While Germany was in ruins, divided in half between the Russians and the West, and it's population was forced to tour the concentration camps, Japan had no such humbling, and was not forced to come to terms with what it had done.
Not to mention the loss of nearly a third of the national territory and the brutal eviction of Germans from all over eastern Europe (which resulted in about two million deaths). But you're right, there was relatively little accounting for the Japanese. Their only territorial losses were inconsequential, and they received a great deal of help in rebuilding. Perhaps part of the problem was that they were occupied only by the US, which was always more interested in economic factors than in accounting for crimes. With four powers involved in Germany, there was simply too much jockeying for advantage in the post-war world for the Germans to escape unscathed. But even then, de-Nazification never went far enough, and war criminals were soon enough re-employed by the West German government.
Another problem, as noted above, may have been that the victims were Chinese. The American and west European Jewish communities were instrumental in bringing the Nazis to account, and there was no similar constituency for the Chinese. Worse, the fall to Maoism in 1949 meant that the Chinese were international pariahs for some time, which dramatically reduced chances of getting foreign help to address Japanese crimes. (Of course, they were soon committing their own crimes in Tibet, about which the world was sadly near-silent. Not even the British military treaty obligation was dealt with, but at least the Indians opened their borders to refugees.) All told, I think the nature of the Chinese government (as opposed to the Japanese) is a major part of the reason for continuing Western silence. It is now considered politically and economically advantageous to favour the Japanese as a balancing power in the region, and
Realpolitik carries a lot more weight than human rights internationally.
Do you know why Japan had to have atom bombs dropped on them? Have you really read up on Shinto and how they responded to the commands of their Emperor? Their will was not going to be broken any other way, the Emperor of Japan himself had to give up as he was their god...
This is misleading. The Japanese had been trying to surrender for months by the time of the Hiroshima bombing, with their only condition the retention of the imperial dynasty. And the US insistence on unconditional surrender was, in the end, almost wasted, as the constitution drafted with US help
did allow them to retain their emperor, with much of his symbolic significance intact. Doesn't it seem odd to you that a man who was being called a war criminal during the war was allowed to remain emperor once the US had troops on the ground?
But to get back to the main point, the atomic bombs were dropped on Japan in keeping with Truman's foreign policy goals, not merely to induce surrender. Their primary purpose was to intimidate the Soviet Union, and if they managed to bring about a surrender before the Soviets declared war on Japan (as they had pledged to do six months after the cessation of European hostilities) all the better, as the US would not need to share the spoils. You can read a tonne of declassified documents from Truman's administration to see how thinking on this matter evolved, and the implications were made clear in the actions to follow. The US refused to follow the pleas of diplomats and scientists alike to internationalise nuclear power and outlaw its use as a weapon. Instead, they made bold predictions that the Soviets had no chance of developing a bomb of their own, and planned to use the American nuclear capability as a foreign policy tool to ensure unchallenged supremacy. In the event it only took the Soviets four years, and then our chance of ridding the world of those hideous things was gone forever.
Question to admin: Why is it that when I use the word "ar-sen-al" (without the dashes, of course), it is replaced in post preview by "AAARRSE!!nal"?!