> The Japanese population was largely prepared to fight to the death against any invasion.

The Japanese military was, clearly since they went so far as to attempt a coup against the emperor to prevent his surrender[0]. I don't know that the Japanese population at large shared the same sentiment by the end of the war. They didn't exactly fight to the death as expected during the occupation.

>The emperor derives his power from the will of the populous.

That interpretation would seem to come from the modern, postwar Japanese constitution, in which the emperor is just a figurehead without real power.

At the time, however, the emperor derived power from a claim of divine lineage from the sun goddess Amaterasu.

>Saying they have zero control over their govt or the situation is overstating things.

Not by much. The whole country was essentially a military dictatorship run by a religious cult overseen by a god-king. Common people tend not to have much influence over the policies of such regimes.

[0]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ky%C5%ABj%C5%8D_incident

I could see, "the Parliament/President/other elected official derives his power from the will of the populace," but the Emperor? An emperor derives his power from his ability to impose it on others. In fact, so does the elected official; just because people have voted for the one they mind the least doesn't mean they consent to any of the bums.

The Japanese were heavily indoctrinated to view the Emperor as their god-king. That was one reason the occupation went so well, because when MacArthur took over, the Japanese generally treated him as a god-king, which made his policies much easier to implement.

https://books.google.com/books?id=iuA-ZOCpTfIC&lpg=PP1&pg=PT...