Explanation: After torturing an American POW after the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the Japanese cabinet and Emperor were convinced that the US had 100 atomic bombs (we did not) and that further resistance was futile. War Minister Korechika Anami, on the other hand, was an advocate for fighting to death anyway. Insane.
It always amazes me when someone that nuts makes it to a position of power. It shouldn’t, but somehow it still does.
Dan Carlin did a series of podcasts on this called ‘Supernova in the east’, talking about the how and why of Japan’s approach to the war. I’m no great historian, but it seemed interesting to me. He quotes his sources and gives a pretty comprehensive overview of the figures involved and the ideologies that drove them. It’s a good listen, each episode is around 5 hours long, but they’re well laid out and it’s easy to pick up from where you stopped.
Some of the Japanese generals were legitimately crazy. There was also a coup attempt.
The Emperor announced his intentions to surrender to his generals and they conspired to assassinate him. He barely escaped the Imperial Palace with a recorded speech to the people of Japan saying he formally surrendered. Because the Emperor was publicly worshiped, the broadcast of that speech forced the military back into line.
The Emperor saved millions of people’s lives.
It was part of the reason why the USA made sure it had two bombs to drop. The USA was playing up the number of bombs it had to try to convince Japan to surrender as they wouldn’t even have the chance to fight back.
Plus they knew that one bomb wouldn’t be enough. One bomb could be all that we had. They had to prove otherwise. I’ve heard that they were finishing the assembly of the second bomb in-route, but that seems like an old wives tale to me. I don’t think you can make atomic bombs in the cargo hold of a jostling bomber aircraft.
I vaguely remember the core and the rest of the assembly being transported separately. But that was on purpose, not out of hurry.
Fighting to the death has been a huge part of Japanese warrior culture for thousands of years.
Not as much as Imperial Japan would have you believe. A lot of samurai mythos are either from the long period of peace in the Edo Period, when samurai felt the need to prove how incredibly warrior-like they were at every opportunity (because there were no wars going on and they would look lame otherwise), or from the period of compensatory ultranationalism in the Japanese Empire, when they felt the need both to differentiate themselves from the European civilizations they had learned from, and to prove that they were, in some way, superior, in the same way that Europeans pretended they were superior.
When you read about, say, the Sengoku Jidai, the warring states period, samurai are always doing things that either of those influences would tell you shouldn’t happen - betraying their lords, running from battles, fighting dirty, surrendering, etc. But unlike European civilizations, there was less stigma associated to suicide - suicide could even be honorable, if done in the right way. That does give a bit more of a ‘do-or-die’ vibe to outmatched forces.
