Kasz216 said:
Mr Khan said:
rocketpig said:
It's insane. There were elements in the Japanese government and more specifically, the military, that didn't want to surrender after the bombs. My point is that they would have surrendered. Despite their insanity, the overwhelming fear of the bombs would have pushed the stalwarts to the side as the Japanese people began to starve and their society crumbled from the inevitable chaos that follows such a situation.
If the Japanese realized that America had no more bombs, I might be more inclined to believe that they could have held out for longer than they did. But they didn't know that and the sheer terror of living in a world where entire cities could be devastated in the blink of an eye would have forced the surrender sooner rather than later.
With that said, the Russians certainly sped it up a few days by invading Manchuria. At that point, the Japanese were double-fucked. No one, and I mean no one, wanted to be under the thumb of the Soviet Union.
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What would have pushed them aside was the need for a return to stability simply because they were afraid of revolution. The widespread misery of the populace could have led to overthrow of the Emperor, and preservation of the Kokutai was their number-one priority both before and after surrender (which is why certain generals fell all over themselves to shift war-responsibility claims away from the Emperor. Hirohito was guilty as hell.)
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I wonder if that would of happened though. Revolution that is. The Japanese were facing pretty dark times already without a shred of unres... it was obvious they couldn't win, people were already starving and there was little to no unrest, and the Japanese people were still seemingly willing to fight for the empeoer who screewd them.
Japan just didn't have the same indivdualistic bent the west has... it's something to consider in eastern "non colonial" states.
It plays a huge part in the chinese economy actually.
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The biography of Hirohito i re-read recently cited it as a huge concern of the regime, so i don't doubt that it was entirely unfounded. The Japanese had a significant enough Marxist underground, just one that had been effectively cowed by the police state, and was later allowed to peacably express itself under the Americans (more moderate socialism which has remained a force in Japanese politics), but it was there. Much of it was founded on intellectual objection to the state's literal interpretation of the whole "Hirohito is descended from the Sun Goddess" thing.
