You could say that about any school children; a lot of text books are edited to shit. There was a consensus performing prior to this 70 year ceremony to the bombing, and apparently a lot of contemporary Japanese under a certain age didn't really know much about the bombing of Japan. They are now trying to find ways to ensure that tragic history is passed down and remembered so that coming generations understand the horrors of war and atomic weaponry.
Germany by far is more accountable about the past. I don't think any democratic country gets into too much detail about the war in childhood education, but as a liberal democracy, Japan definitely has a different notion of disclosure that transcends the cultural notion of "saving face." Shrine that honours all who fought for Japan: http://www.usmagazine.com/celebrity-news/news/justin-bieber-apologizes-after-visiting-controversial-japanese-shrine-2014234 Ludicrous denials of atrocities by media elite: http://time.com/5546/japanese-nhk-officials-world-war-ii/ Japanese ex-pat in Australia gets first accurate education in WWII: http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-21226068
I have wondered about this myself. But for us in the US we are in a similar boat with our treatment of Native Americans. How much do we really learn about how they were treated? I do remember in the fifth grade we learned about the Trail of Tears. Even walked to the high school with these Popsicle stick "family" where one of the supervising teachers would take one from time to time. Not sure how well the experience sunk in for the rest of the grade. I learned about quite a bit about it and other shameful things from our last but I also wonder just how much more we could have learned.
Without the bombings, we might have made the mistake later in our history, and the bombs would have been much, much bigger. Certain lessons need to be learned.
I am one that believes if an 'A' bomb were dropped today on one of the ISIS hot beds in the Middle East, it would help towards curing the problem with terrorism.
