[pessimizer]

> Japan was going to fight to the last man/woman/child.

This is not history, this is a hypothetical.

> They were going to have seniors and children fight with sticks.

I suspect this would have been ineffective.

[misiti3780]

The Japanese were not known for surrendering. There were mass suicides because they refused to be taken alive:

https://www.atomicheritage.org/history/japanese-mass-suicide...

[TedDoesntTalk]

It's not ineffective in all situations. A single soldier, isolated from his group, fighting 10 seniors or children simultaneously, is not going to do well. Plenty of people are killed in the Middle-East from rock throwing.

[jp57]

It's not an implausible hypothesis that an invasion of Japan would have been a larger, and proportionally bloodier, version of the takings of Iwo Jima and Okinawa, two very bloody battles.

[Matticus_Rex]

Right, but at no point were those the only options (even according to key military figures).

[kragen]

The firebombs the Japanese flew across the Pacific, setting fires in the Pacific Northwest of the US, were largely built by children.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fu-Go_balloon_bomb