Sarah Paine Episode 2: Why Japan Lost (Lecture & Interview)

Before I get going, I've got to make a disclaimer. What I'm saying are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent the U.S. government, the U.S. Navy Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, let alone where I work, the Naval War College. You got it? This is just me here, nobody else. All right. Americans have a penchant for what I call half court tennis, which is they like to analyze international affairs and wars.

by focusing on Team America, what Americans did or didn't do, and then that explains causation in the world. And Americans, on the other hand, their beloved sport, I believe, is football. And those people who love football, many Americans, my understanding of it, I'm just someone who reads books, I don't follow football, but now that's just qualifying, I suppose. But anyhow, Americans who follow football, they study...

Both sides, right? They look at their home team, but then they also look at not just one opposing team, but many down to the individual player. And they would no more follow the football game by looking at one half of the football field. And yet Americans, when we do foreign policy, that's often what we do. And it gets us into all kinds of trouble. For instance, in the Iraq War, Americans thought that the Republican Guard was going to be really tough.

And it turns out it wasn't so tough. But then there was this post-conventional phase insurgency that went on and on and on that surprised Americans. Well, the problem isn't actually a new one. In World War II, Americans were terribly surprised by the thing that Japanese did, starting with Pearl Harbor, right? That was a surprise. But also it was the entire way the Japanese fought the war, the way they fought to the last man, the suicides, the brutality, not only...

to the POWs, civilians, but into their own wounded. And the question is, is there any way to anticipate in advance how other people are going to behave? Is there any way to get a sense of the other sides of the tennis court net? Now, here are the two gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu for Asia, and the other one, Clausewitz, is the big guru of warfare in the West. And both of them would say,

to understand the other side, you've got to make a net assessment. What's that? You would look at political, military, geographic, economic factors, the strengths and weaknesses of all sides to get a sense of things. And today, I'm going to make a case for culture. You need to look at that as well. And it's often said that mirror imaging is not what you're supposed to do. What's mirror imaging?

We get into a situation and then I decide what I think you're going to do based on what I would do. I project me and mirror image on you. And that doesn't work so well.

Okay, if I'm not supposed to generalize on the basis of my experience, what am I supposed to do instead? And I'm going to get at this problem today, how you analyze the other side of the tennis court net by looking at Japanese behavior in the 30s and 40s. But the method of analysis I'm using, you could apply to anyone you want. You want to think about Russians today or whatever, you can apply it that way. So culture, it's important.

But it's as amorphous as it is important. For instance, if I'm going to try to figure out the defining characteristics of another culture, it would be difficult to figure out what the list is of all the different things I would need to look at. And even if I could come up with that list, still, how would I figure out how that would work in something like warfare? Hard to know. But the difficulty of the problem doesn't make it go away.

And so we're going to look at it today. And we're going to look at Japanese theorists and belief systems. And that if you believe these things, how this influences your...

your practice. Tojo Hideki said on December 1, 1941, that our country stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion. He got that right. And he's at an imperial conference where he is confirming with Hirohito that Pearl Harbor is going to be a go. But he felt that Japan really needed to do something rather than being ground down, being passive. And here is Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku.

who was the man who came up with the operational plan for Pearl Harbor. He thought it had really long odds of being successful. General Tojo gave it a 50-50 chance. Admiral Yamamoto wasn't even sure that it was that good. But he felt it was the best possible plan for Japan to get out of its predicament. Now, from a Western point of view, this makes no sense.

You're talking about getting the United States potentially into a war with Japan that's already overextended in China. Who does this? Either you need to ratchet back the policy objective and or you need to downgrade your strategy to something a little more costly or risky. And I suppose we can do is go, oh, they're stupid. OK. I guess if I call you stupid, that makes me so smart because I can denigrate you. Explains nothing.

So rather than do that, they're very intelligent men. And why are they doing these? Why do they consider their actions rational and rational in what context? So this is what I'm going to be up to. And I can start with a little story to illustrate my point. In the summer of 1943, this is after the battles of the Solomons.

New Guinea, Guadalcanal, they're all over with. The Imperial Japanese Army had a war college. An instructor comes into class one day and he says, from now on, the curriculum's changed. The main emphasis is going to be countering U.S. tactics instead of what they had been teaching was Soviet tactics and will become the A course. If anyone can teach this, go ahead, because I don't know a damn thing about it. Talk about being unprepared for seminar. And then think about it.

Where are the Japanese actually fighting most of the time? What is the country that most matters to them at the end of the day? It would be China. And that's not what their war colleges are studying. Something's up here. Now, they're clearly making a really bad net assessment about the United States. Okay.

This country also is known for lousy net assessments. I don't believe ours about Vietnam was particularly good either. And that's one part of the problem. So here's my game plan for this evening. I'm first going to talk about traditional Japanese theorists. And then it's going to be talking about Japanese practice. If you have this belief system, how explanatory is it for practice? This is my...

game plan right now. So the Japanese don't have just the one book like Sunza's The Art of War or Clausewitz's On War. What they have is Bushido, Code of the Samurai. It's a whole literature. And it was written in the Tokugawa period, which quite ironically was a period known for peace, not warfare. Never mind. And what's interesting about this literature from a Western perspective, it's really not about military strategy. It's about deportment.

how a samurai should conduct himself. And this reflects Japanese values and what the things that they emphasize. And so I'm going to go through it with you. Here's the game plan on the theorist. First, I'm going to talk about the philosophical origins of Bushido, then the values that underpin it, and then the operational preferences that grow out of it. That's the game plan for the first half.

And I'm going to use as my cultural bridge this man, Nitome Inazo, who wrote a book much later in 1900, Bushido's Soul of Japan. Why am I doing this? He provides a concise definition of Bushido. And you can see he's an important figure in Japan. Not everybody gets their mug on the 5,000 yen note. So he's an important figure in Japan. He had spent 18 years abroad and he had...

He received higher education in Japan and a variety of Western institutions. He married, believe it or not, I don't make up these things, a Philadelphia Quaker, and he converted to Christianity. And he spent his life trying to serve as a cultural bridge, and that's how I'm going to use him today. And what he said is, unlike in the West, where notions of morality come from religion, in Japan they come from Bushido. And what is it?

It's a chivalrous code of honor for the warrior class, these precepts of knighthood. There are three pillars of Bushigo, according to Nitobe. They're Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism. From Buddhism, it's where you see Japanese fatalism, the origin of it. And here you have Nitobe saying, it's this calm, trust, and fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, a friendliness.

And it strikes Westerners reading this Bushido literature as a preoccupation with death. For instance, Clausewitz will talk about violence and warfare, but he's not interested in what constitutes an honorable death, let alone choreographing a soldier's final moments, different culture. And from Buddhism, there are...

Four noble truths of Buddhism. One is that existence is suffering, pessimistic view of this life. Second, it's caused by craving and attachment. So don't cling to this life or the things in it. It's all ephemeral. It's like a cherry blossom, blooms for a day, and then it's gone. But there's a...

a good ending to it all, which is nirvana. And how do you get there? The fourth noble truth is through forms of right conduct. So the emphasis isn't on what you achieve in your life. It's how you lead it. It's this focus on deportment. It's different from the West. Second pillar is Shinto, this extreme patronism, reverence for the emperor. And the third pillar is Confucianism, these imported ideas from China.

of how it's organizing a society and regulating it through interlocking social obligations, hierarchical, and through ritual and etiquette. So in the West, there's much talk about equality, right? In the West, in the East, it's duty. It's what you owe other people. In the East, there is no such thing as social in Japan of equality. Even twins have a birth order. And it's not about freedom either. It's about what you owe others.

If you think that these value systems seems really different, yeah, no kidding. It has nothing to do with the Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian West. Completely different value system. And so, Alice, welcome to Wonderland. Buckle up. We're off for a ride. And I'm going to start. Here's my first piece of the Tokugawa literature. Yamamoto Tsunetomo's The Hagakure that he wrote in the early 18th century. It translates variously as hidden leaves, hidden by the leaves. And in it...

He is describing, I'm going to read you some short passages from it all. What was he? He was a retainer for a daimyo, a feudal lord in Japan. He hadn't actually done any fighting, even though he's writing all about it. So if you don't do, what do you do? You publish. And I will tell you what the man had to say. So here we go. One of the first things is this preoccupation with death.

Yamamoto, the way of the samurai is imagining the most sightly way of dying. Merit lies more in dying for one's master than in striking down the enemy. The way of the samurai is found in death. It is not necessary to gain one's aim, but if you live on without achieving it, it's cowardice. However, if you don't gain your aim and die, that's okay.

This is really different from Clausewitz, where it's all about achieving the policy objective. It's not about how the soldier's leading his life. And here you can see the consequences of this, right? If you're focusing on...

No fears of death. And if you can't succeed, living on is a disaster. Think of the bonsai charges when Japanese remnants would go headlong into oncoming machine gun fire, knowing full well what was going to happen. This is not the way other armies have behaved. Different value system.

All right. In addition to at death, this Bushido literature is emphasis on honor. Back to Yamamoto. The way of avoiding shame is different. It's simply death. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Think of General Tojo and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku.

And if you suffer a catastrophic defeat, here's the solution. In the event of a mortifying failure, you're going to wind up committing suicide. Because the alternative, if you live on in shame, you're bringing everyone you're associated with.

So how does the suicide work? It's seppuku or harakiri. The samurai who's doing it kneels down with short sword. He plunges it into his belly, tries to do a full revolution. And then his second, usually a close associate, takes the long sword. If he does it right, one sweep, head in lap, upright corpse, blood everywhere.

