My father to the day he died hated the Japanese. They cut his best friend's head off, sixty years later a tear would roll down his face when he spoke of his friend. We did not start that war but we sure as hell ended it.
The Japanese should get down on their knees and bless the atom bomb as it saved the nation and culture and millions of lives, Japanese lives.
As the war draw to a close in 1944-1945 we had total air superiority over Japan. We ruled the sea around Japan. They were helpless and still refused to surrender. It was all about saving face. Better to die than lose honor is saving face.
If we had needed to take Japan with conventional forces we would have systematical bombed and burned all cities, all industrial capacity, all means of food production, all that maintains a modern functioning society would have been destroyed before we put one damn soldier on their home islands. Our bombs would kill hundreds of thousands as would the fires from our incendiary raids. Disease and starvation would have killed millions. Two atomic bombs and a couple of hundred thousand direct and indirect deaths prevented their total destruction as a Japanese society.
After the two atomic bombs were dropped the emperor demanded the military surrender. The emperor had no real power but this demand gave the warlords a saving face and thus prevented their total destruction. A pleasing footnote to this history is we hung the warlords after war crime trials.
If we needed to invade Japan with conventional forces we had estimates of a million casualties and about 100,000 deaths. Our army soldiers and our blessed marines would not have been kind as they demonstrated from island to island in the Pacific.
This was total war and it is very ugly business and there is not much glory in it. You simply kill the enemy and all that stand with him. A farmer grows the food for the enemy and thus he is the enemy, kill him. Any and all civilians that are part of the war effort are the enemy, kill them.
As mentioned war is ugly brutal vicious dirty business. One must prosecute it with extreme violence. If you can do this, you will probably avoid war as your enemy will cower in fear of you and this is good. If you can not do this, surrender for your enemy has already defeated you.
I forgot to add this one note about revisionist history of the far left. Their contention is that we should have demonstrated the power of the atomic bomb to the Japanese in an area that would have inflicted little loss of human life. We did not and thus they define us as war criminals. We dropped the bomb on Hiroshima and did give them the opportunity to surrender. They did not. We dropped the second bomb and they did. In actuality we only had two bombs ready to drop. They thought we had many. We did have many in the manufacturing pipeline and a few months later could have dropped them at will. Hanford and Oak Ridge were churning out the nuclear fissionable material as fast as they could.