It's a classic example of, "do the means justify the ends?" - that's what you were asking. It's a slippery slope from "make a cute story on changing container storage policy" to something more nefarious. So think: how many times have you've been manipulated like this? Are you OK with it? Where do you draw the line?

Sure, and how many more weeks would they have remained ready to surrender, but never had done it? We don't know. We know they were beat in all but the surrender, but we also know countries through out history have fought on long after their loss was obvious. Japan has some "interesting" internal politics going on, even if they had formally surrendered it isn't clear if the military would stop fighting (Army and Navy needs to be considered separately).