memes

Ironically I can even apply this thinking to matches of the Civilization game. In general I don't do war if I can avoid it, I enjoy just expanding my own country and trying to focus on science and culture. But whenever some country declared war on me, I would defend myself and then move on to invade the aggressor, because I saw conquest as the only way to "win" a war. And then I would think "it's so unfair that every other country now hate me just because I took some cities from the country that attacked me out of the blue".

Then one day I lost some war and the other country didn't take any of my cities. They declared war not because they wanted to conquer me militarily, but because they wanted to stop me from dominating the world in other ways (culturally for example - something I saw as pacific but that also allowed me to win the match and therefore caused others to lose)

The Japanese attacked and brought the USA into the second world war, I mean you seem to forget that.

The Soviet Union had already invaded Manchuria and annihilated the Kwantung Army. We can argue tit for tat about which part of the final days of the Pacific War contributed the most to the final surrender of Japan. It's clear though that no single part of that was enough and it was the combination of the firebombing of Tokyo and Osaka, the destruction of the remaining IJN fleet strength at the Battle of Tsushima, the Soviets invading Manchuria, Korea and the Northern Islands, and the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Although there are records of some of the civilian government campaigning Hirohito and Koiso for unconditional surrender, the main war cabinet still refused and preferred the path of a final confrontation.

I think it's impossible to say if the atom bombs hadn't been dropped whether they would have in fact surrendered, given that all the other things listed above were true after Hiroshima but before Nagasaki and they still were arguing for a negotiated settlement when no opposing force (USA, Commonwealth or Soviet Union) were prepared to accept anything less than an unconditional surrender.

Also, if you want more details on the extraordinary level of depravity by Japanese soldiers during the Second Dino-Japanese War and the wider World War 2 I can recommend reading Rape of Nanking by Iris Chang, Japan's Infamous Unit 731 by Hal Gold and Hidden Horrors by Yuki Tanaka, all of which contain first hand accounts and then you can try comparing and contrasting by accounts of those carried out by Allied forces in the conflict and give me your false equivalence then.