Do Japanese people view Franklin Roosevelt and Harry Truman in the same sense that Americans view Hitler/Stalin/Mao?

by ImStudyingRightNow

If they do, I can't say it's unjustified. Hundreds of thousands of innocent people were killed and tons of Japan's land was destroyed as a result of Truman's decision. I'd imagine FDR would get the same treatment, as he spent a huge amount of the nuclear research budget on developing nukes, plus he did his share of damage to Japan throughout the course of WW2.

restricteddata

Generally speaking, the Japanese did not take an unfavorable view of the United States after the war, or the usage of the atomic bombs. This was partially because, independent of any other influences, they were inclined to see the destruction as being the fault of the Japanese militarists who ran the country and got it into war in the first place (and in this sense, seemed to think that what the US did was "necessary" to a degree more than even the American public at times), and because in the postwar Occupation the USA did a very careful and thorough job of suppressing any anti-American opinions. The American goal, ultimately, was to rebuild Japan as a strong ally.

This does not mean that the Japanese did not see the atomic bombs as a terrible act, but that they displaced the blame for that away from the US presidents and arguably even the US as a whole. It is also worth noting that the general Japanese approach to Hiroshima and Nagasaki has been less "the cities that got destroyed" and more "the cities that got destroyed and were rebuilt" — a very different association than non-Japanese (notably Americans) tend to have of them.

Now, one cannot generalize for all Japanese at all times, of course. You will find plenty of disagreement on the atomic bombs, as you do in the United States. But I have never gotten the sense from anything I've seen that they vilify the wartime Presidents to the degree that we vilify Hitler, Stalin, or Mao. It probably goes without saying but the bombing campaigns killed orders of magnitude fewer civilians than either of those three dictators did, or compared with Japan's own actions against its neighbors, notably China and Korea. That need not justify them or anything like that — one does not let the lowest bar set the benchmark — but you can see why the bulk of the Japanese were more willing to ascribe blame for the whole situation to their own military.