Explanation: In WW2, Japanese troops commonly performed last-chance 'banzai' charges, wherein they would attempt (especially if low on ammunition and with support not available) to overwhelm enemy positions with a sudden attack with bayonets and swords. Against Allied troops, especially American troops, who were rarely low on ammunition for their semiautomatic rifles, machineguns, and artillery, it was generally not effective, though often traumatizing for the survivors on both sides. The intention was not so much efficacy, however, as an 'honorable' suicide, the classical metaphor being used that it is better to be a shattered jewel than an intact clay tile - better to die gloriously than live ignominiously.
... this is not actually a long-standing Japanese tradition, despite efforts of the Imperial Japanese government to make it seem so. While suicide, especially seppuku (ritual self-disembowelment) has a long history in Japanese history, seppuku is traditionally performed as a display of loyalty or to send a message (ie "I would rather die than betray my lord, despite your doubts"), to 'redeem' a dishonorable act, or an alternative to execution.
While systems of prisoner exchange and ransom were less 'refined' and 'expected' than in European warfare, Japanese soldiery, nobility and commoners alike, have a long history of capturing and being captured in traditional Japanese warfare, as in most pre-modern forms of warfare; only the highest ranking commanders would regularly commit suicide rather than be captured - and that often because what they could expect in internecine Japanese warfare was torture and execution anyway, as in such civil strife the attitude is generally "The decisionmakers must be made an example of and/or cannot be trusted going forward".
Even then, high-ranking noble commanders often made negotiated surrenders with terms when they could - suicide was to evade being at the mercy of an enemy one was pretty sure had none - or when one's entire cause was well and truly fucked, and neither family nor lord could be expected to ransom you from captivity or slavery.
The actual change came during the Russo-Japanese War - in 1904-1905. Japan, seeking a reason for its stunning victory over a nominally materially superior country, opted to believe in its own 'bushido' as overcoming the spiritless and duty-bound Westerners of Russia. This was in part a means of regaining pride after nearly half-a-century of Westernizing reforms (at one point the Japanese government seriously considered mandatory miscegenation with white folk and making English the national language) in order to stave off destruction by colonialist powers. THIS was something JAPANESE that was SUPERIOR to the West, and Japan no longer had to imitate the Europeans just to make it by, at long last!
Rather than giving themselves a pat on the back for their national spirit of ganbatte ('give it one's all') and moving on with their lives, instead, the Imperial Japanese apparatus chose to lean into this whole bushido mythology, hard. And since much of samurai writing comes from the long period of peace of the Edo Period, wherein samurai were a warrior-class without any (major) wars to fight, and so obsessed about the notion of a chance of an HONORABLE DEATH, something which was actually hard to come by...
... well, the result was neither pretty nor particularly traditional with regards to Japanese methods of warfare. In the Russo-Japanese War, the ratio of dead-to-wounded-to-captured was normal for modern warfare - "1-1-1" is the 'traditional' ratio of the period, though that's only a very, very rough estimation of what one could usually expect. By the Second Sino-Japanese War and WW2, the push of the Bushido myth resulted in a ratio closer to 1-1-1000. In addition, civilians were encouraged (or 'encouraged') to commit suicide as well. Rather than increasing the efficacy of the Japanese military, it resulted in a fuckton of unnecessary deaths, and a paucity of prisoner exchange which could have alleviated some of Japan's manpower issues as the war went on (though, admittedly, Japan was fucked from pretty much the start - Admiral Yamamoto did not fear 'waking the sleeping giant' for nothing).
tl;dr; Fascism is a death cult in every society, and even its appeals to 'tradition' are hollow and self-serving.