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Were they unanimous? No, of course not. But most of those willing to fight on were merely doing so to try to maneuver to a face-saving position. No Japanese army had been defeated on the home islands for at least the last thousand years. Face-saving is very important in their culture (just look at their baseball, where they often played to a tie so as not to show-up the opponent too much; this mindset has only very recently begun to change BTW). If they could do so by getting at least one "condition" in the surrender terms - the issue of what happens to the emperor - they save face. Some were willing to fight on till they got that condition. That was as much a function of our own stupidity in broadcasting our insistence on "unconditional surrender" as anything else. Tactically, saying such things is foolish, as it usually makes the enemy fight even more desperately, when they stand to "lose everything" if defeated.

The fact of the matter is that no one in Japan just plain wanted to fight to the bitter end, without consideration of any conditions. And they were incapable of mounting any meaningful defense offshore anyway; if it came down to it, we could have simply blockaded them and deprived them of all outside resources if we were so worried about really losing up to a million men. The peace-wing in the government, along with the general population, would have overridden whatever hawks were left in the military in pretty short-order, once blockade-induced privations really kicked in. The evidence is overwhelming that our own military leaders never bought-into that figure of a million casualties, it was purely for public consumption as a justification for dropping the atomic bombs.