The US insisted on unconditional surrender, prolonging the fighting and resulting in the atom bomb attacks, then ended up accepting the Japanese condition anyway.
What?? Japan was forced to accept Allies' condition.
After rejecting that, thus prolonging the war and using the atom bombs, the US ended up keeping the Emperor in place (ie accepting the previous Japanese condition) anyway.
Personally, I tend to believe that the nukes, the potential cost of defending against an invasion of the mainland by the US, and Russia's invasion made surrender look like the obvious choice, but remember that the initial plan for Pearl Harbor assumed a negotiated surrender with the US which, Japan hoped, would let them keep certain territories necessary to maintain supply lines for their colonial wars, which was what they really cared about.
Fanatical resistance by the military, both due to their own racist ideals and out of the fear for self-preservation (the Japanese people, the Western world and the rest of Asia basically hated Japan's government by the end,) drew the war and the surrender out longer than it needed to be.
Although, I also believe the main reason the US dropped the atomic bombs is that we had them, and therefore needed to justify the expense of making them by using them. It's likely that, without Japan's surrender, the US would have used nuclear weapons and invaded Japan at the same time.
That doesn't seem to be what you were originally arguing:
> It's odd how [Japan "fighting and fighting and fighting"] is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.
How is this a myth if nukes were mentioned in emperor's address as a reason to surrender?
Because, as I've said, at least twice, they were already considering surrender even before the atomic bombs were dropped.
After that, please read some basic WWII history before stringing this thread out any longer, if you're seriously unaware of anything but the atom bomb that didn't go Japan's way in 1945.
That's not the point, obviously. The point is Japan's militarism combined with their utter over-the-top brutality and expansionist agenda.
Everything Japan learned about Imperialism it learned from the West, though. The Empire of Japan may have been brutal, but the Allies were hardly angels in comparison, or lacking in their own expansionist ideals.
Well quite. How was Japan able to attack "the USA" (itself established by over-the-top brutality and expansionism) in the first place? Because the US had earlier overthrown, occupied, suppressed and militarised territories that are actually closer to Tokyo than Washington DC.
How dare some Asian country think it could colonise Asia, when Asia belongs to the US and Europe.
It's odd how this is portrayed as a negative aspect of Japan's militarism, when the Allies were fighting the same war with the same attitude.