> My impression is a lot of soldiers and contemporaneous sources said Japanese fought to the death, engaged in suicidal 'banzai charges', killed themselves rather than surrender, and that those few who did surrender thought it was shameful

That is the propaganda/"history" that I am talking about. If you look at previous battles/wars, the japanese soldiers did surrender. The japanese soldiers did surrender in the beginning of the pacific war to the allies and they were brutally slaughtered, tortured and mutilated. It was part of the racist "no prisoner" policy by the extremely racist allied soldiers. That's why the japanese stopped surrendering.

The myth of the "unsurrendering" japanese was created after ww2 by "historians" to justify the absolutely absurd casualty rates that the japanese endured. Many of these battles in the pacific had deaths rates of 100%. That's unheard of in wars, unless one side was completely genocidal. Meaning there were 0 wounded 0 japanese POWs. What this means is that the allied soldiers simply massacred the japanese soldiers and went around killing wounded japanese soldiers. We know this happened because we have video footage of allied soldiers killing wounded japanese soldiers.

> and had been taught to expect mistreatment from Americans similar to what Japan dished out on e.g. the Bataan Death March.

The Bataan March was "myth". Hundreds of thousands of japanese POWs were tortured and mutilated and massacred by american soldiers. Maybe 100 americans soldiers were killed in the bataan march. Maybe. The propagandist myth of the bataan march certainly influenced the savage behavior of allied soldiers, but the allied soldiers in the pacific were from some of the most savage and racist societies on earth. We pretend that nazi germany and imperial japan were "racist", but we were just as racist as they were and much of axis racial ideology was copied from US/British racial ideology.

> But if your opponent is willing to surrender, it's generally a better tactic to let them surrender, than to have a no-prisoners policy that means their only hope for survival is to defeat you.

Right. Unfortunately, racist hatred wouldn't allow the allied soldiers to let the japanese surrender. That's why the japanese soldiers fought so hard. That's why the kamikazes only came into existence against the allied soldiers. The japanese never exhibited that behavior against the russians, chinese, etc.

> Not saying there was no racism, no brutality, no war crimes from the American side, but would need to see more evidence that the relative lack of prisoners was 100% due to American war criminality vs. how Japanese fought.

"American soldiers in the Pacific often deliberately killed Japanese soldiers who had surrendered."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allied_war_crimes_during_World...

"But the Japanese wasn't dead. He had been wounded severely in the back and couldn't move his arms; otherwise he would have resisted to his last breath... "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_mutilation_of_Japanes...

"In 1984, Japanese soldiers' remains were repatriated from the Mariana Islands. Roughly 60 percent were missing their skulls."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariana_and_Palau_Islands_camp...

If you do the math, pretty much all of the japanese on these islands were killed ( 70K+ ) and tens of thousands of these soldiers were tortured, decapitated and had their heads boiled for war trophies.

In ww2, you can objectively say that pure evil won and that pure evil lost. We love to pretend that the nazis were evil or the japanese were evil, but the most evil societies on earth was britain and the US and had been the most evil for nearly 150 years before ww2. We love to ignore the historical fact that Nazi Germany modeled their ideology after the racist ideology pioneered by britain and the US.