Over a period of a year, half your people are rendered homeless, homes burned to the ground. 1 in 10 city dwellers die. You exist on a diet of 700 calories a day.

America nearly sprayed an herbicide that would have destroyed the rice harvest but held off at the last minute, and that and the delivered food probably prevented 35 million Japanese deaths from starvation, or half the population.

I’m trying to think what would happen if a nation not so merciful as the US had my neighborhood by the guts like that.

I’m not sure we wouldn’t go bitterly to extinction. But the Japanese recovered, forgave and love the Americans that put them through that.

Great respect for Japanese fortitude and character.