Diplomats in the 19th century, Western diplomats, were told to witness this. If a samurai had murdered a Westerner, okay, the diplomats had to come in and watch the proceedings. They just about lost their lunch. So the Japanese think that they are showing...

And what the Westerners think they're seeing aren't aligning. And I'm going to use Nitobe to be the cultural bridge. He said, in our minds, this mode of death is associated with the instances of noblest deeds and most touching pathos. So this vilest form of death assumes a sublimity and becomes a symbol of new life. It's a way to escape from disgrace. And in Japanese literature, there is the...

tragic hero who is pursuing noble but unattainable aims, and rather than making disagreeable compromises, goes down in flames.

This is what seppuku is all about. And Nitobe is saying, look, death involving a question of honor was accepted in Bushido as a key solution to many complex problems. And you can think in World War II, yeah, it was. Complex problems like battle plans not working out and a war that was truly not working out. And you could see the suicide going on, both individual and group.

And I remember going in the caves in Okinawa and understanding how that works because you could see a lot of the damage. If your commanding officer decides to commit suicide and tosses a grenade in the right direction, the entire room goes with him. All right. So in addition to death and suicide and honor, we've got loyalty. It's another key value. And back to Yamamoto. Being a good retainer is nothing other than being a supporter of one's lord.

A man is a good retainer to the extent that he earnestly places importance in his master. Having only wisdom and talent is the lowest tier of usefulness. So much for Silicon Valley. For a warrior, there is nothing other than thinking of his master. And so back in the day, it's thinking of your feudal lord. In more recent times, it's prioritizing your company over family. In China, it's the reverse.

priority. It's family over company. And it's different cultures, different priorities. All right. There are strategic implications. If this is your value system, this is what arises from it. First of all, you're looking at damage limitation, damage control, not in terms of the physical cost of losing lives, having property blown up, but in terms of honor. Also, there's an equation.

A tendency to equate operational with strategic success. Operational success is, I win this battle here and now. Strategic success is, okay, we're in a war for some reason.

What is the reason you're in the war? Japan's reasons for being in China had to do with containing communist expansion and also stabilizing the place so they could make money out of business. So that's your strategic objective. It's not your operational one. But the Japanese samurai are equating the two, saying, if I take this hill, somehow it's automatically going to deliver the strategic objective. And in fact, they won most of the battles in China, but they lost that war.

Also, there's this focus on what constitutes an honorable death. The Western focus of literature is all about preparing the field of battle in advance for success, whereas this literature is focusing on what to do after disaster. So that, here are some more implications. Once the Japanese are failing in battle, operational failure, they are on death ground. What does that mean? It means that...

Death ground means the only way you survive is if you fight harder. This is what's going on in Ukraine right now, is that when you decide you're going to annihilate an entire culture, you put people on death ground, and then they have very few choices on what they do next. That one is...

means for the Japanese to feel that they're on death ground when they're failing means they're not going to give up. They're going to fight brutally against overwhelming odds. So in the West, when we like to mirror image, we want to think of the rational actor with some kind of...

mathematically based cost benefit of when you should give up, when the costs are so high above whatever your value of the object is, you ought to call it quits. Well, that kind of calculation does not translate well across the divides between civilizations. I've got a nice picture here of Lieutenant Onoda, who had been hanging out in Philippine jungles for, what, 30 years after the end of the war, carrying on the war in isolation.

I don't believe this is how most other armies work or soldiers in them. Different culture, different things you do with your life. And here is Sir William Slim Field Marshal, British 14th Army that he led in Burma, commenting on his experiences. If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495, last five committed suicide before we could take the place. And it was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made the Japanese so formidable.

Okay, this brings me to another value that's emphasized in Bushido, willpower, back to Yamamoto. There is nothing that cannot be done. The way of the samurais and desperateness simply become insane and desperate, and it'll somehow work out for you. One can accomplish any feat. Think of Pearl Harbor. And this emphasis on willpower and just trying harder.

It denigrates strategy. And here you see a picture of the supreme example of honor and loyalty and willpower in the kamikaze pilots. But if this is what you're doing, you're denigrating strategy. And here Yamamoto is me talking about tactics, but it has operational and strategic implications. He says, learning such things as military tactics is useless. The way of the samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong.

If one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts. So the idea is if you think about these things in peacetime, you'll start hesitating in wartime. It won't work out for you if you do this. During times of peace, when listening to the stories of battle, we should never say, in facing such a situation, what would a person do? Well, so much for my job at the Naval War College. So much for the case studies.

No matter what the circumstances might be, once you be of the mind to win, once you be holding the first spear to strike. So here's the implications, if you believe this. What you're doing, it's a very unanalytical way to approach wars. It's all about whatever it is you want, you just steal the will and go for it, and somehow you'll get it if you want. There's a lack of grand strategy. What's grand strategy?

It's integrating all the instruments of national power, not just the army or the army and the navy, which is what the Japanese are trying to do, but all instruments of national power in pursuit of if the bigger aim is to stabilize China and keep the communists out, there ought to be some diplomacy and some other things going on. But that's not what's happening. In the samurai literature, it's a focus on the military instrument exclusively.

I'll give you an example of how this works out. Before the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy invaded French Indochina, neither one of them did a little study saying, hey, if we do that, let's check the other side of the tennis court net and see what other people, how they might react. They just steal the will and march right in. Okay, that triggered the U.S. 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Operational success, strategic mess.

So it is this focusing on just the operational level is the basis for this ill-founded optimism with which the Japanese just took territory after territory without saying, hey, what about the cost of actually occupying these places? Oh, we're going for these places for resources. So maybe we ought to check it out with the finance ministry and others about how we're ever going to get these resources back home. None of that's going on.

It's a disaster for them. Okay. I'm going to talk about a couple of secondary theorists. One of them is Taito Shigesuke, who is a contemporary of Yamamoto, because he provides a really concise definition of the operative values of samurai culture. Only three things are considered essential, loyalty, duty, and valor. So steadfastly loyal.

in battle as to disregard his own life. What he's actually talking about is group loyalty. In the West, the basic unit composing society is the individual. Well, in the East, it's the group. And group interests take primacy over individual interests. For the Japanese society is divided by in-groups and out-groups. The most basic in-group, biggest overarching one, is the Japanese people vis-a-vis everybody else. But within Japan, everybody comes from a different province, a different locality.

They go to different educational institutes. They graduate from different kindergarten classes, I kid you not, and college classes. If they work for different companies or they're in the military, they're in different branches, and you also have family loyalties. And you owe each of these nested and overlapping groups different obligations.

And sometimes these obligations conflict, and if the conflict's really awful, that's another reason for committing suicide. And then if you look at the Japanese language, the moment a person opens their mouth to speak to another Japanese, you can immediately listen to the grammatical forms that are being used, the specific word choices, to know what's the degree of hierarchy, like where do they sit in this unequal hierarchy, and whether it's in-group, out-group.

Everybody feels or most people feel some level of group loyalty. This is human. But in Japan, it's the levels of membership are much more finely calibrated and they're reemphasized by these social, cultural and linguistic reasons. So this group membership and stove piping ultimately is going to be a much stronger feature of Japanese culture than some other places. All right.

Last theorist is Miyamoto Musashi, who, unlike the other two, actually did a little fighting. He was born a little earlier, and he was a master's samurai who taught people martial arts. And from him, you get a sense of some of the operational preferences deriving from these values. And I'm going to go through all of these.

in turn. First is risk and tolerance, because remember at the beginning I started with the two flag officers saying, well, we're going to do this war in the Pacific when it's unlikely we're going to succeed, but we're going to do it anyway. And here is Miyamoto. Furthermore, to fight even five or ten people single-handedly in duels, that's what my military science is all about. So what's the difference between the logic of one person beating up ten people and a thousand people beating...

10,000 logistics, my friend, but never mind. And then another thing that he emphasizes, in addition, don't expect long odds to deter the Japanese back in the day. Surprise is another one. Think about... a situation that has stalemated and is going nowhere, which is what the China theater was for the Japanese, and how do you get out of it? And the answer that Miyamoto has is not come up with a new policy objective, but come up with a tactic that'll somehow put your enemy off balance and then...

Get what you want that way. And the way the Japanese did this was often by opening a new theater in a war, by surprising people by the new places that you were going to start engaging in military operations. And here's how it worked. China had been a failed state since 1911.

And it had had an escalating series of warlords fighting each other in this multilateral civil war. And the Japanese were appalled, particularly after the United States passed the Holy Smoot Tariff of 1930 that cut them off from international trade. So then they're thinking, now what? Well, we're going to need an empire big enough to survive since no one's going to trade with us. And so they invade all of Manchuria in 1931. They have it pretty much stabilized by 1933.

So, okay, that was surprise number one. But the rest of China is a mess. And the Japanese, it's coalescing into a bilateral communist nationalist, nationalists under Chiang Kai-shek, communists under Mao Zedong fight with increasing dosages of Soviet aid. And the Japanese are appalled with all this.

And so it's time to surprise everybody again in 1937. And that's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze River. And it works. They take a lot of territory really fast, but then they get to the end of the railway system. Oh, and by the way, China's not pacified. It's just churning. And so now Japan is even more overextended. As a result of doing that, Russian aid goes up and then you're going to get U.S. aid in there. So the problem's actually getting worse.

Okay, time for another surprise, really big one. On that infamous day in December 41, it wasn't just Pearl Harbor, that's Team America focusing only on Team America. The Japanese attacked all across the Pacific that day.

