- Changing thus policy from unconditional surrender to surrender with the condition that emperor would be permitted to remain and would not be tried. Large parts of the Japanese government were prepared to surrender under these conditions and had actually communicated that to the Americans. Considering that this is what eventually happened, it could have been accepted before 150 thousand people had been killed.
Huh? That is what we gave them. Hirohito remained in power until 1989. The only thing he gave up was his status as a God or as a descendent of a God.
Possible but probably would not have happened until a Soviet invasion of the Home Islands had taken place with the possibility that Japan might have been split up like Korea.
The Japanese would have known about its power they and their German allies also had nuclear weapons programs and they knew in theory how devastating these were. Also, unknown to most Westerners, the Japanese had the most advanced stockpile of biological weapons in the world, the problem was that they just didn't use them. It was possible that if we didn't drop the bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki then America may have gotten bombed with biological agents by the Japanese probably using airplanes launched from submarines. The Japanese were close to using this in 1945 but the Navy wanted to keep these submarines in reserve for the upcoming defence of the Home Islands from attack.
I have not seen one piece of evidence for this. If they truely thought that than why did they plan and begin preparing for Operation Downfall and its first landing Operation Olympic? Why would an invasion of the Home Islands be necessary if the Japanese were about to surrender? The problem was the Japanese would not surrender and their leaders and Hirohito had made that clear. Most have stated that we would have to take every piece of ground in an intense ground war in order to finally subdue and achieve a surrender from the Japanese. They weren't planning to surrender anytime soon.
Look at the relative positions of Germany and Japan when they surrendered. When Germany surrendered her entire land mass had been taken over by the Soviets, British, and Americans leaving only small amounts of resistance left. In August 1945 the Japanese still held Manchuria, Korea, the Home Islands, Sakhalin and the Kuril Islands. Basically their entire land mass in about 1934 was still part of the Empire. It was in a much more stable and dangerous state when it surrendered than the German were when they surrendered.
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