Miyazaki's Beautiful Anti-War Dreams

They preferred settling among the local populace, including forced marriages/rape. It's harder to rebel when the invaders are your neighbours or even your fathers.

Cynically speaking, that's better than just evaporating innocents.

1. The Japanese would not have capitulated until much more suffering would have taken place.

2. Negotiations with Russia were going on over the division of Germany and the atomic weapon blasts tempered Stalin's resolve that he had the more effective fighting force.

3. Innocents die in war. Whether from gas chambers or fire bombings or atomic bombs. If we want to stop this from happening then we need to reduce the frequency of war. Especially total war. Or do you really expect the US to send in it's bachelors to rape defenceless Japanese prisoners for decades? In the time of Alexander the great less than 3% of the population was used in fighting forces because manpower was required to keep up the food supply. It was a completely different era with a completely different set of circumstances that we don't even fully understand because we don't have the same level of records about it.

I agree that all members of American and Japanese society share some level of responsibility for participating in total war, but I also think your "no civilians" statement goes too far. It is obvious that some members of a country have more direct effect on the war than others and that once you get far enough away (children are civilians, adults who do not work are civilians, workers who deliver mail are civilians, workers who make vehicle parts are probably civilians, workers who make tanks might be civilians, etc). To argue otherwise is to view war as some kind of 'original sin,' where the level of your contribution is immaterial and any association is sufficient to make one a combatant. If that's the case, then you and I and everyone alive today is certainly indicted in the many wars we are not working to stop. Even people working to stop one war are helping others to continue by not working to stop them. It's absurd.

Civilians do start wars and, in the modern era, they are often held to account for the wars they start. War crimes tribunals indict military and civilian personnel alike. I also agree that young men bear an unequal and unjust burden in war - but the suggestion you make is silly. The solution is not to extend that unequal burden by allowing more people to be killed, but instead to give young men more options to avoid being killed and killing others.