So, both the Japanese and the American landers did the same thing.
In the days of Apollo, a platform called “the flying bedstead”, I believe, was used to simulate and gain understanding of the landing on the Moon. At 1 Earth Gravity, it was a very stripped-down set of mostly legs - hence the name. Neil Armstrong, I believe, had to punch out of one at near 90 degrees during testing.
Without knowing, I suppose I expect that these “landers” went through none of that. When something is barely able to land on the Moon, it is very hard to simulate on Earth, except fully inside a computer.
With both the Japanese and American landers failing, I would want to look at a sudden increase in thrust just before touchdown, as the engine nozzle gets back-pressure from the surface. But, whatever it is, it probably needs to be figured out at this end, first.
Space is hard.
It’s harder when you splash talk of success when you already knew it was a failure.
I don’t know how true it is, somebody was saying the proximate cause was a missed switch setting, a physical switch setting that was out; rendering the laser range finders inop. They would be disabled on the pad so it wouldn’t be energized at the wrong time, overheat, maybe blind people etc. So they had to send up a software patch to utilize a separate laser system intended for another application that was operating. like I mentioned I’ve no idea of the accuracy of that. But that might explain the extra hop around the bend.
Then it was not enough telemetry data to find a suitable landing location. Every Apollo landing, the computer was going to land them in a not quite good enough spot, or they were coming in too hot. So every lunar pilot elected to take manual control for the last several clicks down in altitude. A couple guys talked about letting the computer handle it for a 100% automated landing, which was theoretically possible, but nobody ever did. Imagine that.
The Neil Armstrong bailout is described by Alan Bean in the extras disk of some documentary I have around here, and it’s funny.
footage of the event:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tUJDbj9Vp5w