Japanese Thanking the US?

It was the late Summer of 2004 when I had the good fortune to get into hot water with a Fulbright scholar. She was a teacher out of Montana...bright and blonde. She entered the hot springs camp afoot having hiked from the trailhead some hundreds of feet below. I was enjoying my hot springs dip as she slipped over the transverse log and settled next to me. We exchanged pleasantries and entered into general conversation with "Where are you from? Where are you going? How did you hear of this place?" and somehow got to the subject of her being a Fulbright scholar and having just returned from Japan. I imagined her to have been quite liberal, politically, as are most newly graduated twenty-somethings, so was surprised with her comments about the Japanese she met being quite pleased that we had dropped the atomic bombs. That ain't what we hear incessantly in the American media. It just can't be so. Why would the Japanese be thinking this way with all the liberties taken with Japanese history within that country today. Could it be that Japanese don't believe their revisionists? The teacher/scholar was changed by the experience. If that's all she learned in this scholarly experience, it was a success to my way of thinking. She has been thrust into independant thinking. Bravo. I cherish the visit with her as one of the most encouraging exchanges I have had with (do I have it right?) a GenXer.