>The Japanese were fanatical and vowed to fight to the very end.
That's the official pretext / party line of the US, to self-justify the nuclear bombings (as if they ever could be justified).
The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender. They just didn't want an unconditional surrender, but to save some face/dignity.
> "The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender."
Anytime one hears the "the Japanese were looking to surrender" narrative, it should be understood that, even being generous, it's a half-truth that isn't borne out by a closer examination of the historical record, which even Japanese historians interviewing wartime Japanese officials, who had every possible reason to want to save face for their country, don't contradict.
The reality is that while, yes, there was a peace faction in the Japanese government who did want to surrender but the ultranationalistic Japanese military was quite firmly in control and was very much _not_ interested in surrendering, even at the cost of millions of Japanese military and civilian casualties involved in continuing the war. The aim (and preference of all factions) would have been a peace treaty that let Japan keep its ill-gotten gains in Asia. It took a direct order from the Emperor to initiate the surrender, over the objections of the military, and even then a coup attempt was made by fanatics willing to defy even the Emperor in an attempt to prevent the surrender proclamation from being broadcast (the Kyuujou incident).
> ...the Japanese were dead scared...and were looking to surrender...
Just how widespread was this sentiment at that time? Reading the accounts of the Kyūjō incident starting from the Wikipedia entry and branching from there [1], I got the sense that some of the Imperial Japanese Army leadership prevarication in the very early phases of the incident up to Kawabe's organizing of the agreement was this history's knife's edge playing out again. I just lack the cultural referents to even understand how significant was the fact that after the emperor's stiffly formal announcement, there was a broadcast immediately following to confirm in lay language that indeed it was a surrender announcement.
If specialist historians with the appropriate cross-cultural training can confirm it was that opaque to the Japanese themselves, then I wouldn't be surprised that the Americans misread the cues that Japanese were giving in their attempts to surrender, not helped by their selection of the Soviet Union as an intermediary that turned out to be an unreliable partner. This is all on top of the usual chaotic swirl of the fog of war.
There are criticisms against the narrative the Japanese were trying to surrender but the US ignored those attempts because the US wanted to use the nuclear bombs [2]. And there are narratives that the nuclear bombs were not decisive, but the Soviets opening another front was [3]. This account gives some useful color background to the decisions' context [4].
General consensus of casual discussions (as opposed to scholarly studies, which I couldn't find) of why the US didn't use the nuclear bomb on Tokyo seems to converge upon the US leadership emerging a strategy that desires a negotiated peace with some Japanese power structure intact. So any narrative that the US "just wants to use the bombs" takes place within the framework of the demonstrated and carried out desire for a negotiated conclusion. It might not have been as simple as "we want to use The Bomb, and by God, we'll use it", it might have been used as an instrument to achieving the strategic objective.
And there is definitely room to strenuously object to that use even within that framework, but for me to be convinced it was objectively black-and-white "wrong", I'd have to know more about the information and context the decision-makers on both sides operated upon, not the hindsight information we are privy to. Would appreciate any pointers to material along those lines.
What I took away from that pivot point in history is war is indeed, hell.
That's the official pretext / party line of the US, to self-justify the nuclear bombings (as if they ever could be justified).
The reality is the Japanese were dead scared (also of the incoming Soviets) and were looking to surrender. They just didn't want an unconditional surrender, but to save some face/dignity.