Whats the name of Japanese belief to fight to the death called?

Answer 1

Bushido or way of the warrior is the code of frugality, loyalty, the art of war and "Honor Unto Death".

... the warrior code of Bushido may have been perverted by the Japanese warriors of WW2 into the resulting bloodbaths that took place all through the period of Japanese expansionism from 1931 to the ending of WW2 in nuclear Holocaust in August, 1945. Especially egregious examples include the infamous Rape of Nanking in 1937 and the Bataan Death March in 1942. The thinking ran that the Japanese soldier, himself fully willing to die rather than surrender to an enemy, considered that any enemy who was willing to surrender rather than die was a coward, or worse than a coward. Thus if an enemy surrendered to the Japanese rather than die fighting or committing suicide, then that enemy was beneath Japanese contempt and could be brutalized, tortured and murdered in the most imaginative ways possible. This has been cited as a reason (not an excuse) for the Bataan Death March after the Fall of Corregidor in 1942, during which possibly as many as 10,000 American and Filipino prisoners may have died or been murdered before reaching a prison camp. It's been suggested that the Japanese did not respect these prisoners because the Japanese themselves would never have surrendered. After 1942 they got their chance to demonstrate this repeatedly.

Once the Americans turned the corner in the Pacific with the victory at Midway in June 1942, the Japanese proved their suicidal mettle again and again. They never seemed to reason out that living to fight another day might have more merit than dying valorously. As the Americans invaded island after island held by the Japanese, the already small number of Japanese prisoners got smaller and smaller, until by the time of Iwo Jima and Okinawa in 1945, there essentially were no prisoners. Entire garrisons either died in battle or by suicide, taking with them as many Americans as they could. On Okinawa, the Japanese military even managed to talk the Okinawan civilians into committing mass suicide by telling them that the Americans would cook and eat them. The penultimate example of this perversion of Bushido was the Kamikaze, a suicide pilot on a one way trip to sink an American battleship. Except that the record shows that mostly the Kamikaze ended up simply being shot down, and the ones that got through mostly sank destroyers and oilers. Close to 4000 Japanese as young as 17 lost their lives in this manic effort which some sources suggest cost the Allies a total of some 80 ships, none bigger than a destroyer.

The Americans to this day have never been quite able to "get inside the head" of the suicidal Japanese, any more than we can "get inside the head" of the suicidal Islamic militants who are modern day Kamikaze. There is simply a cultural gulf which we can probably never bridge. But the bigger problem is the same one that we faced in 1944-45: how do you stop someone from killing you whose own life means nothing to him?