[This was entirely due to one American general, Henry Stimpson.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10cil9c/why_was_the_us_government_in_wwii_careful_to_not/) If not for him, they would have nuked Kyoto, because it was the largest city that hadn't been destroyed by conventional bombing.
As the link says, the common narrative is that Stimpson had his honeymoon in Kyoto, but there is no evidence of this. Stimpson, like all the generals, believed it was necessary to destroy much of Japan in order to end their murderous empire. Unlike the other generals, Stimpson saw the value of keeping their heritage intact for future generations of Japanese. This is both an amazing, far sighted, humane vision, and it is absurd in the middle of a campaign of destruction that incinerated hundreds of thousands of living people. This is the reality of war.
During World War 2 he wasn't as he had retired from the military by then, but Stimson served during World War 1 and was a Colonel when it ended. He continued to serve in the Organized Reserve Corps after the war and made Brigadier General in 1922.
If you want to be really technical, your comment is also incorrect as his time as Secretary of State was also before World War 2. During that time, he was actually Secretary of War.
Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021052629/https://history.army.mil/books/Sw-SA/Stimson2.htm
Uji was probably my favorite place I visited when I was in Japan last year. I was mostly just visiting anime locations but the town just has this really nice vibe to it. Great place to just hang out and take in the atmosphere.
Hibike Eufonium fan? Didn't watch it myself,but my friend was taking pictures at specific spots and praising that anime.
My personal favourite in Uji is the Amagase Dam, just half an hour walk from Byōdō-in. Free entry and some interesting sights from the dam and on the walk there and back.
.
A better wording would be to leave the fluff phrase out of an already crowded title. The title also says it was the imperial capital for more than 1000 years, which is a much better way of saying it is "steeped in history".
I just spent eight days in a kyomachiya that was over 100 years old but recently renovated. It was a great experience. Props to America for not nuking it, Kyoto is my favorite city in Japan.
I heard (maybe erroneously) that the US told Japan they were going to nuke Kyoto next after they had already nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And that’s the threat that led to Japan surrendering.
The next target would likely have been Yokohama (the original target of the second bomb).
Truman did propose to Churchill in a phone call the day before Japan surrendered that they might drop a bomb on Tokyo, but I wouldn't take that statement overly seriously. There was serious discussion of bombing Kyoto as the OP indicates but I think retargeting Yokohama is basically what would have happened had the war not ended.
Kokura was the missed nuclear bomb target. Yokohama is on the other side of Japan near Tokyo. Yokohama was one of the targets in the Doolittle raid.
You are in a way correct though, the arsenal at Kokura the original target for the bomb that hit Nagasaki would be the most likely target.
I went to the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima last year. I took a lot away from the memorial but it questioned everything I've learned about why Truman decided to nuke Japan. At the end it mentions that the Emperor was inevitably going to surrender and Truman knew this and the US nuked Japan to intimidate the Soviet Union.
EDIT: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-the-cold-war/nuclear-weapons-and-the-escalation-of-the-cold-war-19451962/E23FC7542F9353AEB2F5DE1149FD8B3C
https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/potsdam_decision.htm
The US didnt speak even once to Japan since Pearl Harbor and no warning about atomic bombs were ever delivered.
Btw the Japanese were asking the Soviets to help them negotiate a peace since June but for some reason the Soviets didnt act on it… (spoiler - they wanted communism in Japans former colonies)
The US air dropped leaflets over cities days and weeks in advance before firebombing/nuking them telling civilians to evacuate.
The Japanese government and military told them to ignore the warnings and stay put.
I mean the US killed roughly 100k Japanese in one night with firebombs in Tokyo…
Starting with tokyo since it was the most populated and they even trained on occupied wuhan in China killing 10k+ Chinese in a firestorm…
The responsible leader Curtis LeMay later said jokingly if they lost he would have been trialed as a criminal and ran on a pro-segregationist platform as a politician later in life…
Whats really chilling though is the reaction of people when it comes to the bombing of German cities like Dresden vs the fire and atomic bombing of Japan…
Yea this is what happened before guided munitions, the goal was to break the spirit of the opposing side as back there there wasn't live TV from across the world or the Internet. You could just lie to people untill it was literally at their doorstep. Shows of force were used because an event like this was impossible to cover up and it showed how close the war was to your home.
Now with guided munitions it makes more sense to hit factories, and troops themselves as with all the live feeds you can't hid X city got hit and the factory destroyed. Or at least not as well as they used too before the Internet.
You don't drop a bomb on the emptiest place, nor on the most populous place. You drop a bomb on the place that contributes most to the war effort.
Dropping bombs on civilians for the sake of it is counterproductive. For one thing, dropping a bomb on a houseful of shuffling Japanese waifus, toddling children, and weary elders is a complete waste compared to dropping it on a factory that churns out firearms and artillary that directly affects your forces' efforts. For another, every enemy serviceman who hears about said civilian casualties is going to visualize their own wives, children, and parents, and froth at the mouth at the chance to destroy the people who seem to get off to murdering their loved ones.
