Why the fuck did Japan not surrender after their fleet was completely

>>2896201
They never really had an offesnive strategy; after all, even with their fleet, it wasn't like they could make it to the U.S. and hit anything that would slow down their enemy's war economy.

The Japanese strategy was always coercive, not controlling; by being too much trouble and too bloody and expensive to take down for America to bother with completely eradicating, allowing for a "peace with honor" at a negotiating table. To do that, they don't need to attack, just defend.

>>2896201
In no particular order that would be better conditions, keeping the emperor, and not being hanged yourself. There was no hope in winning, but there was hope in being so costly to attack that preferable conditions and survival of the ruling class could happen.

the militarists knew they would be hanged

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>>2896212
>>2896214

It just seems completely insane. By this point in time, their imperial ambitions were literally sunk. They basically had nothing to lose by surrendering because all their expensive warships were already wrecks at the bottom of the Pacific. Yet they simply refused to let the war be done.

>>2896240
They had plenty to lose. They had the home islands, Korea, Taiwan, their possessions in China, what's now Indonesia,, Singapore, Malaya, probably a few other areas I can't think of at the moment. True, they couldn't hold any of them if the Allies moved to take them, but that could mean more prolonged, bloody fighting, maybe for years. They were gambling on the notion that America in particular wouldn't have the stomach for that.

They didn't go to war to preserve the fleet; that was something that was used to help prosecute the war, not something that was a goal in and of itself like territory or population centers or primary resource access.

>>2896240
>They basically had nothing to lose
Except for land, their own lives, and their entire way of life and culture, and any future that involves not being any other Asian country under a white man's colonial rule as seen for the previous centuries.

You're coming at this from a view of hindsight. Just try to imagine being a high ranking Japanese military commander at the time. What are your values, what are your priorities, and what have you seen in history to shape your predictions the gambles you can make? Everything you know tells you that surrender means being an-East Asian puppet in the new world order, that losers get killed, and that cultures get radically changed.

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>>2896254
>>2896263

I recently started listening to "Japanese Destroyer Captain" on Audible. )That's why I made this thread) I'm about 2/3 of the way through. Hearing about all this guy's friends being killed left and right for days is honestly kind of depressing. The Japanese fleet never wins and things are just constantly getting worse and worse for Japan as the story goes on, with more ships being sunk and more people dying for no reason. What was the point of all this? Why not just give up and cut losses to a minimum?

>>2896281
You've already been given the reason. There was too much at stake for the men who had pushed Japan towards war and imperial ambitions for them to 'cut their losses' at any point. For them, this was a struggle of life and death for both themselves and the entirety of Nippon as they saw it. It was the supreme test of their nation's will, which they believed was indomitable.

The militarist factions would never back down from the hill they chose to die on and it ultimately took a failed coup for their efforts at continuing the war to be extinguished.

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>>2896281
For several Retarded reasons.

>Muh Honor
>Muh Ancestor
>Nippon Steel better than filthy Gaijin.
>Filthy Gaijin are only shopkeepers we are Samurai.
>Killing Myself is better than Surrender.
>Filthy Americans force us to attack them. They should have never embargo us.
And much more

>>2896294

But that doesn't make any sense. They obviously had much more to lose by continuing to fight an unwinnable war. I mean, you know where all this is leading, right? The nukes. Of course, they couldn't have known that they were coming, but they still could have avoided them by surrendering much sooner, especially after their ships were sunk and they couldn't realistically fight back anyway.

>>2896281
They did want to surrender, just not the unconditional surrender that America wanted/

>>2896311
From the perspective of the Militarists in the Japanese government
>Continuing fighting to wear down the enemy into accepting a negotiated peace
Pros: The possibility of keep your government, emperor, your overseas occupied territory, and your own skin from being tried and hanged in a post-war trial.
Cons: More people die, but that's immaterial to your goals

>Unconditionally surrender
Pros: Less people die
Cons: You lose your government, emperor, control over your own country, are occupied by a foreign power, and you will probably die ignominious in a war crimes trial, the millions of your fallen soldiers died for nothing, and you forfeit the imperial ambitions that had been the driving force in Japanese politics and your own life's goals for the last several decades

>>2896311
They did try to open a channel to the US to started negotiated peace, however the US would only accept unconditional surrender from them. At that point they had everything to lose in staying in the war and in ended the war.

So why not fight at that point?

Does that clear things up for you?

>>2896316

>surrender

You mean ceasefire. What they wanted was not even a surrender at all