Perhaps – but ordering surrender in 1945, indeeed ordering anything of importance, was an extraordinary and unprecedented action for a post-medieval emperor, and it must have taken some guts for Hirohito to cross that line (against the expressed wishes of many of his ministers).
Ambrose Bierce once compared the power of the people in a democracy to that of “the sacred Simurgh of Persian mythology – omnipotent on the condition that it do nothing.” (The Wikipedia entry on the Simurgh – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simurgh – makes no mention of that, but never mind.) That was probably a good description of the power of Japanese emperors. Hirohito probably knew he could use it once and make it stick, but after that, all bets were off.