I've always heard the story told that Japan gave up after the atomic attacks. But I've also heard stories about loyal soldiers living in caves afraid to surrender to allied troops.
I find it difficult to believe that the entire nation simply gave up the war effort, but I suppose it is possible in the face of atomic terror. What kind of resistance, if any, did the occupational forces in Japan face after world war two?
The Emperor's speech to the nation, gyokuon-hōsō, went a lot of the way towards squashing all desire for resistance. The Emperor basically told the Japanese to lay down their weapons (no one understood what he was saying, but everyone knew who gave the order). A good account of this can be found in the book Hiroshima Diary, probably one of the most raw accounts of the post-Hiroshima period, and available at a great library near you.
There was a group of military men who actually broke into the Imperial Palace and attempted to perform a coup in order to stop the speech from being broadcast, and the recording of the Emperor's voice had to be smuggled out in a pile of women's underwear. At least three plotted coups had to be foiled before the speech could get on the air, and once it was successfully broadcast many military men committed suicide. This is dramatized in the film Japan's Longest Day.
The Japanese fully expected the Allies to be vicious brutes coming to rape their women like in wartime propaganda. The Occupation was not free of incidents, but overwhelmingly, there was a virtuous cycle of the American army reacting positively to the total lack of resistance among the Japanese, which in turn caused the Japanese to realize that the Americans weren't actually that bad. There were no attempts to overthrow the occupiers. After the Americans left, there were attempts by small ultra-right groups to overthrow the independent government, but they did not go well.
there's also the fact that japan by 1945 was defeated. every major city had been burned to the ground ("Fog of War" a movie about Macnamara gives statistics about the massive destruction of japanese cities from the air. 60,70, 95% of a city burned down. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hOCYcgOnWUM)
The American navy had blockaded the islands, american subs had wrecked the japanese merchant marine. So japan was going to starve. it also had no oil, fuel or natural resources for an industrialized economy.
Now, the japanese army in China could have kept on fighting. there were over a million men there. they had the resources of northern china and manchuria at their disposal. but the entrance of the soviet union into the war (and I don't know of any indepth study of the soviet-japanese conflict - most say the japanese were crushed in a short time but idk specifics) kind of sealed the fate of that army.