Japanese author Kenzaburo Oe, in a New York Times op-ed column, is outraged about Hiroshima.
Outrage about Hiroshima and Nagasaki is nothing new. Unfortunately, neither is selective amnesia.
However, Richard Fernandez, writing for Pajamas Media, has a different perspective.
And you know what? He's right. The usual suspects who are routinely, annually outraged about Hiroshima and Nagasaki have a tendency to be strangely silent about atrocities committed by Japan during the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Second World War such as the Bataan Death March, the "Death Railway", the Manila Massacre, and — before World War 2 even officially began — the Nanking Massacre, more often known as the Rape of Nanking. Estimates are that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed between 150,000 and 250,000 people within four months of the bombings, roughly half of those on the actual day of the attacks.
By comparison, an estimated three hundred thousand Chinese were slaughtered and sixty to eighty thousand women and girls raped (most of them killed afterwards) at Nanking alone, and "at least" a hundred thousand Filipinos at Manila. Another ninety thousand Asian forced-laborers and sixteen thousand Allied prisoners of war died building the Death Railway. Of the 75,000 prisoners who set out on the Bataan Death march, only 54,000 reached the destination; Japanese troops also frequently killed bystanders for showing sympathy or concern for the prisoners. (Some of the missing 21,000 escaped, but it's impossible to say how many.) The Japanese government has repeatedly and persistently tried to "rewrite history" to deny that many of these atrocities ever happened, even in the face of photographic evidence and first-person accounts from survivors, and has only ever issued apologies for a very few of them. Many Japanese nationalists still claim that the Nanking massacre was completely fabricated for purposes of anti-Japanese propaganda, and Japanese law does not acknowledge those convicted in post-WW2 war crimes trials as criminals.
Far beyond even any of these specific incidents, estimates of the total number of Asian civilians slaughtered by the Japanese military during the 1930s and 1940s range from ten million to thirty million.
So where's the outrage about all of those?
Make sure you read the comments too. There's some very good observations there, starting with this one:
Those killed at Hiroshima, and later Nagasaki, were killed in spite of their being non-combatants.
Most of those killed in Manila and the vast majority of the slain in Nanjing were killed because they were non-combatants. Wherever the Japanese went, the slaughter started after resistance ceased.
When the Americans carried the day, the killing stopped as soon as the victory was won.
We've nothing to apologize for.
Disclaimer: I have a personal horse in this race. One of my grandfathers, who served in Malaya under Gen. Stilwell, was captured by the Japanese and forced to work on the Death Railway and the Kwai (actually Kwae Lai) bridge. He technically survived the war, physically speaking; but a part of his mind remained forever trapped in the Japanese prisoner-of-war camps. He eventually committed suicide, as the only way to escape from the horrors he was unable to ever forget.