Political Crossfire Forums

A major Japanese corporation will offer a landmark apology this weekend for using U.S. prisoners of war for forced labour during the Second World War, according to the Simon Wiesenthal Center, which is hosting the event.

A senior executive of Mitsubishi Materials Corp. will apologize to 94-year-old James Murphy, of Santa Maria, Calif., and relatives of other former POWs who toiled at plants its predecessor company operated in Japan during the conflict.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/wor ... cmpid=rss1

Have the Americans ever apologized for destroying 65% of Hiroshima and killing 140,000 people?
This was terrorism and a war crime by any moral compass.
And of course answer is NO. And never will.
Just because most of Americans think that it was justified

Did Japan ever apologize for Pearl Harbor?

As Galt mentioned, the firebombing campaign by Curtis Lemay was much more devastating than the A bombs. Tokyo was particularly hit hard by it, but Osaka, Kobe, and Nagoya also were decimated due to the large amount of wood construction in Japan at the time. James Bradley does a very good job of detailing the how and whys of this campaign in his book Flyboys. He doesn't sugarcoat the massive amount of quid pro quo between the U.S. and Japan, which the U.S., obviously, upped the ante on to a level the Japanese couldn't handle.

On a personal note, I had to deal with Japan's extremely demanding fire codes when I was doing work there for years, which were directly related to the firebombing campaigns in WWII. Easily, the most stringent fire codes I've ever encountered anywhere.

I remember hearing about bat bombs but I didn't realize they used actual bats. Wtf?

That would have made for a great premise for some 50s post wwii sci fi film.