The Japanese were NEVER ready to surrender.
“The Japanese were NEVER ready to surrender.”
You’re right. In the pre-war years Japanese society had become dominated by an particularly virulent Bushido cult. Combined with a culture that puts immense value on ‘saving face’ and you had a very dangerous mix for both the Japanese and those fighting back against them.
The Japanese had a saying “100 million dead for the Emperor” and the increasingly hard fighting as we got closer to the Home Islands proved the willingness of even civilians to do exactly that.
In the six weeks prior to Hiroshima the battle for Okinawa had just ended. 123,000 dead in one battle, many of them American. In Hiroshima there were 140,000 dead.
The Japanese weren’t going to quit. Nothing short of a force of nature like a typhoon or massive earthquake would permit them to quit and yet save face. Well the atomic bombs did exactly that. They were like something supernatural, and after Nagasaki the ‘peace faction’ within the Japanese leadership was able to overwhelm the Bushido lunatics who were willing to sacrifice the entire Japanese people in their vision of a last glorious fight against a conventional invasion.