert your favorite national/ethnic/racial slur here)' while watching the 'drama' on TV.

It's an ugly part of our history, yet it's also a symbol that for the first time in history mankind had achieved the ability to destroy the whole planet Earth and all its people, but fortunately did not.