64 Years Later - Hiroshima & Nagasaki

Perhaps if we would acknowledge how much some of our policies have been the cause of devastating our own, we would understand our moral obligation to help reconstruct our own. The misinterpretation of responsibility for the state of "all of us" in this nation is an ethical dilemma. If we truly believed in the Christian principles on which this nation was founded (even the right wing agrees with that half of the statement), we would remember that we are our brother's keeper.

No better contrast between free market forces that piggy-backed on US aid to revitalize Japan cities vs the liberal democratic forces that have piggy-backed on US aid to destroy American Cities.

By trying to save the world we are our own greatest enemy.
Lets get our house in order before we try and order others.

"...liberal democratic forces that have piggy-backed on US aid to destroy American cities."

Hmmm. Free trade and globalization had nothing to do with Detroit's downfall, huh?
Oh...I almost forgot...it's all the UNIONS' fault.
Not the corporations who beat the unions down and then built cars that nobody wanted?
Meanwhile, Toyota, Nissan and Honda paid workers AS MUCH OR MORE than union scale and built sensible products that people wanted.
This is the fault of "liberal democratic forces?"

I visited Nagasaki during the last year and it was quite a beautiful, crowded city. There is a museum there dedicated to the bombing that was really interesting--in part interesting by the information left out about why we bombed them. Our tour guide on the way back to the naval base did say something about recognizing the Japanese responsibility, but the museum didn't have anything about Pearl Harbor in it at all. There's a gorgeous park built on "ground zero." We also visited a memorial park, which was quite stunning. The memorial park has sculptures from places around the world acknowledging a promise that we should never again use nuclear weapons.

The answer has remained the same for the last 64 years. The United States won the war. Japan was rebuilt itself in an image closer to that of the United States than the out-of-control democracy that Japan became from the 1920s through the mid-1940s. Japan is clearly in the U.S. sphere of influence and the sphere of influence sought by Japan during the war is divided between the U.S., India, and China.

You may wish to try restating the hyperbole of your question. However, you, may easily lose that argument too. As like the question you pose, one may post glossy photos of Beverly Hills and picture pit them against photos of homeless and neglected Japanese citizens to propagandize the completeness of a U.S. victory.

To have a reasoned debate you need to establish the criteria and measurements to answer the question which country has done better since the Second World War.

My answer is that the U.S. rebuilt the world so thoroughly in it's image (World Bank, WTO, the United Nations, IADB, International Criminal Court, decolonialisation, and the final victory with the collapse of the Soviet Imperium) that even Americans don't recognize the completeness of the U.S.'s victory and instead try to measure how well the U.S. is doing within it's victory. I like to make the analogy that the question asked is "Who won in a happy marriage, The wife or the husband?"