Okay, now what? China had never been able to threaten the Japanese home islands. Well, the United States, here the United States was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the map. Well, after Pearl Harbor, they sure could. And suddenly the United States isn't.

isolationist anymore and they're coming to get the Japanese. So you can see the samurai values in operation here. Just try harder, more dosages of willpower. Eventually you'll win or you'll die trying. Okay. Another...

operational preference that you can see, which is as part of the surprise or preemptive attacks. And that's just how Japan began all of its wars. The first Sino-Japanese War and the second Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War and the Pacific War. This is how all of them begin. And finally, Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy willpower. And in this case, you've already won conventionally.

But they're waging an insurgency against you. I'm modernizing the terminology. And the idea is you want a psychological victory. You want them just to quit. And somehow you're going to break their will to resist. And I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing in the rape of Nanjing and other atrocities, that they were going to do these horrifying things and that would break the will of the other side.

OK, be careful whom you put on death ground. The Japanese were repeating a mistake done by the Nazis, which is if you're dealing with even a failing state, which Russia was, Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the 30s and then he inflicted a famine on Ukraine. But when the Nazis came in and they...

we're going to wipe out not only the Russian government, but also the Russian people, you will superglue people, government, and military, and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary. And this is what Nazi brutality does to Russians, what Japanese brutality does to Chinese, and what Russian brutality today is doing to Ukraine. Don't do it. Bad strategy. All right.

There are strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis on the offensive, preemption. It's emphasis on military action to solve all your problems. And you have a fixed policy objective, whatever it is. And if you're in a given battle, you have to win that battle. It's not, oh, I have an overarching objective. It's too costly here. I'm going to call off this battle and I'm going to try again somewhere else. Uh-uh. The moment you're...

Plan is failed. You're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches of sequels and there'll be unexpected events that take place you'll adapt to. None of that. You're a failure. Funny that stuff happens to you. So there's a real insensitivity to risk. And there's no grand strategy. But if you believe these things, you will be lethal in warfare. You're not going to give up easily at all.

So you look at the Japanese at the end of the war and go, why don't they quit a lot earlier? Well, it's because in a way they're already dead men. They suffered social death. And so they're going to keep on until the very, very end of all of this. And it's a great sin of omission, this absence of grand strategy. The Japanese aren't the only ones to have done this, the belligerents on all sides in World War I.

were thinking all in terms of using the military instrument, got themselves into trouble. So if you look at what the Japanese are doing, they had some vague ambitions and wanted to take advantage of opportunities, but there's no definition of what win in this war is. How much territory should Japan take and then call it a day and say, done, or it's been successful here. Rather, their territorial acquisitions are really a function of what they were able to take and what...

an anger they did take, but also a function of strategic failure. No matter what they did, it never pacified the China theater. Problem for them. Okay. Alice, that was Wonderland. Now we're going to get to how it works, how other people live, of if you believe these things, how does it help explain what actually happened in World War II? And I'm going to start with two sins of omission, the Japanese neglect of...

paying more careful consideration to logistics. And then another sin of omission is a neglect of protecting their sea lines of communication. And then I'm going to, the last two are about these in-group, out-group divisions and the problems it caused for within each military service, intraservice rivalries, and then between the two services, the Navy and the Army in the war that caused them such difficulties. Okay. The Japanese, if you...

Started at the beginning of the war. Japan never produced more than one one-thirteenth U.S. steel and coal production. It never did more than 10% of what U.S. munitions productions were. I believe if you do the math and take all the battleships and divide people into...

everything, that each U.S. soldier had four tons of equipment per, whereas each Japanese soldier had about two pounds of equipment. Japanese main weapons in this war were the grenade and the bayonet. Their artillery and machine guns were very obsolete, what they had going into the Pacific War. And then you flip it around, look at the United States. The United States had about...

18 men in supply, or men and women, but mostly men, in supply services supporting each rifleman at the front. Other militaries in this period had about an 8 to 1 ratio. Japan had about a 1 to 1. So Japan's already suffering food shortages before Pearl Harbor. And then when you get to the winter of 1942-43, the Japanese are having critical shortages of oil, so they no longer can deploy the fleet at will.

That means you forget about convoying anything because you just haven't got the oil to do it. And yet, when you get to 45, when they're predicting they're going to have absolutely zero aviation fuel and other fuel by the end of 45, you have the government saying, still, we're going to fight on for this honorable whatever it's going to be. These Bushido ideas of that you just persevere, loyalty, honor, duty, keep going.

All right. I'm going to be quoting this gentleman's diary, Admiral Ugaki Matome. He was the chief of the staff of the Combined Fleet until his plane and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's plane were shot down. U.S. code breaking was quite good. We figured out where they were and we killed Admiral Yamamoto. But this man survived. And by the time...

He wrote this entry. He was the head of an air fleet on the home islands sending kamikaze flights out because Japan simply lacked the ability to do too much else this late in the day. And here...

is his last diary entry written on August 15th, 1945. This is after two atomic bombs had been dropped and after the Russians had deployed into Manchuria. And he said, okay, there are various causes for today's tragedy. And I feel that my own responsibility is not light, but more fundamentally, it was due to the great differences of national resources between the two countries. Okay.

It's too late to come to that conclusion. U.S. production statistics had been on the books forever. But when Japanese read these numbers, they thought they were ludicrously high and discounted them as propaganda. And those who knew better, who'd done tours of duty in Britain or the United States, they weren't promoted because they were defeatists. I believe that Admiral Ugaki kept and maintained his diary.

is because he was an honorable samurai. He had believed in Bushido, the ability of material, of willpower, to more than compensate for inferior resources, but the war's outcome had proved him incorrect. And so as an honorable samurai, he paid with his life, and he kept his diary to nothing to be ashamed of. He'd done what he was going to do.

Here I have the last prime minister of Imperial Japan, Prince Higashikuni Narahiko, talking about his take on the war. He said, I think the basic cause of defeat was the loss of transport shipping. Okay.

By the end of the war, Japan was down to one-ninth of its transport shipping. It meant the empire was paralyzed. What's the point of taking all these territories if you can't get the resources back? The Navy had always focused on the mission by Alfred Thurmahan, who's from where I work back in the day. It was all about fleet-on-fleet engagements and things. But it turns out that...

The Japanese Navy hadn't focused on convoy duty. Mahan had called that a promising secondary operation. Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific, that U.S. submarine services paralyzed their sea lines of communication. Go submarines. So here's Admiral.

Ugaki Matome, who is talking about, he eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy of not having this fleet on fleet because they don't have, they've lost a lot of the fleet and then they don't have the fuel to run it. But by the time he's recommending a more defensive strategy, they don't have the fuel or the assets to do that either. Earlier in the war, here's his take before all that bad stuff has happened. It's too bad for the officers and men of the submarine service.

that they have not yet sunk any important men of war, only merchantmen, while his disdain for the target would cost him. And he noted later on, when he's trying to account for why the Battle of Guadalcanal is going so badly for Japan, he said,

of supply and transport to the front has not even been half fulfilled each time. It led those on the verge of death, i.e. the Army, to be extremely skeptical about the Navy and thinking that the Navy is just sacrificing the Army. Well, no kidding, that's what the Army thought. Because for an expeditionary force, you absolutely need the Navy to deliver you there, to maintain your supplies there. And they're thinking, the Army's thinking, you Navy are being irresponsible, not doing it.

any of these things. So there are tremendous inter-service rivalries between the Army and Navy in Japan. And it goes back to the pre-war budget wars where Japan's a resourced poor country and both services have what they consider absolutely essential things to be funded. Japan didn't have the money to fund both. And then when you get in war and you start expending these things, you need even more money. And so the...

The disagreements were brutal. But before I get there, the in-group, out-group differences that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between Army and Navy. They're within each service. So I'm going to start there. And to be fair, I'm going to provide one example for each service. I'll start with the Army. It was the Guangdong Army, or Japan's Army in Manchuria, that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in 31. It was not the...

home office back in Tokyo, but it's this branch that turns out kicks off a 15-year war. So these folks think that they know what's best for Japan and how best to defend the empire, and they're just off and running. Meanwhile, there are a series of coup attempts, some of them...

where Navy is part of it, more of them with the Army that's dealing with it, going back and forth. And at the very end, when Emperor Hirohito is capitulating, there was one last coup attempt, which a minute failed because the war might have terminated quite the way it did if it had succeeded. So the point is, if you've got coups running on, that is not called unified command. It's a mess. And the Navy wasn't any better.

I have a different sort of example here. During the war, the U.S. air service, people who were flying planes, they would alternate combat and training missions so that you would bring back someone who had survived and learned something from combat to tell new people the things to avoid, how not to get yourself killed, and some other things. Well, in Japan...

In groups, out groups. You sign up together, you train together, you fight together, and you die together. It doesn't mean the Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups. It's just culturally, it's not the natural thing that comes to mind. Moreover, and this apparently applies to the present, that in the U.S. military, they have what are called hot washes after different operations where you come back and you're very self-critical about all the things that went wrong.

to figure out how to do it better the next time. Well, there are cultural reasons why you would not want to do that in Japan. It's different. So if these in-group, out-group things are causing problems within services, it gets toxic between the services. And I've got four examples, and I'm going to start with organizational issues. So it's only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally get it together to have regular liaison meetings in Tokyo.

Great. Just in time to figure out how the capitulation is going to work. And then the Army wanted to unify the two high commands. The Navy wanted nothing to do with that one because they knew they'd just become the box lunch delivery service for the Army, didn't want to do that. So by 1945, they did unify their information department. Great. They could spew the same propaganda and maybe share Tokyo Rose on a good day. Who knows?

