Hiroshima had happened days before, but it was only now that the Japanese leaders fell into a panic. He and two other members of Japan’s Supreme War Council preferred to continue fighting—not in the hope of winning the war, but rather to damage the enemy enough to achieve a negotiated surrender that would preserve the kokutai, or the institution of the emperor. Why did Japan surrender? The public view that the atomic bomb was the decisive event that ended World War II is not supported by the facts. Japan surrendered 70 years ago, but it … The Japanese refer to the attempted coup d’état on Aug. 14, 1945, the last night of the Second World War, as the “Kyujo Incident" On August 15, Emperor Hirohito announced Japan’s unconditional surrender, bringing World War II to a close. The key reason why the Allied Forces refused Japan’s initial surrender because it was not an unconditional surrender. Perhaps the bomb did nothing to accelerate Japan’s surrender. If Japan was given their surrender terms they would have room to move, but the Allies pushed for an unconditional surrender in order for the Emperor could be prosecuted for war crimes. A full-scale invasion of Japan itself would mean hundreds of thousands of dead GIs, and, still, the Japanese leadership refused to surrender. 'remaining Japanese soldiers') were soldiers of the Imperial Japanese Army and Imperial Japanese Navy during the Pacific Theatre of World War II who continued fighting after the surrender of Japan in August 1945. A growing number of historians believe that Japan would have surrendered if the United States … ... the Japanese leadership refused to surrender. A Japanese soldier who refused to surrender after World War Two ended and spent 29 years in the jungle dies aged 91 in Tokyo. From the Japanese side, the reasoning was something like: If the Americans had more of such weapons, they would have used them all at once to completely destroy us. Japanese holdouts (Japanese: 残留日本兵, romanized: Zanryū nipponhei, lit. PHOTOS: Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Before and After the Bombs The debate over what precipitated the Japanese surrender at the end of World War II is a source of contention among historians. Why a Japanese WWII soldier refused to surrender for 29 years For the Japanese in World War II, surrender was unthinkable. Japan's surrender happened because of a radio broadcast by the emperor — but that broadcast almost didn't make it on-air. This debate has also figured prominently in the discussion of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (for more on that discussion, see Debate over the Bomb).The “traditional narrative” put forward in the war’s immediate aftermath was that using the … As historian Tsuyoshi Hasegawa puts it, “The Soviet entry into the war played a much greater role than the atomic bombs in inducing Japan to surrender because it dashed any hope that Japan could terminate the war through Moscow's mediation.” If the bomb did not motivate Japan to surrender, perhaps it was not necessary to use it. But in early August 66 years ago, America unveiled a terrifying new weapon, dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That is certainly what we would have done.