Originally Posted by CYDdharta

I’ll take it up with you, since htperr6565 doesn’t actually have a position, other than US strategy was wrong.

Japanese offensive capabilities need to be assessed by the forces they’re fighting. Even at the start of the war, they didn’t have the ability to win against the US, and most of them, the upper echelons of the admiralty included, were well aware of it. Their hope was to sign a treaty with the US to keep us out of their sphere of influence.

At the start of 1945, the Japanese had lost a significant amount of their capabilities, but a significant amount remained. The US still had the only force that could have opposed the Imperial Japanese Navy. They were a formidable force compared to any navy in the world. If we hadn’t pressed the attack, if we hadn’t continued the bombing campaign, if we’d pulled our forces back to a defensive position where we couldn’t easily have been attacked by warships or kamikazes, which is what I understand htperr6565’s ambiguous position to be, then IMO the Japanese certainly retained the capability to rebuild and rearm.