[chajin]

Of all the people in the Japanese leadership Hirohito is the only one who would have understood as much as anyone outside of Los Alamos what the A-bomb was about.

But there's something else here. Halsey is famous for saying that by the end of the war the only place Japanese would be spoken was in hell. What he didn't understand is that virtually all Japanese would have been quite content with that. There was a significant portion of the leadership that expected an Allied invasion that would have killed off all of the Japanese, who then would have become kami or Japanese spirits, rising up and causing the invaders and occupiers to flee the sacred soil, so that it could once again be filled, not with living Japanese, but with the ancestral spirits of dead Japanese.

[Alas Babylon!]

Yes, and death is as light as a feather.

What a brave culture!