It was untenable to just quit. Of course there we some seasoned military figures who knew better, but just like us, when our generals warn against war (Iraq invasion for example) when the wheels are set in motion, there is little stopping it.)
Germany as well. The war was over way before Berlin capitulated.
I do think their religious beliefs were relevant to policy. The US was very cognizant of this when they demanded the unconditional surrender of Japan.
That's certainly the Chrysanthemum and the Sword take on it. I'd agree that American conceptions of Japanese religious beliefs influenced American policy. The extent to which emperor-worship was truly inculcated in the population at large is still subject to scholarly debate, but the trend is toward understanding that Japanese internal religious propaganda doesn't necessarily reflect deeply-held cultural beliefs. It's unquestionable that タケヤリで (with bamboo spears) was a thing to an extent and that an invasion of the mainland would have been a clusterfuck, but I personally see it (as described up-thread) as more ascribable to the comprehensive failure of the nation's autocratic elites at holding non-idiotic worldviews, rather than them (or the population at large) being hyper-fanatic State Shintoists.
And trigger an immediate army coup to secure the Emperor and destroy defeat acceptance recordings. That happened.
To me, the most striking example of this is what happened to Ishiwara Kanji[1]. This is the guy who gekokujou'd Manchukuo into existence, so not exactly a cautious humanitarian.
Ishiwara later got purged for opposing further expansionism in China: he thought that grabbing Manchukuo had been enough to assure Japan's quest for autarky in vital military materials, and that continued messing around in China would accelerate confrontation with the West and act as a resource drain on Japan's ability to shape itself into a militarily self-sufficient state. He was totally right, of course, but got it in the neck anyway.
There's a lot more examples of this, both in the military branches and in elite political circles. I highly recommend the scholarly book Japan Prepares For Total War[2] if you're interested in the details. The result, though, was that many voices of reason were explicitly removed from power for being too reasonable. At this point in the war, the cast of characters running the show weren't able or willing to see sense and had insulated themselves from all advice and criticism.
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[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kanji_Ishiwara
[2] https://books.google.com/books/about/Japan_Prepares_for_Tota...
Case in point:
After Japan officially surrendered in August 1945, Japanese holdouts in Southeast Asian countries and Pacific islands that had been part of the Japanese empire continued to fight local police, government forces, and American and British forces stationed to assist the newly formed governments. Many holdouts were discovered in Southeast Asia and the Pacific Islands over the following decades, with the last verified holdout, Private Teruo Nakamura, surrendering on Morotai Island in Indonesia in December 1974.
I think the saga of the Japanese leadership considering surrender is fascinating. Obviously everything will be destroyed pretty soon without capitulation, but it's clear that the leadership had a difficult time admitting that their decades of confidence in the Japanese military's destiny were wrong.
"You did the right thing. You know the Japanese attitude at that time, how fanatic they were, they'd die for the Emperor ... Every man, woman, and child would have resisted that invasion with sticks and stones if necessary ... Can you imagine what a slaughter it would be to invade Japan? It would have been terrible. The Japanese people know more about that than the American public will ever know."
Even after the atomic bombs were dropped, the military half of the cabinet would not accept unconditional surrender; the Emperor and civilian half would have accepted surrender much earlier, but feared the military would simply seize control, as had happened many times before in Japanese history. And even after the Emperor forced the decision in cabinet to accept surrender, there was an attempted coup by parts of the military.
Japanese obstinacy was driven mainly by a kind of hybrid fascist/bushido doctrine that dominated the Japanese military starting in the 20s.
People forget but the bloodiest days of WW2 where not in the insanely large battles where the Hitler regime was defeated, but rather in the last months when obvious defeat was years earlier for the Nazis - and where where Eastern Europe was devastated between the Germans the Soviets. The flow of blood was unimaginable.
I personally would hope that would have been the case that the USA not invade, as the intelligence started to show that the two-stage Americans invasion plans for the Japanese home islands badly underestimated the Japanese. Washington was already concerned about the cost, but we know now that these estimates where off by almost 50%.
