Japan had ample opportunity to stop the deaths of so many of its own people
by surrendering but declined to do so. In fact, it could have saved many, many millions of lives by not going to war in the first place. In 1937, Japan invaded Nanking, and 100,000's of lives of totally innocent Chinese people were lost, in truly horrific circumstances. Read this :::
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre
There isn't the space on here to go into all the atrocities committed by the Japanese from the mid 1930's to 1945. Their behaviour was entirely unwarranted and unnecessary and the day that they attacked Pearl Harbour, was the start of their eventual downfall. The reasons that the USA used nuclear weapons on Japan are many and complicated, as it was a public declaration to Russia as much as anything else.
But I stand by every word that I say about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I believe it stopped the war quickly and decisively. Of course I have sympathy for all the Japanese civilians killed in August 1945, but my sympathy lies more with the untold millions of totally innocent people that were killed by the Japanese all over Asia, in their bloodthirsty and totally unjustified attempt to forge a region-wide Japanese Empire. The truly awful thing is that in 2014, 70 years after these events, there is still wide-spread ignorance amongst the ordinary Japanese people that these events ever happened at all. Millions of post-war Japanese children never learned of the atrocities committed by their fathers and grandfathers.