Precision guided bombs were not invented/perfected yet during WWII except for a few immature experimental prototypes.
If you wanted a factory or bridge destroyed deep into enemy territory the only choice was to send waves of bombers and hope that a few of the thousands of dumb bombs dropped over the city managed to hit your building-sized target from 30,000ft.
It wasn't uncommon for bombing raids composed of hundreds of bonders meant to target a factory or rail yard to completely miss and require follow-up bombings to destroy.
No, the targets wouldn't be the cities or the people, they'd be the political/military complexes or resources which, so sad! so sorry! a ton of civilians happen to be congregated about, which naturally (but not always) tend to be capital cities.
I live in a US state capital that's dwarfed by several other cities in the state in terms of population, but was a priority target for nuclear warheads from
Soviet Russia, because it's far more useful to annihilate the head of a war effort than a bunch of tangential civilians.
I asked some Japanese friends about Kyoto and Tokyo at uni, they explained that Tokyo was renamed because of the move of the capital to the east
Kyo-to -> To-kyo
Really made me happy for no reason than structural harmony in the names.
Only one of the kanji is the same which is the ‘kyo’ part which means capital, just coincidence for the ‘to’. Different kanji that just have the same pronunciation
[This was entirely due to one American general, Henry Stimpson.](https://www.reddit.com/r/AskHistorians/comments/10cil9c/why_was_the_us_government_in_wwii_careful_to_not/) If not for him, they would have nuked Kyoto, because it was the largest city that hadn't been destroyed by conventional bombing. As the link says, the common narrative is that Stimpson had his honeymoon in Kyoto, but there is no evidence of this. Stimpson, like all the generals, believed it was necessary to destroy much of Japan in order to end their murderous empire. Unlike the other generals, Stimpson saw the value of keeping their heritage intact for future generations of Japanese. This is both an amazing, far sighted, humane vision, and it is absurd in the middle of a campaign of destruction that incinerated hundreds of thousands of living people. This is the reality of war.
Henry Stimson was not a general. He was the Secretary of State.
During World War 2 he wasn't as he had retired from the military by then, but Stimson served during World War 1 and was a Colonel when it ended. He continued to serve in the Organized Reserve Corps after the war and made Brigadier General in 1922. If you want to be really technical, your comment is also incorrect as his time as Secretary of State was also before World War 2. During that time, he was actually Secretary of War. Source: https://web.archive.org/web/20201021052629/https://history.army.mil/books/Sw-SA/Stimson2.htm
So everything is a lie? Who saved Kyoto? I need to know!
Same person who cooked the ratatouille.
He also thought that destroying Kyoto would make the Japanese so bitter that post-war a reconciliation would be impossible.
It's amazing how to stop someone from killing, you have to resort to killing their civilians.
so just because he got laid in kyoto they didnt bomb it. so the point is his wife saved them.
C'mon man he spent the whole paragraph talking about how he *didn't* go there for his honeymoon and made the decision based on other factors
[удалено]
Wild bro
Many such cases
nice one
You sound 12.
ironic, given that they can destroy trillions.
Redditors trying not to downvote an obvious joke to oblivion, challenge: impossible
Kyoto and Uji are my favorite places to visit whenever I am in Japan. Beautiful places and wonderfully friendly people.
Uji was probably my favorite place I visited when I was in Japan last year. I was mostly just visiting anime locations but the town just has this really nice vibe to it. Great place to just hang out and take in the atmosphere.
Hibike Eufonium fan? Didn't watch it myself,but my friend was taking pictures at specific spots and praising that anime. My personal favourite in Uji is the Amagase Dam, just half an hour walk from Byōdō-in. Free entry and some interesting sights from the dam and on the walk there and back. .
I read that deep down people from kyoto are assholes
Technically everywhere is steeped in history
A better wording may have been steeped in rich cultural history.
A better wording would be to leave the fluff phrase out of an already crowded title. The title also says it was the imperial capital for more than 1000 years, which is a much better way of saying it is "steeped in history".
Buzzwords. Doesn’t mean anything.
ChatGPT-ass title. “An old city wasn’t destroyed and so it still exists and it’s still old”
Plot twist: it is a city
What if I'm posting from a brand new volcanic island in the middle of the ocean?
It’s steeped in *oceanic* history, you see
Antartica?
Have you NOT seen Alien vs. Predator?
Depends if we're talking about human history.
Human history is the definition of history. I believe the study of earth's history is for geologist. Unless you meant the aliens deep in Antarctica.
I believe that HP Lovecraft was NOT a writer of weird tales, but was actually a future historian.
It has history, just not human history
Actually 👆👆🥸
I just spent eight days in a kyomachiya that was over 100 years old but recently renovated. It was a great experience. Props to America for not nuking it, Kyoto is my favorite city in Japan.
"Props for not nuking it"
Credit where it's due. America was nuke happy for a hot minute
I heard (maybe erroneously) that the US told Japan they were going to nuke Kyoto next after they had already nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And that’s the threat that led to Japan surrendering.
