Please make sure that Prime Minister Shinzo Abe gets a copy of the story titled "The top-secret flights that ended the war" in the Aug. 2 edition. What if madmen like Vice Adm. Takijiro Onishi had had their way? Would 20 million Japanese have perished during the Allied/Russian invasion of Japan in the autumn of 1945 and the spring of 1946? If the invasion had been deemed necessary, it's doubtful that Emperor Hirohito would have kept his throne when all the dust settled and the blood stopped flowing.

I wonder how many Japanese realize that nearly 27 million Russians died fighting Nazi Germany? Or care? When I hear the Japanese whining about how their warrior nation suffered during World War II, I feel a sense of bemused repugnance. Please Japan, ask Indonesia, Vietnam, Korea, Taiwan and China about war-related suffering and then shut up, or offer a deeply felt apology to the millions upon millions of Asian victims of Japan's wartime slaughter and greed.

What if Japan had refused to surrender after the atomic bombing of Nagasaki and Hiroshima, and instead embraced Onishi's suicidal dreams of glory? America could have dropped four or five more atomic bombs on various targets, including the most culturally significant city of Japan, Kyoto.

It's too horrific to even contemplate. Such a massive loss of life and property simply to perpetuate the militarists' nightmare ambitions. And yet I fear that modern Japanese revisionists like Abe admire the old fanatics of wartime Japan, including the genocidal firebrand Onishi.

Until reading about Onishi's death wish for Japan, I never realized just how much self-hatred there is in Japanese culture/society, or how nihilistic and supremely arrogant Japan's leadership truly was and is today. I still recall former Prime Minister Taro Aso shouting in anger that the terminally ill and very old should "hurry up and die." That statement was not a gaffe. It was Aso's true mind.

Now I understand where such thinking comes from. Abe would seek war with China, or Russia, for the glory of Japan, just like his grandfather. I thought such madness ended in late August 1945. Apparently not.

ROBERT MCKINNEY

OTARU, HOKKAIDO

The opinions expressed in this letter to the editor are the writer's own and do not necessarily reflect the policies of The Japan Times.