Speaking about POWs , I have a little quip about the erroneous notion from the fascist officers of the Japanese considered refusing to surrender because it was "disgraceful" that's just parroting overt propaganda, the real reason is ugly. What, it's "graceful" to be killing each other for limited supplies and cannibalizing, than surrendering? Doesn't add up. They refused to surrender because, they firmly believed all the cannibalism of slaves and natives, POW brutality, raping underage girls was "normal and justified behavior" and if their imaginations ran wild thinking they would suffer the same if they lost. The "Yamato samurai spirit" and superiority over all races... including the "cowardly capitalist white pigs," whom they were told all sorts of racist lies. (Like not putting radar on some ships for Midway was justified with "only the blind white pigs need that, we just need our Japanese men with superior eyesight.")
They believed in their racial superiority because they posited, they alone were guided by the one true god that is Emperor Hirohito and nihilistic Japanese Zen Buddhist rhetoric of dying and killing is just early deliverance to paradise... is what led them to blow 10s of 1000s of people up in suicide attacks by plane, submarine, boat, diving suit, manned antitank mines, etc. Remember they had all their Shinto shrines defaced with their individual patron shamanistic gods from ancient times, and repurposed to an Imperial Cult worshiping only Hirohito (and his holy sons).
The Japanese soldiers seldom surrendered, for they thought they would be flayed like the prisoners in the Pacific Islands, or Singapore, or the 2 million butchered in Vietnam, or 25 million gas bombed and anthrax germ bombed and experimented on in China (Not even Germans used WMDs in war, Japan was using these WMDs AND developing two nukes up till the end of WW2, and tried to buy time by scheduling Operation Cherry Blossoms at Night for September of 1945, trying to bomb America with bubonic plague and mustard gas. The Soviet push in August is what got them to surrender like Nazi butchers in Eastern Europe running to the West to surrender in order to avoid being sent to Soviet Gulags. The Japanese accounts actually show that by the end of WW2 casualty reports by 10s of 1000s did not faze anyone at all, so the nukes hardly fazed anyone in the Daihon'ei high command). They also feared that if they surrender, the Americans will do what they gleefully did to 100 million Asians. (the number includes 30 million of them killed)
(Also, there is a difference between accounts from the better-off officers and the base soldiery with lower morale. Some men were too timid to refuse anything so they instead, ran off to the jungles to eke out a living there for years, bothering nobody, and when finally found, all they could do was be sorry that they were "surrendering" at all after all these years. While some officers held out near villages and kept robbing livestock, threatening, and terrorizing villages at katana-point, being bandits into the 70s.)
There's a reason the 1 billion Asians cheered for American nuclear liberation. Well Japan hides that 1/3 of those casualties were foreign Asians put to slave labor in their munitions factories or poison gas factories (Hiroshima was Japan's primary poison gas production hub and Nagasaki was Mitsubishi's slave factory complex), and blames America for "Starting Pearl Harbor" to this day.
Their logic is, America "had no right to stop exporting US steel and oil to Japan." Which was done as a the last straw against all its decades of invasions in Asia and an outcry against Japan's bombing cities all over the Republic of China (Chongqing being the most infamous) since 1937 (this wasn't the first Japanese bombing of foreign cities, that was Siege of Tsingtao in 1914) with all sorts of bombs and chemical/biological WMDs.
And one should not clump all the colonies in Japan to be all "Japanese," which was actually Japan's intent. They figured if rural islanders showed fierce suicidal resistance fighting on the outskirt islands of Japan, they hoped the US Forces would be too afraid to land on Japan proper.
By the way, the Okinawans are like the Irish brutally subjugated by the English for centuries. Okinawa's Ryukyu kingdom was subdued some time ago, but the people have been for centuries, overtaxed by samurai even worse than the samurai did back in their homelands (MABIKI or infanticide was as common as 1 in 3 households annually, according to Nobuhiro Satou from 19th century Japan, because contraceptives didn't exist and mothers couldn't feed themselves. The 16th century Samurai wartime heyday was also like this, according to Portuguese missionary Luis Frois, Japanese mothers would kneel on their babies' throats when the the 75% tax rate rendered them unable to raise babies, which was 3 times the effective tax averages throughout feudal Asia and also feudal Europe). They were told to listen to the Japanese oppressors and sacrifice their lives as cannon fodder for Japan because the Americans would be 10 times worse if they landed, and will eat and violate all their children, so might as well just kill their children now to spare them the fate, and parents should follow suit with seppuku. They were surprised to find that they were given food and medical supplies instead. And found that their Japanese were the ones doing everything they warned that the Americans will do. (Himeyuri Students is one infamous case of what they did in Okinawa, conscript school children for official sex slavery approved by the Japanese government)
