The stereotypical answer folks expect /want to hear is about how Japanese society is strictly hierarchical, or focused on group consensus and harmony. That the emperor's radio announcement broke their spirit. That Japanese attitudes tend to be pragmatic and quick to accept reality when faced with it. Or, uncharitably, that Japanese people are weak and spineless. If you dig deep enough, you'll find elements of those sorts of things, or a way to view events through such lenses, but focusing on them gives a warped and incomplete picture.

In Imperial Japan, much like any other country, most of the population was not involved in political decision making, and the actions of the Imperial army were a distant, unreal thing, removed from daily life. While some people were very fervent about Japan's victories overseas, many folks yelled "banzai" and cheered at certain announcements because that's what everyone did. In so doing, perhaps they got swept up in it; certainly, the communal norms bolstered the spirit of laborers feeling included in the Japanese war effort by working hard on the domestic front, but similar effects were at work in the domestic labor forces of other countries, too. But by and large, war was this ephemeral far off thing that was often the source of news and town gossip.

And then it was real. It was fire and explosions and air raid sirens and hiding in shelters and hospitals and funerals and starvation and scrounging for scraps of metal and rationing and privation.

Japan, much like areas of Europe where fighting was heaviest, was completely ruined by the war. American infantry never set foot on the Japanese home islands to fight, but the incessant bombing ensured that the majority of Japanese people had little to sustain their broken families with when the war was finally finished. And Japanese people, despite perhaps having an unusual amount of fighting spirit when the circumstances were right as they were in Imperial times, are much like anyone else deep down: they prefer survival to the alternative.

I suggest reading the first-hand accounts of kamikaze survivors if you wish to be convinced of this. Their stories of being young and scared and proud--and often poor--will paint in great detail and in vivid colors the most dramatic aspects of many of the feelings Japanese people were undergoing as the war continued to become more and more real and more and more dangerous.

After the devastation of the war, most of the population was focused on rebuilding; first, the bare necessities, and later some semblance of a normal life and normal communities. Yes, there were Americans involved in high-level political decision making, but much like the war in the early years, those political decisions were distant and unreal and didn't really touch on the day-to-day life of laboring for another day of survival. In rural areas, many Japanese people had never even seen a foreign person--even by the end of the 20th century. Certainly not in the immediate aftermath of the war. The Americans were ghosts that rained fire from the sky and had suddenly decided to stop, ghosts that the people had been made to be terrified of marching through the streets pillaging and raping and killing. And now they were not to come. They were best ignored or forgotten, especially when food and shelter were more immediate concerns.

What kept the Japanese people "in line"? Political distance, an end to the horrors of war, a sense of defeat and acceptance, and those much-made-of factors of cultural uniqueness. But, mostly, it was the will to live when survival itself was questionable.