But there was no planning, even under the imminent threat of invasion, to how they're going to coordinate their assets to protect the home island. They aren't even coordinating their air assets. Disaster. And this disaster goes back way in time. They had a very far back in time. They had a very successful war against Russia that ends in 1905.

Afterwards, in 1906, immediately afterwards, the Army and Navy are allowed to have completely separate war plans. The Army plan is all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia. The Navy plan has a completely different set of enemies. It would be the United States and Britain for the big gambit. You're not going to use ships in Siberia. The big gambit for empire in the Pacific.

And each of these plans, A, they're secret from the other service, and B, each plan assumes the other service is going to do all kinds of important things for them. Okay, great. So I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise, normally you apply that to your enemies, not your sister service. But that's how it works in this setup. Now, the Army does come around to the Navy plan. Why? Because they get...

walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of Noman Han. The Russians just decimate them in 1939. So now the army says, OK, OK, maybe that southern advance thing wasn't such a bad idea. And so the Navy thinks this is great. And they do their...

Southern advance. They go zooming down. The Japanese mind over matter stuff seems to be going really well because in 1942, the Army takes more land or more dispersed theater than any country on the planet. The Navy hasn't lost a single ship. I mean, it's looking really good. Except there are a few little details here that are a problem.

What the Navy hadn't told the Army is that actually they weren't ready for this whole thing, that they needed this outer perimeter reinforced by airfields in order to make the thing work. And that wasn't complete. And the Army learned about this on August 17, 1942, because one of these airfields was being built in this tropical nightmare called Guadalcanal.

the United States knew about, even though the army didn't. And all of a sudden, the Navy is in deep, dark trouble and needs the army to help them out of Guadalcanal. So now think samurai. The Japanese 17th Army had been ordered to take Port Moresby in New Guinea. That's what they were up to. But with Guadalcanal, they are told, ah, you need to tack on Guadalcanal to that Port Moresby event. Okay, enter logistics. They're a thousand kilometers apart. So now the army...

is going to be lying to the Navy about how many people they've got at Guadalcanal because they're scared the Navy won't provide enough rations and things. The Navy doesn't provide enough rations. People starve anyway. And then the Navy that got the Army into this mess wants to call it off and move out, but the Army good samurais want to fight on, and they just expend all kinds of resources. And this thing has enormous strategic effects. Prior to Guadalcanal,

The Japanese army wanted to continue their strategy of chasing the nationalists out of China. Back in 1937, the Japanese had conquered Nanjing, which is the original nationalist capital. And the nationalists had fled up the Yangtze River to Chongqing beyond some gorges and some other things and beyond the rail network. And in 1943, the Japanese were planning to attack Chongqing. And then at that point, I think if you're a nationalist, you're fleeing into Burma.

And if that had happened, then the Japanese could have probably pulled hundreds of thousands of people out of the China theater and put them elsewhere, and that would have caused all kinds of problems.

Also, the Japanese had to call off their plans to invade Australia. So Guadalcanal has enormous strategic implications. So if you're focusing samurai on one battle, Guadalcanal, well, it has implications in places called China and Australia that are a long way off. OK, the United States also had inter-service rivalries, right, between our army and navy. And that's why you have two separate campaigns for Admiral Nimitz and General McCarthy.

Big egos, one campaign for each ego, and apparently that wasn't even big enough for MacArthur. But even so, I don't believe the inter-service rivalries in the United States were remotely on the scale that they were in Japan. I have one final example to prove that one. So, after Pearl Harbor...

that had been tremendously successful for Admiral Yamamoto, he wanted to do, the next thing was to attack Midway, because U.S. basing there. And the Army said, I don't want, we're not going to do this. And Yamamoto goes, I'm going to resign. And the Army, we don't care. I'll commit suicide. We'll buy popcorn. And here's what changes this. So after Pearl Harbor, Americans wanted to let the Japanese know that we were thinking about them.

And so this is where Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, the Doolittle Raids, named after him. In April 1942, it was a one-way trip off an aircraft carrier because they had so much fuel in order to get to Japan that the idea was they're going to go bomb Japan and then ditch in China, whoever survives. Very brave people who did this. And are they going to cause massive damage in Japan? Well, yeah, if you're directly underneath, you won't appreciate it.

In general, it causes minor damage, but it has a major unanticipated strategic benefit. Think samurai. The army all of a sudden is backing the navy that they're going to now do midway with them. And it's, right, don't think, retaliate, avenge your honor. The army was appalled that anyone had been able to bomb Japanese skies. So now they're all over it. Okay.

So how does Midway work out? Really poorly for the Japanese. They lose four aircraft carriers. They've only got 12. They've lost a third. Oops. And here we go, in-group, out-group. The Navy doesn't tell anyone for three or four months. Incredible. And a war. Right? So they're thinking about their little stovepipe, and they're ignoring Japanese interests when this is going on. Okay?

Different story. So they do get their operational end to the whole thing. It's called, this is the firebombing of Tokyo. The whole place went up in flames. In fact, it got so hot, the canals boiled. It's an operational solution. It's unconditional surrender after a protracted war of annihilation that destroys just about every single Japanese city, minus a couple that survived. What broke the stalemate?

And here's what happened. It's three really bad things that happened in four days. Talk about a concentration of really bad events from a Japanese point of view happening all at once. This is the psychological shattering that actually happens to the Japanese. First, the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

Two days later, the Russians pour 1.5 million people into Manchuria, the nightmare scenario of the Japanese army. And they know if this war protracts, the Russians are going to come down through Manchuria, down the Korean Peninsula, onto Hokkaido, and down the home islands. It'll yield a divided Japan if it goes on for a long time. And then...

You have the next day, the United States drops the second atomic bomb with a bluff. The idea being, we're going to keep doing this daily or every other day, except we don't have any more atomic bombs, and we cannot build them quickly for a long time. So that's big bluff. But the emperor...

then has had enough. And he breaks the deadlock in the cabinet, and the cabinet allows the deadlock to be broken the next day. And then he makes an unprecedented radio broadcast, never had that happen before, to his subjects telling them,

Game over. And then the next day, he sends three imperial princes to the Manchurian, Chinese, and Southern theaters, conveying his orders at game over. And from that moment on, his samurai obeyed him, and they absolutely cooperated with the occupation. There's no insurgency, no nothing going on after this. And at the end of the war, the United States came to understand the Japanese. At the beginning,

Totally misread the situation with the oil embargo that's meant to deter and state it precipitates the war that we didn't want. But at the end of the war, the United States realizes you're going to need some level of Japanese cooperation if you're going to occupy the place. And they're going to use Emperor Hirohito for this. Hirohito is scared to death that...

It's not so much that he'll be hanged, but that the United States will extinguish his dynasty, kill him and his son, and then it's over. And so he's willing to sign any piece of paper that MacArthur puts under his pen. And one of those is the Constitution of Japan that is going to change their civil and military institutions, demilitarize the place, and try to get a democracy going there. The Constitution was written in one week by MacArthur's staff. They're running around raiding.

bombed out libraries for examples of Western constitutions, and they cobble this thing together. And this is the unamended constitution of Japan still in power as in effect to this very day, MacArthur's gift to Japan. All right, I've been incredibly critical of the Japanese, but to sum up here...

Their cultural explanations for their neglect of grand strategy, inability to cut their losses, inability to coordinate, and the ferocity with which they fought. So if you look at their values, and they're explanatory of what may well happen when things get set off. But I've been really critical of Japan. I want to even out the story by ending on the United States a little bit. Because the United States played a good game.

or bad game of half-court tennis, and mirror-imaged at the beginning of this war. So when the Japanese go into Manchuria in 1931, we want them out. We don't ask, well, why are you doing this? And their answer would be, well, hey, you passed the Hawley-Smoot tariff. That means this...

We're trade dependent. Whom are we going to trade with? And once you did the tariff, everyone retaliated. So you've now shut down international trade. So we need an empire that's big enough to survive. So that's why we're in Manchuria. And by the way, there are way too many communists here. We got to get rid of those. And then in 1937, when they up the ante.

Going into the rest of China, we didn't inquire what's going on. And what the Japanese want to do is wall off communism. Don't want that. And then they want to stabilize China so that you can have some productive economic growth. And if you go, well, what were U.S. post-war objectives for China? Ooh, sounds remarkably familiar. Communists out, stabilize the place. Okay.

Well, how does the war affect all this? Well, actually, the warfare that went on wiped out the two barriers to communist expansion in Asia. What are the barriers? Well, one is Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists in China. The Japanese wipe him out. They don't totally defeat him, but they have so weakened him and so discredited him. But by the end of the World War II, he is really poorly positioned to win the Chinese Civil War, which he promptly loses.

And then what does the United States do? What's the other barrier to communism? Well, it's the Japanese. We wipe them out. So what do you get? A unified communist China, which makes really complicated wars in the Korean War and the Vietnam War. And the problem is the gift that keeps on giving. We're still dealing with this problem today. So.

Take a little word from Sun Tzu. Know your enemy or the other side. Know the person you're talking to. Don't play half-court tennis. It's a really dangerous game.

Try to analyze why, ask yourself, why is someone doing whatever they're doing? And just because you're trying to understand it doesn't mean you're condoning it. It's just trying to figure out the logic of the other person. It'll set you up for more informed choices. Before we move on to the interview, a quick word from our sponsors, Scale AI. The AI race is the Manhattan Project for the modern age. Whoever wins reshapes the balance of global power.

