Japanese women training to defend Japan with bamboo spears.
At Saipan hundreds (maybe even a few thousand - no one knows the real number) of Japanese civilians committed suicide by throwing themselves from cliffs, rather than surrender to the Marines, because of the propaganda they had been fed. Had the U.S. invaded Japan the civilian deaths would have been astronomical.
I was thinking of the same things. I understand how hard it is in this day and age to wrap one’s mind around it but that was the mindset in Japan then. Very little of the population knew anything of the outside world and the militant leaders were dead set on keeping it that way and pushing the entire country to fight to the death. For a number of reasons they would have proudly done so.