I'm not a historian but I've always read that the Japanese government famously did not intend to surrender despite being cornered.
They had some operations scheduled for October 1945—they surrendered 1 month before due to the bombs.
I’m fairly certain that happened after the bombs.
Then they suggested they’d surrender if the poition of the emperor was untouched.
From the Japanese PoV, imagining that they could hold off the US/UK suddenly ceased to matter. Obviously Japanese armies could not stand against Soviet armies. So - "OMG, who could have imagined the Americans inventing a super-super-duper bomb! I guess we'll have to surrender to them" was a face-saving way to avoid a quick & brutal Soviet conquest & occupation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proposed_Soviet_invasion_of_Ho...
In comparison, the proposed allied invasion was planned to have 42 aircraft carriers, 24 battleships, and 400 destroyers and destroyer escorts. Even that wasn't considered enough:
>...Ken Nichols, the District Engineer of the Manhattan Engineer District, wrote that at the beginning of August 1945, "[p]lanning for the invasion of the main Japanese home islands had reached its final stages, and if the landings actually took place, we might supply about fifteen atomic bombs to support the troops."
Nobody is saying anything different.
>...And several previous Japanese conclusions of "the USSR will not be able to do X" had proven catastrophically wrong. For example …
The Japanese had already moved all of their experienced troops from Manchuria before the invasion. They were surprised that the USSR would break the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact, but the defense of the home islands was their main concern at that point.
As your source says:
>...The Soviet entry into this theater of the war and the defeat of the Kwantung Army were significant factors in the Japanese government's decision to surrender unconditionally on 15 August, as it became apparent that the Soviet Union had no intention of acting as a third party in negotiating an end of the war on conditional terms.
The Japanese knew the USSR was not a threat to the main islands and the USSR knew they would likely fail if they tried to invade Hokkaido. The Japanese had hopes that the USSR would be willing to negotiate with the Allies on their behalf, but once the Soviets declared war was, they knew that would not happen.
Japanese strategists wanted to be in Manchuria and Korea because of their proximity to imperial Japan, but that was also why they had invaded the Philippines (to defend seaborne lines of communication to their oil supplies in Borneo).
By the time the Soviets invaded, the Japanese had been ejected from much of their outlying empire, yet they had not surrendered, because Japan itself had the capability to fight.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria did not change that, an invasion of Japan proper could only have come with involvement from the rest of the allies, including the sealift used for the invasions of Normandy and southern France.
The Japanese were already expecting a Soviet attack: the only 'unexpected' thing about what the Soviets did was make a move in Summer 1945 instead of Spring 1946.
But the Japanese knew what was going to happen eventually.
As in, Kamikazis because ordered, honour in death, or killing yourself with your own sword. Not really a culture of capitulation. Most of their cities were already firebombed, as you elude to, some more than once, yet there was still no surrender.
Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you. Invade, and your troops die, for a standing army still existed. Japan also had colonies, islands, resources.
And of course without surrender, even if you occupy, now you have insurgents.
It's hard to view the world through the eyes of even 80 years ago.
War weary, endless soldiers lost already, an unsurrendering Japan, and a way to put an end to it...
> Without surrender, a country isn't really done. Leave it be, and they'll arm and rebuild, still at war with you.
The massive bombing of Japan was a grinding war of attrition that has well-understood limitations and challenges. Military leaders in Japan were perfectly capable of understanding what those campaigns couldn't do, so it came down to a willingness to accept the losses to maintain strategic optionality, which they clearly were.
Most of the limitations of strategic bombing campaigns do not apply to nuclear weapons, which is something the Japanese military leadership also understood, though the scope of capability was uncertain (which also probably helped). If the US switched to nuclear weapons instead of conventional bombing campaigns, which was the risk Japanese military leaders had to consider, it takes most of the strategic optionality off the table at which point there is little to gain by continuing.
So they chose to end it.
There's a fair amount of detail and references in those books if one wishes to dig into it.
(I say they are "history" books as opposed to "activist" books. The latter are not worth reading.)
Some material I've seen claimed that the Japanese leadership didn't know it was a nuclear bomb. The Japanese knew immediately it was nuclear bomb, because they had a nuclear bomb development program themselves.
"Furthermore, the enemy has begun to employ a new and cruel bomb, causing immense and indiscriminate destruction, the extent of which is beyond all estimation."
Japan had no idea how many bombs we had and part of the strategy of using them in quick succession was to give the perception that we hod more than we did. It seems like Tokyo was going to be the next target:
Truman had ordered a halt to atomic bombings on 10 August, upon receiving news that another bomb would be ready for use against Japan in about a week. He told his cabinet that he could not stand the thought of killing "all those kids". By 14 August, however, Truman remarked "sadly" to the British ambassador that "he now had no alternative but to order an atomic bomb dropped on Tokyo", as some of his military staff had been advocating.
Yeah, it was in an activist's writings someone was using as a cite to me. Tells for an activist book:
1. hyperbolic language
2. no discussion of alternative explanations
3. mind reading - "surely so-and-so must have understood that..." and "so-and-so's reason must have been (something nefarious)"
And this is also something that could strike their leadership. You can build bunkers against conventional bombs but for nuclear that's a different ball game
One can argue about the increased cost in terms of lives if the bombs weren’t used, but my understanding is that by that time, we’re talking about shortening the war by maybe months, but certainly not years.
(*Worth noting that in the final terms, the Japanese did keep their emperor, but the US was demanding an unconditional surrender as a matter of principle.)
By whom? In actuality, both the US and Japan were planning for a long campaign on the Japanese home islands: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Operation_Downfall. The Japanese intended to prolong fighting as much as possible to force the US to abandon the invasion because of mounting costs and casualties.
Even the night before the surrender, some among the Japanese military attempted a coup to prevent it and continue the war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident
Before that The Japanese had started to talk about a cease-fire, but that cease-fire was expected to include ongoing control of China, Korea, and some of the islands they had taken in the war. In other words it wasn’t a surrender, but rather a let us keep these last little bit bits and maybe we won’t kill you. It was delusional to the extreme.
The debate in Washington at this point not if Japan would be invaded or not or would surrender.
Operations downfall and Olympus were planned. They were projecting anywhere from hundreds of thousands to 1 million casualties on the US side. No one bothered to do the calculation on the Japanese side, but the Japanese leadership believed that their path of victory was to make it prohibitively expensive in American lives to take the islands and they didn’t care how many Japanese died. You can take a look at the ratios of Japanese dead to American dead on Iwo Jima, the Philippines to get an idea of the bloodbath that that would’ve been.
Of course, some Americans were seeing that the Japanese were far stronger on the islands and they anticipated. And we’re pushing for a total naval blockade instead. Japan’s economy and agricultural harvest had already collapsed. A total net naval blockade would’ve killed millions.