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Dwarkesh. All right, back to Sarah. I'm a little bit confused on some of the Bushido stuff and how it explains Japan's actions in the war. So look, this Zen Buddhism stuff, the cherry orchards that are blossoming and you must act with the generosity of a samurai, all this Bushido moral stuff. How does that square with...

the conduct of Japan during the war, the rape of Nanking, the killing of millions of Chinese, the treatment of prisoners of war, which rivaled the fatality rates of the Nazi extermination camps. It seems like there's a, where's the Buddhism there? Where's the, well, A, I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but you've got a lot of things conflated in there. If you're asking about,

Part of the brutality of the war is Japan's totally out of resources, and you're thinking it's going through a massive area of territory. They actually had no ability to take POWs, or if they took POWs, they'd have to halt the military operation, and then you've got to put these people somewhere, and so they just slaughtered them instead.

There were POWs or there were cases of hostile civilians who also got slaughtered because I don't know the because, but they had very limited numbers of people to deal with this. So on the one hand, you've got absolute desperation. I don't think any people behave well when they're desperate. The war had been going on for years by the time we get interested in it, right? It starts in 31. So you have desperate people.

There's another piece. I can just add little pieces. I can't explain a whole people that in the prison camps. So in Japan.

If I'm going to be, let's say you were Japanese, you and I are looking each other in the eye. That's how you do it in the West, show that you're paying attention. That's not how you do it in Japan. In Japan, if you're Japanese, I'm looking at your shoulder. It's rude to look people in the eye. It's just too intrusive. You're getting too much information probably from that person's face. So you can imagine a Westerner in a prison camp looks his guard in the eye and the eyes going.

The guard's going, oh, who is this arrogant person? You can imagine bad things are then going to be happening. These are guesses on what's going on. There are certain values that I've talked about. There's certain desperation that's going on. And then there's the dehumanization of what wartime's all about, right? Initially, conscripts go in of all armies having trouble killing people. And then they get...

better at it over time. This is a tragedy of human beings. I don't know if I answered your question. I don't know that I know the answer. Okay. So here's another thing that I want to clarify. Look, if you were trying to understand Britain's conduct in World War I, why they initiated it and why they conducted it in the way they did, and you try to understand it using cultural explanations, what some British guy wrote in the 17th century, I don't know how far you'd get. And maybe the more...

illuminating thing is just to look at immediately what was happening in the 1910s, what were the proximal strategic objectives. So with Bushido, why are we looking back at what people were writing in the 1700s? I'm going to break up the British thing into two parts. So one analytical framework is you can look at wars.

in terms of underlying causes and proximate causes. The underlying causes are like the tinder of grievances on both sides. And there can be cultural components to that or other components. And so there's this accumulating tinder of where you've got two different sides, at least across purposes. But then there's the match, the proximate cause, which is a whole series of matches. And finally, the last one's Pearl Harbor. And you are off and running to a place you might not want to go to.

Right. So there's that. And then there's a culture. Let's look at Britain strategic culture. And I'm no expert on British strategic culture, but these are some basics. So they're an island and they want to be able to trade with the world.

They don't want any one power dominating the continent. So this is their strategic thinking from way back. And so if there is a power that's on the verge of dominating the continent, you want to back the other side to prevent that outcome. So that's very much a part of British thinking, goes back a long time. And you can read things going back a long time of describing that situation. There's another piece that goes back a long time in the British. Navies are rarely decisive in warfare.

What I mean by decisive means you actually get the goal that you're after for fighting. Whereas armies can be, if your goal is I want to occupy all of France or better yet, the Holland, something smaller. Yeah, an army can probably might be able to do that for you, one instrument of national power. But Britain's reliant on a navy and doesn't like to have a big standing army. And so they're thinking in terms of diplomacy and allies.

and working economics, making money from trade. And so they are the ones who coined the term grand strategy. It is their gift to us.

And it absolutely informs their thinking at a very macro level. So no one thing is entirely explanatory. Also, we human beings game the system. The moment I tell you you're Japanese and you think this way is the moment I go, oh, that's what she thinks. Ha, ha, ha, ha. We're going to do something different, right? So this is the problem with human beings. The loyalty precept.

Wasn't one of the problems with the Japanese military that they weren't loyal, that they were trying to do these coups all the time and the young officers were insubordinate? Yeah, it's an excellent question. And what you're doing is...

feeding me back the Greek principle of logic, which is the law of non-contradiction. You cannot simultaneously believe mutually exclusive things. So what's going on? You're telling me it's all hierarchical, and now you're telling me junior officers are doing, or mid-level officers are doing things. What's going on here? Ah, but that's a fundamental principle of logic that the West puts great credence on. Not the case in the East.

Now, now people have educations that are different. So we're going back in the day where people are not looking in terms of, okay, we're going to have a logically consistent argument. Rather, there are these social values that we are going to, if it's all about group loyalties, that's what we're going to prioritize. And if my subgroup...

is going to be my unit or whatever, that's how that's going to go. So you're doing a wonderful piece of Western logic. It's excellent. And this is why other cultures find dealing with Westerners like battery acid, because they have these different belief systems and you go like, okay, you have women and we got women.

Our women drive cars and yours are like, where? Is there something wrong with your women? It's battery acid on other cultures. I was struck when you were describing the Nazis were putting their enemies on death ground. The Japanese were putting their enemies on death ground. And in both cases, it was detrimental because you're preventing the other side from surrendering. That seems even worse than what was happening before that period in history where, look, you can think over time that our norms about...

civility and war crimes are improving over time. But it seems like in World War II, the way people were acting was even worse than they were acting in World War I. The way Germany and Russia were fighting in World War I was probably more civil than how they were fighting in World War II. And then obviously what Japan was doing in China at the time. What was going on around the world that people just got so demonic during this period? No, warfare is not civil. You're killing people. A lot of people talk about just wars.

It's rather a horrible piece of human existence. So a number of things have gone on. With the Industrial Revolution, you can now kill people on an industrial scale. When you're doing it with bows and arrows, it takes a lot more time to create the mayhem. So that's one thing, the ability just to wipe out people. World War I on the Western Front.

was all entrenched on the eastern front there was a great deal of movement but on the western front it was entrenched which meant civilian populations weren't really touched by it right where the initial fighting yeah they're leveled but once you get a trench you're not and then we in the west don't actually study too much what happened to the civilians on the eastern front where it's moving around this is back to my half court tennis so we're not paying attention to those civilians so

For the West, very few civilian casualties. Whereas when you get to World War II, you're bombing people. You've got technologies you can get at people and invading. Also, it's the lesson of World War I, the feeling that the Germans really hadn't felt their defeat and that allowed them to make up this story about how they weren't defeated. The Jews did it or whoever. They were betrayed. And Churchill and Roosevelt decided there would be a...

a march to Berlin to disabuse them of that. And that involves killing a lot of civilians to get to Berlin. And of course, the Russians were determined to pay back for what the Nazis had done to them. And we had no sympathy for what we weren't going to turn a blind eye on what the Russians were up to because the Nazis had been so heinous. This is probably wrong. I want you to correct me, but maybe one way you can explain why the Japanese...

were so brutal in their campaign around this time is if you if you think that when you lose you have this idea that you have social death it's better to kill yourself than go back to your family and say i surrendered maybe they just applied this is their failure to empathize with or think it from the perspective of their enemy but they were just thinking like listen if we lost we would commit seppuku when they lose they forfeit

human rights, and in some sense, it was just like applying the principle of social death to their enemy. The whole war is brutal. So they're doing a lot of hand-to-hand brutality, and part of it has to do with lack of equipment. That firebombing of Tokyo happened in one night. I think it's 80,000 Japanese are incinerated. Okay, let's talk about brutality.

Now, the reason why Americans did that is because they knew the alternative was sending American kids onto Japan who would die doing that. And so the decision was it was better to kill a lot of Japanese civilians than it was to kill American soldiers. And that's also the reason that went into the atomic bombing. That's controversial, right? The Americans, why did they drop atomic bombs on the Japanese? And there was no...

disagreement about that in the United States at the time, because it was a question of, are you going to send American young men your age? And millions of them would have died hitting the home islands. Or are you going to do the bombing? And of course, the Americans did the bombing. So there's brutality all around in this war. Wars don't come up with clean hands. Was there any way for the West or for America to win the Pacific War?

without the firebombing. Well, okay. This is a whole other topic. Win. In wars, what does win mean? For us, it was put Japan back in its box, right? But this is a whole problem for Japan. What's win? Or this country in Afghanistan, what's win? Is it booting Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan once that happens at today? Is it overthrowing the Taliban at a particular period? Or is it trying to turn the whole place into a democracy?

Okay, those are all radically different things, but you need to make up your mind what it's going to be. I think it's a miracle. Well, A, okay. The win, if you're going to have the win be that the United States transforms Japan into a functional democracy or sets them on the road so that they will become them, if that's what the win is, no. Because if you don't, I showed you the...

Three horrible events in four days. That's quite incredible to have that much bad news happening in a half a week. And that absolutely shattered the Japanese. And it also opened the door for those who thought they were in crazy land to capitulate. If you don't do that, okay, we invade the home islands. Americans were sick of the war. And you start losing lots of American kids in Japan.

I think at some stage, we decide to pull them out of Japan and blockade them eternally. And then you've got, I don't know, Japan is like a new North Korea, just this inevitable, this eternal, non-functioning society. So no. Wars are tragic. And also, don't think that you have all the cars that you're going to make the decisions about what's going to happen. The other side is going to...

put you into corners where you're going to choose from very unpleasant alternatives. I want to ask you about how the war starts. So there's obviously that go 10 years before and you've got the tariffs and that creates the incentive to build an empire. But even months before when there's negotiations between Japan and America to get rid of the embargo, it's striking to me how much

miscommunication and the ability for both sides to just understand that there was a compromise here was such a big factor here where I feel like if Prince Kanoi and FDR could get on like a Zoom call, I feel like the war. You're an optimist. Think about, let's talk about sunk costs. And I'm going to talk about sunk casualties. By the time you're there,

The Japanese have suffered 600,000 casualties in China. There is no easy out of that one. And so the United States' minimum program is you get out of China. Not happening if you're Japanese. You look at the government. The government's definitely on death ground with that one because there's no way they stay in power if they get out of China.

