I can’t reply fully tonight (inebriated) but this is a fantastic rebuttal. I didn’t mean to excuse Japanese War crimes, just add some context to the meme.

I love you. Big fan of the Pacific War and have a large collection of books I’ve yet to read on the subject, but I’ve read the Ian Toll trilogy on the subject as well as listened to a great deal of Dan Carlin’s Supernova in the East series on it, it’s so fascinating how tangled the political web was there.

Any other assessment amounts to historical revision.

Your assessment builds on the (unprovable and undisprovable) assumption that an invasion would have otherwise happened. But we can’t know what would have happened if different decisions were made. l Wikipedia says that at the time the top brass was split on this decision, and not just for moral reasons.

Also I’d like to mention that whether something is a war crime or not, is, at the end of the day, just a legal question. Back then it wasn’t, but by today’s treaties killing any civillian under any circumstance is indeed a war crime.