They still had options, even without the Atomic bombs. That alternative would have been a starvation blockade. Given the complete collapse of the Japanese economy, the complete inability to import food, that blockade would have made what occurred in WWI with Britain blockading Germany, or the earlier famines in Bangladesh, or even the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor) look like Child's play.
Edit - honestly curious why people are downvoting this?
They also forgot that right on the other side of a small channel was the world's largest army that was willing to pay it. The US has a total of 160,000 dead in the entirety of the Pacific war. That was a week of active fighting on the Eastern front.
To their credit, they didn't actually forget, they were simply hoping that the USSR would keep it's word and not break their non-aggression pact. It didn't, though, and overran Japan's continental holdings in a matter of days.
Losing Manchuria was huge in bringing Japan to the negotiating table.
That said, this point is usually very overblown by cold-war theorists. It was a factor, but not the Factor. The Atomic bomb was the critical factor in Hirohito's thinking and Kids in particular - and the imperial court is what forced the end of the war. Supposedly the Army was more concerned about the Russians, but the Army never cared about Japanese civilians anyways - and their concern went so far that leadership cliques in the Army tried to overthrow Hirohito.
Once you seriously look into Japan plans for suicide attacks on massive scales would have been very costly. They were doing series effort in transformed their air-force and navy into suicide attack armed forces.
And these suicide attacks are not crazy, they were well plant and well executed attacks designed inflict massive costly attrition on the US.
Think about literally 10000s of well planned and executed suicide plans and suicide submarines attacks, army willing to suffer mass sacrifice.
And the fact is, the US did not have any solution for these suicide wave attacks. They were literally designed to work around US air defense patterns, and by the end of the war, the US had not figured out how to decisively defeated these attacks.
Landing 100000s of troupes in Japan against massive waves of suicide plans would have been insane.
> the systematic starvation program that the Bolsheviks unleashed in the Ukraine (The Holodomor)
Just FYI, it was not a systematic starvation program, it was a systematic food export program. And it was not target at Ukraine, but was applied in much the same way all over the Soviet Union.
I know there are some books that push the ethnic angle (and doing so is very popular particularly now), but its pretty clear from the top level documents and policies that it wasn't some form of ethnic warfare.
It was do whatever you need to export food so you can buy machines from the West.
Total production was expected to go down. The regime was very well aware of that. But their control over that production was increased exponentially.
And considering the industrialization, a lot of that went into exports where it was exchanged for industrial goods.
Sorry for your g-grandfather, must have been a horrible time. Its insane that back then they considered anybody a 'wealthy farmer' who had like 1-2 cows.
Food production was initially fine. After USSR central planning shenanigans shaking things up production was less. Those crops were then allocated away from Ukraine because they were last in line to be fed and first in line to starve for political reasons.
Whether that constitutes "systemic starvation" or just "normal starvation" is pretty much an exercise in taxonomy because the fact of the matter is that intentional decisions by the people in charge are what lead to the problem.
> intentional decisions by the people in charge are what lead to the problem
And I am not denying that. What I am arguing against is the claim that this was ethnic derived warfare target at destroying Ukrainian nationalism. That is the story often told today.
Stalin certainty was engaged in class warfare ('taking a class approach' is the common translation used from his writings) and many different cultures and ethnicity were hit. Kazakhs, Ukrainians and lets not remember the many Russian victims too, and of course many more.
Their fundamental driver was getting the resources need for spending on industrialization.
They didn't care if millions of people died slowly and horribly of starvation.
Phrasing it as "Production went down" is a rather extreme euphemism.
My point is that it is not primarily target towards ethnicity. It was certainty targeted towards Kulak's and of course, Ukraine had a productive land and thus a fair number of 'Kulaks'. The typical translation that is most often repeated in Stalin writing and the 'party line' was 'taking a class approach'.
What I dislike is the Ukrainian nationalist attempt to own the history. The same policy hit other ethnic groups just as hard. The Kazakh population was probably more effected in terms of %.
