Unfortunately, I gave away most of my WWII books when I was still living in Japan, because of space considerations, so I don’t have them for reverence. I’ll google a bit to find some info.
The average Taro and Hanako did not think about it. They simply endured the hardships and consigned their fates to fate. They had no say or power to stop what was happening. People who wanted to read between the lines of the official news would have known things weren’t going well, as the great victories over the evil Americans were coming closer and closer to the homeland. More likely than not, however, most people just ignored what they were powerless to change.
The B-29s brought the hell of war to their shores on March 9/10, 1945 in the deadly Tokyo firebombing raid which killed more people than either Hiroshima or Nagasaki. My former MIL lived as a child in the area which was targeted. They went one way and their neighbors went another, only to never return.
One unintended consequence was that the displaced working class people who were taken in by kind strangers in the more prosperous parts of Tokyo were shocked to see how much better the other half lived, even in the middle of war. This became a serious problem for the government which started to become concerned over the reaction of the people.
In 1940, 50% of Japanese lived in rural communities and on farms. The majority of them were functionally illiterate and most lacked radios. From 1942 onward, in the forth year of the war (for them, the US skipped the first couple of years), these families started to feel the effects of the war rationing and loss of male labor. The rice crop that year was disastrously low.
By 1943, labors throughout Japan were forced to skip work at times in order to obtain food either through theft or on the black market. To combat this, the government increased the rations for certain workers. Increasingly, the Japanese were becoming dependent on food from the Ryukyu islands (Okinawa), their colonies and conquered areas, a dependency which would cripple them as the USN slowly sank their merchant fleet. IIRC, that fleet was only 75% of their civilian needs at the start of the war, and they lost something like 60% of that.
By mid 1944, workers were not able to receive enough food. Daily calorie intake for nurses in one hospital were only 1,475, a mere 67% of recommended allowances. People complained of chronic fatigue and became more susceptible to disease and malnutrition.
Junior high school children became an important part of the workforce during the final year of the war as high school student were already taken for either labor or inducted into the army.
PM Tojo was forced to resign in June or July, 1944 after the loss of Saipan and an ineffective place keeper was set up in his stead.
By late 1944, some noted civilians and government officials were (extremely quietly) suggesting negotiations to end the war, but the military dominated government refused to consider this.
The Imperial Japanese Navy should have known that it was all over by the Battle of Leyte Gulf in October of 1944 which finished it off as a fighting force. This was after having its air power destroyed in the Great Marianas Turkey Shoot earlier that summer.
In February 1945, former PM Prince Konoe urged the Emperor to negotiate for a conditional surrender but Hirohito declined, preferring to wait for a “grand victory” in some battle in order to negotiate from a position of strength.
After the invasion of Okinawa in April, 1945, PM Koiso resigned and Admiral (ret) Suzuki was installed in order to find a way to end the war.
I’ve posted a number of times on the final days of the war, so I’ll skip that this time, but as others have noted, the fanatical elements would have preferred dying over surrender.
