Richard Rabinowitz comments

Lol, Japan

Ahh yeah, interesting that Japan celebrates Christmas as a wintertime Valentine's Day. Wonder how that came about?

So there IS such a thing as a caffeine overdose!

If you're so eager for Japan to apologize for WWII, then we might as well ask for apologies over the restriction of foreigners to Dejima and the expulsion of the Christians by the Tokugawa shogunate. Maybe we should look up the descendents of the daimyo and have them apologize for their feudal wars. And then ask Japan to apologize for chasing the Ainu to Hokkaido. Heck, perhaps we should ask for an apology for building overly big mounds during the Kofun period, thousands of years ago!

If your country is not multiracial and your race is pretty much your country and its people, then, of course, patriotism comes tinged with racism. In America, racism is a vice because we have had numerous problems with racial conflicts in the past. Wars over slavery, civil rights struggles, lynching of blacks, the lynching of one Jew who had been called out for being Jewish and being from the wrong part of the country, chasing the aboriginals out of their motherlands, and so on and so forth. Some countries might have a more positive view of racism, particularly if one's people or ethnicity is at the heart of his or her nation's identity. For example, national racism can be an "item" in Israel (Jewish), Palestine (Palestinian), the Slavic countries (Russians, Poles, Czechs, Ukrainians, etc.), Ireland (Irish), the UK (Scots, English, Welsh), Malaysia (Malay), Korea, and, of course, Japan. Let's not forget India, Iran, and other old countries whose national soul traditionally revolves around some ethnic group or other.

The best apology for wrongdoing is refraining from doing it again, and Japan seems to have been doing fine in that regard.

As if Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Fukushima weren't bad enough...

Perhaps we should hold onto our nukes, but never actually use them. Saber rattling has worked in the past, but it has the bad habit of unnerving everybody, friend and foe alike.

If everyone got rid of nukes, then the state of warfare could go back to the way it was before WWII. Wars of conquest by established countries, without restraint. Usage of alliances as checks and balances - which could falter if a dictator decides some little country needs to be punished, which is what started WWI. (And WWII, for that matter.)

If nukes weren't involved, there would've been full-blown war in India/Pakistan in the late 1990s instead of a petty crisis and both armies marching up to the borders.

The Showa Imperial government was not the reason for the nuking of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Joseph Stalin, Communist extraordinaire and bloodthirsty dictator, ally (at the time) of the USA, was. The US wanted something to show off to Stalin and his land-grabbing ilk, so they readied nuclear fireworks.

Also, WWII was a pretty racist war. The Nazis and the Hakko Ichiu delegation were not the only racists in the war. People in the American government, the Chinese, many of the Soviets, etc., were also racist, and some of the bigots included American generals. The nukes could've been used on a Japanese forest. Instead, the USA chose to massacre civilians with nukes.

Showing off atomic weapons? Justifiable. Nuking civilians and wrecking cities that didn't need to be wrecked? Not justifiable.

The firebombings of the mid-1940s were the last of the "flowers of Edo", as far as I know. Tokyo (or Edo, as it was once called) had burned in 1601, 1641 (on March 10th or 11th!), 1657 (also in March), 1683, 1698, 1704, 1745 (on March 14), 1760 (a March fire), 1772, 1806, and 1829 (all three were in April), 1834 and 1845 (both in March), 1855, and 1923. The metropolis was historically very large and quite flammable.