A huge amount of ethnically Russian farmer died as well, and they often get no mention in discussions of this.
I has become fashionable to portray it as a Ukrainian tragedy, rather then a Eurasian tragedy. It effect people between Moldova, Omsk and Arkhangelsk and beyond.
The most powerful version of that is Red Famine by Anne Applebaum. And that book as a pretty clear focus on Ukraine and a political message for the current situation for Western audiences. Ukrainian nationalism has been trying to use the Holodomor in the same way Israel does with the Holocaust, it gives it the permenent victim role and the moral high ground. She her self of course is a political commentator on those matters and her husband is politically active in trying to pull Ukraine into Europe. While here book does pay some small amount of attention to the other aspect and other victims, the overwhelming message is about Ukrainians suffering and overcoming basically intentional attempts at destruction of Ukraine and that is what the conversation around the book has universally focused on those aspects.
Steven Kotkin biography of Stalin that just came out spent a lot time at looking at the Presidential archives, meaning the archives of actual stuff on Stalin desk. With Stalin writing on it. Very often Stalin notes his responses directly on the reports he gets. And the overwhelming focus on that is showing how Stalin had on his desk lots of reports of starvation from all over the Soviet Union, his response a lot of focus getting his party to hit requisition quotas and that the reports about starvation were exaggerated or excuses by functionaries for failing to hit quotas. Very little is about 'lets plan a mass starvation because we are afraid of Ukrainian nationalism'. The overwhelming focus is on building and wielding a governmental machine to impose a new state dominate economic system on everybody, no matter the cost.
I have certainty not done an exhaustive study of all books and paper published on this topic in the last decade so your overall characterization of the debate might be accurate.
The term 'systematic starvation' implies that starvation was the goal. This is not the case in my opinion. The Soviet certainty expected economic disruption and people like Alexei Rykov (2nd most powerful guy in the Soviet Union) opposed the collectivization on those grounds. However even in Rykov worst prediction fell well short of what was actually required to push this all the way to the end. Their reports don't say 'great success, mass starvation achieved', they actually believed their own propaganda about how collective farms would be far more efficient and so on.
The difference seem to me that Soviets are willing to tolerate starvation to achieve their goals, not that they deliberately engineered starvation to achieve their goals. And their primary goals were not targeting Ukrainian nationalism.
All in all, its a difficult topic and has been used as a political weapon before it even started so its of course a minefield.
The Soviet system is the best example of what happens when the measurement becomes the metric - it produces all sorts of unintended effects, trains of freight being moved hundreds of miles to fulfill a ton-mile quota, ignoring what functionaries in the aparat say, because they dont fit the measurement-metric, etc.
Like you, I don't believe that mass starvation was the point, but it did have the effect of temporarily tamping down nationalism too.
I also found https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B007CJLZKQ/ quite interesting, as to how it painted stalinist society, and gave me a clearer understanding.
I'm eagerly looking forward to the final part of the biography on stalin.
(Actual question, not rhetorical.)
They didn't care about their citizens, just the Emperor.
Fantastic video which explains everything: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RCRTgtpC-Go
For at least some, the suffering was irrelevant. Many held that it would be better for every Japanese person to die than loose the war.
If you think of defeat like death, then surrendering means you die sooner. Military leadership and civilian suicides in the face of defeat were not uncommon.
In the meantime I don't think Japan allowed for many different points of view on the topic and even expressing it might be risky / the same result.
The leadership of Japan during this time was truly reprehensible: Willing to sacrifice millions of their own citizens to continue their failing war of aggression.
We have more land, so I think we could have dispersed the population to the country to make the bombs or raids less effective. But at some threshold you do have to give up and fight another day.
Arguable, clearly. But plausible.
Hitler had no interest in expanding westward. His plan was a great German empire where the Volga would be what the Mississippi is in the US. If France & Britain had not attacked, Germany would very likely have left them alone.
In the east, it was a fight to the death, and both sides knew it. If the Russians surrendered, they faced extinction.
This is just one point among hundreds in this thread that I find fascinating for the same reason.
