This is a simplification that doesn’t really work. Japan decided as part of their war economy to decentralize their war industries to protect them from bombing - literally putting furnaces into small urban and rural environments rather than centralizing production as all the other powers did. This is why they failed to accomplish real industrial scaling during the war.
As the old line goes - in jungle fighting, the Japanese way of war was to fight in the jungle. The Brit’s way of war was to go through and around way the jungle. The Americans simply leveled the jungle.
That’s why the Japanese strategy didn’t work. That decentralization became a liability even before the cities were destroyed and why you can’t divide Japanese cities into civilian and military targets.
This is more or less verbatim the justification given in US public messaging around the bombing of Japan’s cities, and it’s heavily reiterated by Rhodes. The problem is that even if you fully accept the bloody logic of this, it wasn’t what the Interim committee specified for the atomic bomb target list: “the most desirable target would be a vital war plant employing a large number of workers and closely surrounded by workers’ houses.” This didn’t apply to Hiroshima. It did apply to the secondary target used in Nagasaki, but not to the primary target. The fact that more appropriate targets were passed over in favor of (largely unbombed) residential targets is not some unfortunate necessity of the war, it was a deliberate decision made to show the world how powerful the bomb was. That decision might - in the very long run - have saved more lives than it took. We should talk about that. But we can’t talk about it if we’re busy fooling ourselves.
We were running out of unbombed cities to drop the nukes on. They wanted to see the full effects of only the nuke. They had to request for a few spots to be saved for them even.
As the old line goes - in jungle fighting, the Japanese way of war was to fight in the jungle. The Brit’s way of war was to go through and around way the jungle. The Americans simply leveled the jungle.
That’s why the Japanese strategy didn’t work. That decentralization became a liability even before the cities were destroyed and why you can’t divide Japanese cities into civilian and military targets.