Who do the Japanese blame for the bombings at Hiroshima and Nagasaki?

by Radagastroenterology

Do they blame the Americans, who it is argued were about to win without using nuclear weapons, or do they blame the Emperor for being on the wrong side of the war? How do they look back on WWII?

restricteddata

If you mean today — I don't know. I haven't seen recent polling on this. It's not really an /r/AskHistorians question (it's a present-day question).

If you mean after the bombing, we do have some data on this. From a previous comment of mine:

There is some data. The US Strategic Bombing Survey issued a study of the effects of bombing (atomic and conventional) on Japanese morale in 1947.

For those who were actually in the atomic-bombed cities, their reactions to the bombing were:

Fear—terror ....................................... 47
Fear for own life ................................. 16
Admiration—impressed by the bombs' physical power
   by the scientific power behind the bomb ........ 26
Jealousy—why couldn't Japan make such a bomb? .....  3
Anger—bomb is cruel, inhumane, barbarous .......... 17
Hate of US specifically because of A-bomb use .....  2
No reaction indicated ............................. 11

(Note this adds up to more than 100% because multiple answers were possible.) You can see that specific hatred of the US is pretty low, though the anger about the bomb was not insignificant.

The survey continued:

Less than one-fifth of the respondents in Hiroshima and Nagasaki expressed hatred of the Americans for using the bomb. Typical of the expressions among this group are the following:

They really despise the Americans for it; the people say that if there are such things as ghosts, why don't they haunt the Americans?

I only wonder why they did not let the people know of this bomb and give us a chance to give up before bombing us?

After the atomic bomb exploded, I felt that now I must go to work in a munitions plant . . . My sons told me that they wouldn't forget the atomic bomb even when they grew up.

I didn't know about the atomic bomb before. After the bomb dropped I thought it was terrible. I think that it was cruel to drop those in an area where ordinary people are living. I don't see why they didn't drop it on some army camps or something.

The proportion of respondents in the atomic-bombed areas who expressed hatred because of the atomic bomb is greater than the proportion in the rest of Japan who expressed hatred because of bombing in general (approximately 19 percent as compared with 9 percent). These figures probably underestimate the extent of hostility, for several reasons. No doubt one of the factors involved is that many Japanese, out of fear or politeness, did not reveal their feelings with complete candor to American interviewers.

It is also possible that people's subsequent attitudes served to color their reports of their experiences at the time of the bombing. The interviewing was conducted three months after the surrender, at a time when Japanese war leaders had become completely discredited and American prestige was very high. Many of the respondents, for example, were hoping that the Americans would supply them with food, so hostile attitudes expressed to American interviewers would be extremely inappropriate. There is evidence that the hostility was turned against their own government. In response to the question, "When the American planes bombed Japan, on which side did you feel the responsibility lay?" 35 percent of Hiroshima-Nagasaki area residents stated that it was Japan's fault. This percentage is much lower, however, than the percentage of people in rural and urban Japan who gave this same response (45 percent and 47 percent respectively).

It goes on (page 91-97 of the above-linked document is about the atomic bombs), but you get the drift.

During the postwar Occupation, very little discussion of the atomic bombs was permitted in the Japanese press, and the atomic bomb victims (hibakusha) were shunned. So there wasn't as much "processing" as you might expect (and no polls to my knowledge). This is one of the reasons the Japanese were so angry by the Castle Bravo accident, which re-opened the atomic bomb issue for them not long after they had re-gained their independence, and served as a sort of proxy issue to talking about the atomic bomb attacks.

Further discussion: Asada Sadao, "The Mushroom Cloud and National Psyches: Japanese and American Perceptions of the A-Bomb Decision, 1945-1995," Journal of American-East Asian Relations 4, no. 2 (Summer 1995), 95-116.


For more present-day data, there are some polls as recent as 2016, but they aren't as specific as what you're asking (they're just approve/don't approve polls, not "who do you blame", which is a different question).

"How do the Japanese people today view World War II" is a more complex question, and also more a political science question than a historical question.