So many people here know exactly what they would've and what we should've done back then. Because we have the benefit of nearly a hundred years of analysis and hindsight.
Most of the disagreements here aren't actually about what happened, and why, but what the people in this thread would've done and why.
I find that fascinating.
They're basically the equivalent of "Ha! If I were Yamamoto, I would have...." because they know what happened and when and what would have turned events. But had they been in Yamamoto's (or Nimitz's or Patton's, or Rommel's) position, would have made much worse decisions. As you say they have complete benefit of decades of study of the war and tactics as well as limitations we are privileged to know only after the war.
99% of those bombs don't hit anything relevant for the war effort.
At the same time production of those rockets was far more costly then whatever they hit in Britain.
And sure, if they could magically have no limits then maybe. But in practice, Germany had mass starvation while huge amounts of bio-mass was converted into rocket fuel. Not to mention very inefficient uses other materials.
Even ignoring all that, the total payload deployed by German over Britain was laughably small compared to allied bombing raids.
Once the US took Guam, the war was over (Guam was close enough to Japan to enable the US to enact a campaign of unlimited bombing). From that point forward, continued conflict was a matter of Japanese leaders sacrificing their own citizens for absolutely no gain
Even the Japanese military knew that at the time. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attack_on_Pearl_Harbor#Strateg...:
Admiral Hara Tadaichi summed up the Japanese result by saying, "We won a great tactical victory at Pearl Harbor and thereby lost the war."
Historians are arguing that in a industrialized conflict, where the United States was committed to war, Japan had no shot at winning. And to some degree that's true. But it depended on political factors that were no means set in stone.
But was America truly that dedicated to war with Japan? Turns out yes - but it's not hard to see a world where Japan wasn't quite a closely allied to Germany and/or Midway had gone the other way, or after millions where dead in the home island where that commitment would be tested.
Or conversely - as Hitler hoped - Japan would hold off America just long enough for the Russians to be finished off by the Germans in the East and Britain would finally come to the table. In a "Germany First" Strategy, America could not have taken the offensive in 1942 in that scenario.
But it's also reflective of the dehumanization that Japan's leadership as - the West was soft, just as the Russians were soft, and Japan's greater fighting spirit would carry the day.
Pearl Harbor didn't predetermine history.
> In the first six to twelve months of a war with the United States and Great Britain I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues after that, I have no expectation of success.
Isoruku Yamamoto, commander-in-chief of the Japanese Navy.
I’m sure a part of the reason the Japanese refused surrender was because their reflection in the mirror was not pretty.
It's worth noting psychiatric casualties for bomber crews, for the Allies at least, were sky-high with about a quarter of those not killed in combat being discharged for mental breakdowns. Whether that rate of breakdown is from the extreme risk, or from sometimes coming back smelling like burning flesh, is up for debate.
We really do a disservice when we try to take WWII and put it into a modern relativistic historical analysis. The scope of evil and sacrifice here is completely different from our western conception of War as a video game where kids fly drones and random pixels die.
That's a quote from the Japanese Instrument of Surrender.
And even after dropping 2 nukes, and believing the US had 100 more, it took days more, and some additional attacks, to convince Japan to surrender. And even after all this, there was a serious attempted coup.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surrender_of_Japan#:~:text=T....
Some more color, from Wikipedia:
"The Japanese cabinet considered the Allied response, and Suzuki argued that they must reject it and insist on an explicit guarantee for the imperial system. Anami returned to his position that there be no occupation of Japan. Afterward, Tōgō told Suzuki that there was no hope of getting better terms, and Kido conveyed the Emperor's will that Japan surrender. [...]
That day, Hirohito informed the imperial family of his decision to surrender. One of his uncles, Prince Asaka, then asked whether the war would be continued if the kokutai (imperial sovereignty) could not be preserved. The Emperor simply replied "of course.""
By WWII’s low standards that was very much a military target. In comparison Japan tried using unguided balloons to bomb the US which while completely ineffective targeted everyone. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb