In the case of the Japanese, would that change in thinking have occurred had not nearly their entire country been burned to the ground?
It seems patently obvious that even **AFTER** the mass devastation of Japanese cities and industry, the Japanese would never have surrendered without the decision of the Emperor to do so. That nation, from the lowly peasant to the highest general, gave every appearance well into 1945 of being willing to die in a last-ditch defense of the Home Islands. The mass suicides at Okinawa were likely only a foretaste of what was coming if the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had not worked and if we had been forced to invade.
Nations, like alcoholics, sometimes have to hit bottom to decide they need to change course.
I think a reasonable case can be made that Mao, by unifying most of China under a single central government, and then destroying much of his country's traditional elites in academic, religious, military and cultural affairs, and then with the Red Brigades showing to pretty much everyone the utter bankruptcy of Maoist ideals of agrarian Communism, made his own country “hit bottom” in ways that caused Chinese leaders to look to the West to find a system which worked economically while preserving social unity and government control.
But then again, understanding the “inscrutable oriental” has not always been the easiest task for Western minds, and we have found our failures to be catastrophic at times.