I am surprised that a research associate in any department at Brown would write such a silly letter to the editor of the BAM as that written by Takahiro Hiroi in the May/June 2012 issue (Mail Room, “Whose Truth?”).  As an apologist for a government and army that started the war in Asia, committing barbarous acts appalling in their number and style, he emphatically denied the existence of the well-documented Nanking massacre, while labeling as “massacres” the bombings of Japanese cities by the United States, long after Japan had clearly lost the war but advertised its determination to fight to the last man, woman, or child.

I do hope Mr. Hiroi exercises more careful scholarship in his chosen field of geology.

Mark de Regt ’74
Redmond, Wash.
deregt@earthlink.net