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“The thing that always struck me as curious is that their commanders would not deeply quiz them.”

As you said, orders were expected to be followed and failure was not allowed for. This showed up in the navy as a lack of damage control training for ships crews. While US forces constantly emphasized training and new techniques the Japanese treated damage control as an afterthought.
Add in the fact that higher officers had little regard for midgrade officers and no regard for the average soldier or pilot and it was a recipe for mediocrity at best, disaster at worst.

Even worse was the lack of communication between the services in Japan. The army and navy operated completely separate of each other. From intelligence to weapons to research and development they were two separate trees in the same forest.
One of the things that hampered their radar development was the fact that both services ran their own R&D and strictly forbid sharing of information between the scientists and technicians, even if they were working in the same building.
Japan could never have run something like the Manhattan Project with it’s many different departments and specialties.

“The Japs had a fakenews problem themselves at the time, on steroids”

Of course they did.
Their easy victory in the 1904-1905 war with the much larger Tsarist Russia fed into their beliefs that the Japanese were invincible.
Then there were the senior officers who didn’t want what they perceived as temporary setbacks to jeopardize their cushy positions. Then the Junior officers who didn’t want to rock the boat.
All that was enabled by an introverted Emporer Hirohito who was much more comfortable with a book than with his cabinet and military leaders.
A complete clusterscrew from top to bottom.

One of the problems was the Japanese believed that if they could make the war costly enough in men killed and wounded then the soft Americans would sue for peace. They didn’t have a clue.

I remember reading about the Wahoo a lifetime ago. :(
Ironic that O’Kanes boat was sunk by a circular run.
All told our submarine forces went from 0 to 100 in record time. Even with defective weapons and no tradition in the silent service.

Oh, a quick and non definitive check shows most of our wartime sub skippers got their starts on destroyers. Maybe they were hardwired for aggressiveness from the get go.

The army and navy operated completely separate of each other.

To the extremes. You ever hear about the Army trying to build their own submarines? They were demanding that the Navy drop what they were doing and make supply runs to their isolated garrisons, Navy said nothing doing, they had their own missions to handle. So the Army went about trying to set up their own navy. Not sure how far they got on that before the war ended. People I knew who had contact with the Japanese military before the war said that the Navy had personnel that were humble, very intelligent, highly trained and disciplined, real squared away kind of guys, while the Army had a hammer and everything looked like a nail to them, including their own navy. Pretty accurate observations I do believe.

All that was enabled by an introverted Emporer Hirohito who was much more comfortable with a book than with his cabinet and military leaders.

Basically, he couldn't do much of squat anyway. There was a clause that once a national emergency was triggered, the military assumed total control of the country - the civilian government stepped back and were essentially spectators with limited advisory input, for what that was worth. The civilian government was on a need to know basis and as far as the military was concerned they figured they didn't need to know much, worked to keep them out of the loop. It was their show as far as they were concerned, had worked for years to finally seize control and were in no mood to relinquish any of it.