Well, here are some things that I haven't seen mentioned that might be useful to remember.
With the destruction of her merchant fleet, starvation was going to be a huge issue for Japan durring the winter of 1945-1956. Things were so bad that the Japanese government was looking at plans to convert things like acorns into foodstuffs.
If the US had made the decision not to drop the atomic bomb, then there would have been no reason to not systematiclly destroy every Japanese city by firebombing. Take the March 9-10, 1945 raid on Tokyo, 100000 killed, a million injured, almost 16 square miles of the city destroyed. Now consider that by Oct 1st the 60 most important Japanese cities would have been destroyed, and that by Jan 1st 1946, every major Japanese city would have been destroyed.
Also, something for those who keep claiming that Japan was ready to surrender. If they were so ready, then why did they reject the Potsdam Declaration on July 28th 1945? It wasn't until August 10th that Japan decided that it should accept the Potsdam Declaration.
In short, Japan wasn't close to an unconditional surrender, and there would have been a lot more dead Japanese if the US hadn't used the bomb (this is true even if you ignore the bloodbath that the invasion of the home islands would have been).
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Hiroshima and Nagasaki were the greatest human tragedy of the 20th century.
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Way to put Hitler in his place.