Operatio Ten-Go, the certain suicide of the Yamato and the rest of the Second Fleet, was certainly an impossible operation even without the benefit of hindsight. Many survivors of Ten-Go such as Tameichi Hara, the captain of Yahagi, recalled that a number of officers in the Second Fleet protested the mission and saw it as a useless gesture. Even Matome Ugaki, whose faith in ultimate victory outstripped his capacity for sober analysis, recorded in his diary that he was opposed to Ten-Go as a "superficial" gesture. The outcome of Ten-Go bore these concerns out, but there were several reasons why the Second Fleet had been sent.

One logical element of the operation was that the Second Fleet represented the last functional and most power element of Japan's remaining surface fleet. The invasion of the Ryukyus represented an imminent danger to the Home Islands and preventing or stalling the Allied invasion would help brace the Home Islands for the coming assault. The Special Surface Attack Force would distract Allied air power and, if the odds were right, perhaps manage to damage the landing. By this logic, it was better to use the Second Fleet in a risky gamble than let it rust out in port from lack of fuel and provide nothing to Japan's defense.

There was another reason for Ten-Go: pride. Part of the impetus for Ten-Go was that at an Imperial GHQ conference in March on the defense of the Ryukyus, Hirohito pointedly asked the Naval Chief of Staff Admiral Koshiro Oikawa what was the Combined Fleet plan for the invasion. This prompted Ten-Go in that it would have been an embarrassment for the IJN if its best remaining surface forces sat the defense of Okinawa. The Yamato had earned a reputation as a luxury flagship for admirals and her stores included such luxuries as frozen meat, earning the warship the unflattering nickname "Hotel Yamato." When Combined Fleet Chief of Staff Admiral Ryunosuke Kusaka outlined Ten-Go to the Second Fleet's officers, Yamato's captain Nobuei Morishita objected to the Combined Fleet throwing the ships and men's lives away, to which Kusaka tartly replied that Yamato's only real engagement with the enemy, Leyte, had ended in failure without the warship even firing her guns at the enemy. As Kusaka reportedly put it:

This ship's only action was a failure. People are wondering whether it has become a comfortable hotel for unemployed admirals.

Hara's memoir recorded that Morishita, who commanded Yamato at Leyte, took this as a personal insult, but the warning cowed him somewhat. For Kusaka and other admirals at the Combined Fleet, to have the surface ships sit out Okinawa would have meant losing a degree of face versus both the IJA and the air forces.

Finally, it also bears stressing that the Japanese were operating under a serious pressure from all sides, diplomatic and military. Not only was Germany on the verge of total defeat, but the Soviet nonaggression pact had lapsed and Moscow opted not to renew it. For Japan's military planners these setbacks, along with the collapse of Japan's military on all fronts inculcated a form of tunnel vision with regards to military operations. Planning and executing an operation became an end onto itself and decoupled from the wider military situation. Ugaki's diary entries after the Philippine Sea, for example, became more concerned with minutia and occasional morose poems than any real taking stock of the dire situation of the war.

These overlapping rationales all resulted in Ten-Go and ironically, the operation produced the opposite of the intended effect. Rather than go out in a blaze of glory, Ten-Go underscored how the ultimate futility of armed resistance at this point. The complete lack of coordination between the Special Surface Attack Force and kikusui operations meant whatever distraction of Allied air cover Ten-Go produced, its impact on the battle was nugatory. Instead of saving face, Ten-Go helped perpetuate an image of an out of touch and quite foolish admiralty that was very popular in the immediate postwar years. Even though Japanese memory cultures of the postwar era tended to treat Japanese as victims and eschewed any place for non-Japanese suffering, militarism and its champions were targets of scorn in the postwar period for their stupidity and inflexibility. Ten-Go appeared to be the ultimate expression of such poor planning and strategy, and it was only well after the Occupation and immediate postwar period that the final sortie received the elegiac quality that characterizes contemporary depictions of Yamato's last mission.