Why did Japan repeatedly underestimate the resolve and willingness to fight of the US and assumed the US wanted a compromise for most of World War 2 despite all evidence and behavior that indicated the exact opposite?

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A friend of mine related this story to me.

He’d worked for IBM a few decades after the war. Japan had surrendered, and America held the keys to her fate. His work took him to Japan and IBM apparently was a significant cause of the post-war boom in Japan. Some high-up Japanese execs at one point took a trip to America and my friend was to accompany them. They had decided, in their infinite wisdom, to drive from LA, where their plane landed, to Chicago, instead of taking a connecting flight.

They’d vastly underestimated how long of a drive that wound up being. They had no idea of the sheer scale of the United States of America. They literally thought driving across our country would have been like driving across theirs. Halfway through, they related to my friend, “If we know your country was this big, we’d never have started the war.

It wasn’t the resolve and willingness of the Americans that would have or should have scared them. It was the size, resources, and distance.