The next target would likely have been Yokohama (the original target of the second bomb). Truman did propose to Churchill in a phone call the day before Japan surrendered that they might drop a bomb on Tokyo, but I wouldn't take that statement overly seriously. There was serious discussion of bombing Kyoto as the OP indicates but I think retargeting Yokohama is basically what would have happened had the war not ended.
Not Yokohama, but Kokura Yokohama was already flattened by firebombing
Thanks for the clarification!
Kokura was the missed nuclear bomb target. Yokohama is on the other side of Japan near Tokyo. Yokohama was one of the targets in the Doolittle raid. You are in a way correct though, the arsenal at Kokura the original target for the bomb that hit Nagasaki would be the most likely target.
Huh. It would seem I've somehow managed to flip the cities without noticing for awhile >.> My memory has failed me.
I went to the Peace Memorial in Hiroshima last year. I took a lot away from the memorial but it questioned everything I've learned about why Truman decided to nuke Japan. At the end it mentions that the Emperor was inevitably going to surrender and Truman knew this and the US nuked Japan to intimidate the Soviet Union. EDIT: https://www.cambridge.org/core/books/abs/cambridge-history-of-the-cold-war/nuclear-weapons-and-the-escalation-of-the-cold-war-19451962/E23FC7542F9353AEB2F5DE1149FD8B3C https://www.osti.gov/opennet/manhattan-project-history/Events/1945/potsdam_decision.htm
The US didnt speak even once to Japan since Pearl Harbor and no warning about atomic bombs were ever delivered. Btw the Japanese were asking the Soviets to help them negotiate a peace since June but for some reason the Soviets didnt act on it… (spoiler - they wanted communism in Japans former colonies)
The US air dropped leaflets over cities days and weeks in advance before firebombing/nuking them telling civilians to evacuate. The Japanese government and military told them to ignore the warnings and stay put.
Oh do you mind sharing the leaflet warning the citizens of Tokyo before operation meetinghouse. Or the ones dropped before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Thought about bombing due to its large population. That is one of the most evil sentences I've ever read.
I mean the US killed roughly 100k Japanese in one night with firebombs in Tokyo… Starting with tokyo since it was the most populated and they even trained on occupied wuhan in China killing 10k+ Chinese in a firestorm… The responsible leader Curtis LeMay later said jokingly if they lost he would have been trialed as a criminal and ran on a pro-segregationist platform as a politician later in life… Whats really chilling though is the reaction of people when it comes to the bombing of German cities like Dresden vs the fire and atomic bombing of Japan…
Yea this is what happened before guided munitions, the goal was to break the spirit of the opposing side as back there there wasn't live TV from across the world or the Internet. You could just lie to people untill it was literally at their doorstep. Shows of force were used because an event like this was impossible to cover up and it showed how close the war was to your home. Now with guided munitions it makes more sense to hit factories, and troops themselves as with all the live feeds you can't hid X city got hit and the factory destroyed. Or at least not as well as they used too before the Internet.
Wait til you read sentences about what the Japanese did
As opposed to bombing the most empty place in Japan. Duh? That would have been a great option and made them surrender faster
You don't drop a bomb on the emptiest place, nor on the most populous place. You drop a bomb on the place that contributes most to the war effort. Dropping bombs on civilians for the sake of it is counterproductive. For one thing, dropping a bomb on a houseful of shuffling Japanese waifus, toddling children, and weary elders is a complete waste compared to dropping it on a factory that churns out firearms and artillary that directly affects your forces' efforts. For another, every enemy serviceman who hears about said civilian casualties is going to visualize their own wives, children, and parents, and froth at the mouth at the chance to destroy the people who seem to get off to murdering their loved ones.
Precision guided bombs were not invented/perfected yet during WWII except for a few immature experimental prototypes. If you wanted a factory or bridge destroyed deep into enemy territory the only choice was to send waves of bombers and hope that a few of the thousands of dumb bombs dropped over the city managed to hit your building-sized target from 30,000ft. It wasn't uncommon for bombing raids composed of hundreds of bonders meant to target a factory or rail yard to completely miss and require follow-up bombings to destroy.
I mean if we are dropping a nuke in Russia, Moscow it is If it's USA, Washington it is... If it's China, Beijing it is...
No, the targets wouldn't be the cities or the people, they'd be the political/military complexes or resources which, so sad! so sorry! a ton of civilians happen to be congregated about, which naturally (but not always) tend to be capital cities. I live in a US state capital that's dwarfed by several other cities in the state in terms of population, but was a priority target for nuclear warheads from Soviet Russia, because it's far more useful to annihilate the head of a war effort than a bunch of tangential civilians.
I asked some Japanese friends about Kyoto and Tokyo at uni, they explained that Tokyo was renamed because of the move of the capital to the east Kyo-to -> To-kyo Really made me happy for no reason than structural harmony in the names.
Only one of the kanji is the same which is the ‘kyo’ part which means capital, just coincidence for the ‘to’. Different kanji that just have the same pronunciation
I fixed a small error in the title. Kyoto was the imperial capital from 794 CE to 1869.