the governement said they ignored it. This is not true, the reporters asked one of the advisers whether or not they were surrendering, his reply was, "mokusatsu", which is a Japanese term equivalent to "No comment". However when the allies heard about this they mistranslated the word into its other meaning, "To ignore with contempt". So basically thousands of people died because some guy forgot about the existence of homonyms. My sources are my various foreign friends from England, France, Russia, Germany, Japan, as well myself; we had various discussions on the different portrayals of history from each countries version of the events. Posted By: Anonymous The bombing of Hiroshima was not justified. Japan was on the verge of surrender, therefore, dropping the atomic bombs did not necessarily speed up the end of the war. If it had been any other country, for example, Germany, dropping atomic bombs on the US or any of the allies, the people who instigated this attack would have been charged with war crimes and executed. It was completely inhumane of US leaders to drop the bombs and kill thousands of civilians who were not a part of the war. For a number of reasons I did a whole debate on this but essentially, Japan was already willing to conditionally surrender and most military experts in the US opposed the bombs. In any case when is killing civilians justified? not at all justified!!! Japan was about to give up when America bombed hiroshima and nagasaki.