And particularly, this is why Hirohito is Mr. Silent for most of the war. Initially, he's all for it until it goes sour, and then he's less so. He knows that he'll be, if not assassinated, declared insane, and then his perfectly serviceable adolescent son, or however old his son was, would be the token emperor. So I don't think, no matter, the Zoom call is not going to change the fundamentally high stakes.

that are involved for both sides. You really think if Hirohito had stepped in and been like, no, we're not doing this, that he would have been usurped as emperor? Yeah, early on. Oh, and there's another piece. Let's look at the United States in 1941. Great Depression, isolationists. This is where the first America firsters are. They're the ones who created the idea. They didn't want to know about all these foreign places.

The totally isolationist, Hawaii wasn't even a state, doesn't become a state until 1959. If you're Japanese, you'll get a place, oh, it's a colony. So it'll be like sort of the dog that barks. You take a newspaper and flap them a few times and maybe the dog will start barking. Because what the Japanese want is the United States just mind its own business, stay out of Asia. It's our backyard. It's not your backyard. And it looks at the United States. The United States doesn't have that much trade with Asia compared to the rest of the world. Sure, it sells Japan.

And most of it's oil, but that's not most of U.S. trade. I was reading about this before preparing to interview you. And the particular cases where diplomacy broke down. So there's examples where the translators between Japan and America are, and I can't believe this is true. You can tell me if this is not, but they're exaggerating what each side is saying to make them more vivid to read.

Like, you know, if Tojo says something conciliatory, it's exaggerated to make it sound. And that's like obviously not the role of a diplomatic translator. And there's many cases where after the war, Tojo says, if we had gotten the modus of Vandy that FDR apparently was contemplating sending to us, if we saw those agreements, we would have agreed. Or apparently they misunderstood the final agreement they got from Secretary of State Hull, where it said that you must return China. They thought it included Manchuria. Hull didn't intend to include Manchuria. They might have said yes to that.

It seems like the work really could have been averted if a couple of mistranslations were avoided. Okay. I wouldn't take Tojo as my source for anything. He's a guy who was before a graduating class of cadets or something. He was talking about how people had said that he was mediocre, but look where he'd risen to be, and he's this great man. And then at the end, when he's supposed to commit suicide, well, the way you do it, as I've described.

And he's an army officer. So what does he do? He takes a gun and he shoots himself. It's buddy, point blank range with a gun. How hard can it be? And he survives that one. And we glue them back together. So here's the honorable samurai who sent so many children or young people to their deaths. And at the end, when he knows full well what he's supposed to be doing.

Can't do it. So I wouldn't take him as my source. Also at the end, he's got this whiny answer of, oh, it wasn't my fault. It's all your translators.

And, oh, the peace on Manchuria. No, I don't know that that would have been a compromise because the League of Nations had sent in something called the Lytton Commission, which had told the Japanese they had to get out. And, oh, by the way, it is a fiction that Manchuria is not a part of China. It is an integral part of China, has been for the longest time. What the Japanese did is they kidnapped the last Qing emperor, Manchu, Manchuria, who's...

ancestors came from Manchuria, popped him in, Henry Pui, made him the emperor to try to come up with this fiction that, oh, Manchuria is a separate place. Excuse me. It's not. It's part of China. It's the internationally recognized territory of China. So I wonder if one of the problems here is, look, it was not in the vital strategic interest of America to...

secure or liberate China. In fact, the outcome of the war, obviously, is the National Institute, the communist state power. And as we'll talk about in the next lecture, that was the very opposite of liberating China. So basically, America puts in this oil embargo and knows that the outcome of failed negotiations on getting rid of that embargo is a total world war of this kind. And it's not even for the main strategic objective, which is, you know, you got to get Hitler, you got to beat Germany.

Wasn't this just our failure grand strategy to realize, why are we doing this? What's our trajectory objective here? Hold on. We weren't fighting Germany. The only reason we fought Germany is because Hitler made a major blunder. He had an alliance with Japan that said if Japan was attacked, he would come in. Not if Japan attacked someone else that he would come in. He interprets it broadly, and he declares war on this country. That is how the United States got into World War II.

Europe. If Hitler had not made that blunder, FDR would have been in a world of trouble trying to explain why he's suddenly going to be fighting Nazis over an attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese. So that's a separate issue. The main thing that...

uh americans who thought deeply cared about is the international system that we should deal with each other through laws through freedom of navigation so this is how you run your commercial transactions that big countries don't get to overrun small countries because if they do the entire international system goes down and the logic that you're describing is

Excellent logic. And this is what the Japanese are saying. It's like, why would the Americans care about this? Americans care deeply about the international system or people who are thoughtful about it. And it's also like, why not let the Russians eat all of Ukraine? Why are the Europeans suddenly all over this problem, right? And they've unified very...

recently on this, it's because the whole system is at stake. So it is really high stakes at a strategic level. The Japanese are looking at the operational level and going, why do you care about these countries? We care about the entire system because our prosperity is based on it. So I wonder if the problem here is that America isn't, at least at the time, wasn't willing to give enough concessions to the factions within Japan.

that care about peace so that they can save face and actually argue for ending war. Just the idea that they're going to give up Manchuria as well, obviously that's not going to happen. And when Secretary of State Hall just sees these vacillating telegrams from the Japanese, he assumes it's because they're fickle or something. It's like, no, it's a civilian part of the government trying its best to prevent the military from taking over. And you've got to give them something to save face, you know?

The Jap, that faction had already lost and they lost in 1936. Takahashi Korekyo is Japan's longest serving finance minister. And he was a very distinguished man. In fact, he brought the Japanese economy out of the Great Depression before anyone in the West was doing it through government spending and trying to get people to spend at home. And he told the army, he said, fellas, if you go on this bent for empire.

But you're not going to actually get resources because you're going to spend a lot of money fighting with people, resources doing that. And then it's going to take you years of investments to access these resources. So you've got to be able to cover these investments for years and years and years. And cooperate within the international system. That is the way to prosperity for Japan.

That was the February Young Officers' Revolt where he and I can't remember how many others were murdered. They came to his home in the middle of the night, and as he stood up to talk to them, they literally hacked him apart.

They had lost. That whole game is over. But Prince Kanoe doesn't, like he knows he's going to, the person who's prime minister in 1941 realizes that they're going to lose a war against America. And he doesn't want to do that. It's just that Tojo, the war minister at the time, doesn't answer to him. Like there are people that the prime minister is like doesn't want war. And we don't give him enough to save face, right? They have a huge army there that's more than capable of assassinating people when they get in the way. So that ship has sailed.

That you can make, this is what a pivotal decision is. Once you've made it, there's no going back to the way the world was. And Japan lost too many people. And there are too many figures in the army. We think that it's an inevitable outcome of having the world the way it is now with this Japan, this wonderful country now.

just at the lead of so many different areas of human endeavor. And we think, oh, that's the inevitable outcome. It's not. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, is there anything America could have done in the immediate years leading up to the war that could have prevented this outcome? Because the fact that there is a world, like prima facie, you should assume that if there is a world war, things weren't done optimally, right? That doesn't mean everybody's equally at fault.

But is there anything that could have done differently? Yeah, Holly Smoot. But like in the years directly before. But this is serious.

But we all live – that holy smooth tariff is a game of half-court tennis. You're looking at the United States. It's in a terrible depression. You want to protect jobs here. And so you raise these big tariff walls. And then, OK, what's the other side of that going to do? They're going to raise their tariff walls and pay you back. What's that going to do? It's going to cost a lot of American jobs if you play that game. You need to be talking with other people.

Once you have set the conditions, hothouse conditions, for fascists to take over in Germany and in Japan, you are in a world of hurt. The easy solutions are no longer there anymore. Maybe I'll ask the question this way. The oil embargo, was it a mistake? Because the idea is to protect the international system, prevent empire. Well, we got more empire. We got a world war. We got communists taking over in China. Whatever's going to happen if we got rid of the oil embargo can't have been worse than that, right?

Well, yeah, it was. What Roosevelt was really scared of was that the Japanese would attack Russia because then he thought Russia would fall. And if Russia fell, he thought the Nazis would win. So at least when the Japanese attacked, they attacked us. That was actually better than attacking Russia. So the oil embargo, if you want to...

So let's say you don't do it and Japan never attacks us. And then the Russians are down and you've got Nazis in control of the world. So it must be better. But you don't have that world war with America. It doesn't seem insane to think that. And we're still going to find the Nazis. You're not going to have an international system. Oh, and if that's the case, and the Nazis were gearing up because eventually they're going to fight us. So this is another problem.

concept that I think is useful is limited versus unlimited objectives. An unlimited objective is I want to do regime change in your country. The most unlimited variety is that not only do I want to do regime change, but I want to kill all your people while I'm at it. So if that is what your opposite number is planning, if you compromise with them,

You are simply setting them up and putting them in a stronger position when they come at you for the final kill. If they have limited objectives, then by all means compromise with them and negotiate away on what is it? You want just this little sliver of territory or you want some preferential treatment? We can do that for you. But you're talking about a world order here, whether it's going to be based on laws increasingly or...

these opposing spheres of influence. To keep pushing back on this. I don't have an answer. I've given you what little I can think of. But hey, I'm not the grand propeteer in this world. These questions you're asking me are way above my pay grade. So people in the YouTube comment section get mad at me when I keep asking about counterfactuals.

And I understand, you know, obviously I don't understand what was happening at the time. I'm naive about history or whatever. But I do think it's important. What are we trying to do when we try to understand history? We're trying to understand if we had done things differently, what would have happened? What are the lessons we take? And counterfactuals are the main way we can do that. I'm all for it. We teach by counterfactuals. Replay it. And can you come up with different options? I think you're in a series of really awful options. The difference between the Japanese and the Nazis is that the Nazis had...

The ideology was that we got to kill millions of people. That's like, that is what they believed. The Japanese didn't in the same way have the ideology. And naturally, they had their continental empire. They also want to trade. And they, you know, they don't like communists. They don't want the communists to take over in China. It just seems like naturally, if we didn't go to war with them, we might have been allies as we ended up being later on.

Well, they attacked us. After the oil embargo. Yeah, yeah. But the question is, should we have gotten rid of the oil embargo? Wait a second. The Japanese are saying we have the rights to your oil? Excuse me. We have the right to sell it or not sell it to anyone we feel like. All right?

Since when do they have the rights to it? Okay, great. So you're going to do all this crazy stuff and then still think we have to sell you oil? And oh, by the way, this oil is being used to kill Chinese all over the place. This is what their Japanese bombers are running on. Yeah. I feel like...

No, I mean, morally, I agree. They don't own our oil. The question is, are they entitled to it? It's like, should we have given it to them? Would the outcome have been better if we did? I'm telling you, I suspect the outcome wouldn't have been better. But I don't know, right? And you're asking me things where...

And my experience is I'm just a professor. I just show up at seminar on time. And I try to do reading and prep. And my experience has not been in government, let alone at the highest echelons of government of what's feasible and what's not feasible. And the answers I've given you are where I'm at, but I can't tell you more.

All right. I'll ask about other things, too. The sort of delusional optimism of the Japanese to think that they could beat America, how much of that is motivated by the idea that they actually do think they're led by a living deity? Did that make...

Or is it just, is that related to why they thought they could win? No, but you're looking at the United States as isolationist. If you're Japanese and you're looking at these absolutely isolationist Americans, right, who are letting Britain, their closest ally, potentially go down to Nazis, right? Because think about Britain. How did it all work?

Fall of Norway, fall of France, then they lost Crete. We aren't even in the war. They're about losing everything, and we're not doing anything. So, wait a second. Now I'm losing my track of my train of thought. Revisit the question again, please. Can somebody in the audience remind me of the question?

Yeah, the optimism of the Japanese. So they're looking at it and going, the United States is not bailing out its key ally. Hawaii is a colony, right? It's a bunch of white people dominating Hawaiians. So we're just going to do a little, set an example that, hey, if you mess with us, it's going to get costly. And we know you don't have much trade in Asia. Sure, we want to buy your oil, but overall, most trades elsewhere.

And so they're looking at it. Isolationists, won't the answer be the isolationists go, ooh, this is expensive. Let's get out of here. And of course, that's not understanding Americans. I remember I was in seminar the day that 9-11 happened. And there was TV in the seminar rooms. And there was a break. And after the end of the break,

the students had the TV on and were watching Tower One had gone down. And then while we're in seminar, the next one we're watching, it goes down. And I thought, oh my, there's going to be hell to pay for this one. Because this is how Americans are. That if you mess with us, boy, does it get ugly. And boy, this is like, don't think, retaliate. So the Japanese didn't understand that part of us. In fact, a lot of people don't. They look at Americans, we look like a bunch of hedonists. But if you mess with us,

It's ugly. If you are in the Japanese government a couple years before, like 1939 or something, it sounds like from your earlier answer...

That you think it was a sort of hopeless situation if you're the finance minister or if you're the prime minister. Is there anything they could have done to prevent an inevitable conflict with America? They brought it up and they say, well, we can't afford this. The resources aren't here and the army wasn't interested. And they shut up because the last guy had been killed in his house in his pajamas. So they weren't up for that. How much stock do you put in the idea that?

If you have a society that rapidly industrializes, that goes from a feudal state to advanced industrial nation in a generation, that it's just not enough time for the culture to evolve. And so the way that the Japanese behaved in the lead up to the war and during the war, the feudal values just didn't have a chance to evolve. The major restoration happened too fast.

No, it didn't happen too fast, but it's that institutions take a long time to take root. Look at this country. It's been an evolving democracy for hundreds of years. Okay, we no longer have slavery, amen. But you look at today, really consequential things about our own institutions. So now we're going to go pick on the Japanese because they managed in one generation to westernize their political, judicial.

legal, educational, you name it. They westernized them. But there wasn't enough time for these things to grow deep roots. And then if you think about who's doing this, they're called the Genro, this very distinguished generation of Japanese who all knew each other. And so their career paths were very broad, covering both civil and military areas.

And when they died, they couldn't transfer their prestige to anyone else, nor had they institutionalized it in some kind of cabinet or something that would force all these different...

in fact, groups to discuss things without giving a primacy to the military and then understand what is the tradition in Japan. Shogunate. That's what Japan had before. What's a shogun? Shogun is the Japanese word for general. So the long history of Japan is military rule. So when it comes back in World War II, that in a way is a kind of normalcy. It would have taken a long time. So this comes back to the United States.

fooling around with tariff walls, thinking that was such a clever idea. Maybe if the Great Depression had been managed better, it would have given time for these institutions to take deeper roots. No one knows, but I would not criticize the Meiji generation. They're brilliant.

They did so much. But you're talking just a number of years. And look at this country. We're really having major problems with our institutions, wondering whether we've got a stalemated legislature, whether we've got a skewed court system or whatever it is, and we're sorting these things out. And then to criticize the Japanese because they couldn't do it all in 25 years. One thing I found really interesting in your book is that you were arguing that not only was...

the military not in charge of the officers, but nobody was even in charge of the military. I think you called it a system of irresponsibility. It was just basically government by committee. Tell me more about that. Why does that lead to mistakes? Well, I'm going to flip it around and look at how the West has done it. It's all about, it's supposed to be, and of course there are exceptions, that it's not

that it's about you if you have a particular job. It's that your job gives you certain authority by law to do things. And then we have courts to adjudicate when you in that position.

Other people think that you've exceeded your authority and they start suing about different things. And that's how it goes in the West. It's very legalistic, goes all the way back to the Romans. When I think about what is the West, it's Greek logic, it's Roman law, and then it's these Judeo-Christian moral values. Those are essential pillars of what the West is all about.

So in Japan, it's, yeah, they get laws and they westernize, but they have their own indigenous way of dealing with things. And it's very much about different in-groups and out-groups handling things in whatever the committee is. And so we're going, well, who actually did that and whose fault is it? Because we have this very legalistic way and fault and law, we're going to either put you in jail or whatever.

So it's different ways of organizing ourselves. But we in the West assume, because going back to Roman times, is that institutions are going to be a really big thing, that that's how things are going to work. So then when we get into somewhere like Iraq and we think the police is going to still be functioning after we blow the government, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa. It's not an institutionalized.

I'm no expert, but you're projecting the kind of institutional setup that Western countries typically have to other people. They may name these things the same thing, police or whatever, but they may function in very different ways. When you look at the soldiers who fought these hopeless battles, where tens of thousands of them on a single island might starve or be forced into a bonsai charge that they knew was hopeless and they were all going to die.

And they knew that they were put in this hopeless situation because of these destructive, petty fights between the Navy and the Army where one of them isn't willing to supply the other one. Why didn't that break their morale? Where it's just like, look, we're supposed to die and commit seppuku because you guys didn't give us the right supplies because you guys aren't willing to share information or something? A, I don't know the answer because I'm not a social historian where you would really be doing... I've always... I've done more...

a diplomatic and military. So you're looking top down. But what you're asking is a very important question for how do individuals react to all this? And that I do not know the answer. And you'd have to, and there's another piece that makes it hard in Japan since people don't want to talk about failure because it's considered a loss of face. Whereas in the West, one of the fundamental assumptions of Christianity is we're all sinners, right?

original sin. We're all defective goods from the very beginning. And so there isn't this expectation for perfection because it's known you're kind of a mess to begin with. And so you can talk about these things. So that's a whole other problem of getting people to open up about truly horrible events. So I don't know the answer. I know that the World War II generation, they came home, they just didn't talk about it with their children.

It's just not a matter for discussion, so I can't answer that of why they followed. But you look in the West, in World War I, soldiers would go up and over the trenches, and they knew exactly what was going to happen to them. And yeah, there were people who didn't, and then they were court-martialed and shot. A lot of people were shot in World War I. But there's been a change in society about...

what young men are willing to do when their officers start telling them. The way the Russians solved this problem in Ukraine, but Stalin would do this too, is you send people up ahead, and then you've got the KGB or whatever, the killer unit, so that anyone who tries to go the wrong way in the battlefield, they get machine gunned by their own side. That's one way to get an army to go forward, and that's what Putin is doing right now. But anyway, it's...

So in more democratic places, people aren't willing to go along with this now. But in the West, we did it too. When you're having lunch with your colleagues, with the people who are also experts in this field, and you're discussing, look, what are still the big unresolved questions? We don't understand why this person did X or why events transpired in a certain way. What are the big things where you guys have to hassle it out?

Oh, well, it's more as someone's decided what the curriculum is going to be. And then you teach it. Oh, and by the way, as of like six months ago, I've moved to the Maritime History Center, so I'm no longer teaching. So I'm just doing research at this stage. Well, I think the whole point of the curriculum at the War College is to get people out of the operational level. So the junior course is about...

The strategic effects of operation is like, okay, Pearl Harbor, to me, it's an example I'll use. Pearl Harbor, it's an A-plus military operation. They sink everything. Of course, it's shallow water, and we raise most of it afterwards. They lose nothing. I mean, boy, how can you do a more perfectly choreographed military operation than that one, except?

It turns an absolutely isolationist country into one hell-bent coming after Japan, and that would be called a strategic disaster. So you've got to be cautious about your military actions and think about what are the strategic consequences, and it's very difficult to gauge those accurately. So that's one big...

issue that you need to get at. And then for the seniors, it's okay, great. You're an officer and you understand if you're in the army, you understand about how to use armies and the Navy, about how to use navies. But how does this integrate with all the other instruments of national power that actually account for how wars turn out? And economics is a huge one. And there is no definitive answer in these wars.

but rather you can give analytical concepts, and this is my reason for doing these lectures, is to say, hey, don't play half-court tennis. Wouldn't that be a basic thing? Is it going to provide you the answers if you look at the other side? No, it won't, but it'll position you to be in a better shape. Or tossing out limited versus unlimited wars, and unlimited wars are putting people on death ground.

Does that answer the question? No. But he goes, OK, if Vladimir Putin has an unlimited objective vis-a-vis the world order, and he's basically said that he does, then compromising with him would be a mistake on that subject. Right. And you're going to have to deal with him one way or another. So it's the what is it? History isn't over. The great.

The longstanding struggle between continental powers that want to divide the world up into mutually exclusive spheres of influence and butcher each other over territory, very negative sum. They tend to be very authoritarian. Or this maritime order that says, hey, surely join the party. Follow the rules. You'll make money.

Right. And this is Angela Merkel's thinking this of, hey, we're going to. She was a German chancellor for many years. And she's thinking Putin will sell him oil. He'll make money. It's a win win, surely. Well, he's back to his continental stuff, destroying wealth and lives. That's what the alternate world order looks like, is killing people to get things. It's more promising to spread the other one. And this disagreement has been going on for a long, long time.

I feel like we had a mini version of this debate in the podcast we did a year ago. I have a limited number of ideas. But if you just said, you know, we can't compromise with people who will have these unlimited goals like Putin, who have these territorial goals. If we're using the analogy as you're actually making it to Japan during World War Two, look what it took.

If we wanted to say, we're not going to compromise with your territorial goals, we will stop you at every way. What it took was a world war that led to an unconditional surrender. So if we're using that analogy, does that imply that no compromise requires some unconditional surrender type event? No, no, no, no, no, no, no. There's something called precision nuclear strike. And it has changed things. During World War II, the United States had sanctuary.

which means other people couldn't touch us at home. And our productive base was not touched, and that was essential. There are many things that were essential for Allied victory. Take any one of them away, and the outcome's different. One of the essential things is this productive base. This time around, all kinds of people can come get the United States. So a lot of times in foreign affairs, you can't solve things. And I don't know who originally said this, but you manage things.

And so this is where the sanctions and things come in. You give people a time out from the world order. You don't solve it. You look at North Korea. That is not solved by a long shot. But at least South Korea can go become prosperous. And the North is just sitting with its time out and being more and more malign at home. But it's more like that. It's of not recognizing.

For instance, conquests. And this is what went on, actually, when Stalin took over the Baltic states. We never recognized that. In fact, they ran governments in exile based on the funds that they're... I think, oh yeah, there were Baltic states had their funds in U.S. banks. So when Stalin overran them, I think those funds became what funded their embassies. And so, N generations later...

We recognize their independence. These things are not solved on anyone's watch. And basically, if you want the things, the way the last Cold War ended is because the Chinese and Russians changed their minds. You have to wait for others to come to their...

own decisions. What is the track record of sanctions actually changing other people's mind? Because if you look at the world today... Unknown. But just to finish the question, because you're advocating that as the way we should proceed this, it's worth asking. If you look at the world today, North Korea, we've sanctioned them for decades. If the idea is we're going to deprive them of resources to do these bad things, well, they're just going to divert resources from their civilians.

to the military. And you're just making the people poor. You're not changing the government's decision. Same thing in Iran, same thing in Venezuela. So we're just like making the people poor. We're not even changing the government's decision. What's the idea here?

You know, I don't know the answer, and I'm working on an edited book with a wonderful colleague who knows much more about economics than I do, and we have all kinds of chapters. This book will not be a good read, because you want to learn things. And so I've done a lot of edited books to learn things, different kinds of naval operations, and then they feed into the books that are more overarching. But this one's on sanctions, and we're in the process of writing the concluding chapter now.

And the things that you're bringing up, sanctions don't seem to make people do what you want them to do. And so a lot of people go, well, they don't work. But boy, do they inflict pain. And then, of course, you're doing it on usually an authoritarian regime that diverts as much of that pain as possible into the civilian.

population, and then uses that as an excuse to justify its rather brutal rule. And I don't have the answer. And the other piece is, so you're dealing with these expansionist powers with a limited toolkit. And the question is, which tool to use? And I truly don't have the answer. But you've mentioned a really good counter argument. And I've given you an argument. And I don't know which of the rebuttal is the better one, honestly.

And I think the whole approach, this is another thing about what do you, you were asking me what you're worried about, but here's something to help you with what you're worried about, is thinking in terms of arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttal. So you have an argument, I have an argument, and on this one I'm not sure what the rebuttal is. But it's a good way of thinking about things because it allows you to change your mind. You may well be right. Or I may be right.

Or maybe we're right in one country but another one. I honestly don't know the answer. Yeah. It does seem like one of the biggest things you want to try to figure out.

In strategy in general, because if you try to do sanctions, it doesn't seem to work that well. Well, if you try to replace the regime, I mean, people said, like, look, Saddam's regime after his invasion in Kuwait. This is somebody who has territorial goals. So we can't have somebody who is going to keep trying to do this in power. You try to replace that. That doesn't work. Well, that worked well. Yeah, right. Yeah. So just like the idea, what do you do with irascible regimes? Well, actually, in the Gulf War.

Bush Sr. fought a limited war for a limited objective. The limited objective was get Iraqi troops out of Kuwait, restore the Kuwaiti government. Those were the two really big things. And then call it a day when you've done those things. That's what he did. And it was an incredibly successful war and it went to our heads.

So, right? Because when you run a successful limited war, it's over very rapidly. You get stuff with not too much cost and it's done. So then we try to do the total makeover of another country. And excuse me, what right does one country have to do a total makeover on another country? And then, of course, the Russians and Chinese are apoplectic watching us do this. And that's a problem. Or you think about Afghanistan. Maybe you go in there and...

You at least boot Osama bin Laden out of the country and then proclaim it victory and leave. All right. Going back to Japan. Yeah, OK. I tried to divert you. No, no. I did the diverting. It was interesting. Do we have some sense of what Japanese public opinion was like through the 30s and 40s? I don't know. OK. And it's also because it's becoming more and more authoritarian.

yeah i have no idea on that subject and again it's a social historian that would require really detailed knowledge that i don't know i had daniel jorgen who wrote the prize which is the pulitzer prize winning history of oil and he has a big section in the book about world war ii because in his view oil was a big component of why the war happened the way it did and one of the interesting points he made was that

He thinks that the kamikaze missions, a big part of the motivation behind them was that Japan lacked the fuel to have the pilots fly back.

Is that accurate? Oh, it's worse than that. They don't have the fuel to actually train the pilots. And as we learned in 9-11, sorry to bring it back, it's really much easier to learn how to take off a plane and crash it into something, right? That's what those guys were doing, than it is to teach them how to make safe landings under weird conditions. So the kamikaze was just an act of, it's a guided missile. And it was an act of...

having very few assets at the end of the war, not enough fuel to fly anyone anywhere. So it's going to be a guided missile into an aircraft carrier or a battleship destroyer or something.

One of the things I learned from your book is the overwhelming fraction of debts on the Japanese side during the war happened after it was known that they were going to lose. I think in the last 14 months, and this is all from your book, 1.8 million of the total 2.1 million Japanese debts. That's 85% of the total.

happened in the last 14 months of the war. And a similar thing is true with Germany, where I think 43% of the debts happened in the last year of the war. I think like 2.3 million out of the 5.3 million. Walk me through what is going on inside government when the higher level people must know that they're losing, but they're going to make bigger and bigger sacrifices. Well, you're conflating, I think, Western values about what the purpose of the government is.

in commonwealth, commonweal, commonweal is common good. And this notion that governments are about the well-being of individuals, okay, well, we're not in societies where we're talking about individuals for openers, certainly not in Japan. Then there's another, well, why the death's so huge? It's at the end of these wars, you've broken the transportation system that gets produce to...

hungry mouths and you've also removed so much manpower literally from the fields you aren't producing anything so that you're talking about mass starvation as the result of having done a number of previous years of warfare and also this mass starvation helps account for why one side gets shattered and quits and then the thing that ought to give everyone pause

is, okay, if Japan's economy was, I don't know, a tenth of ours in World War II, and these are the kind of costs that they could inflict, watch it on getting into wars with countries that you think you're vastly superior to. It may not work out.

The costs are horrific. I mean, you're illustrating the problems with this continental order of taking territories. This is how it goes. But sometimes other people visit wars on you, and then you're into their world of hurt. I mean, I think it's like Angela Merkel or Neville Chamberlain back in World War II, who's going, surely these people don't want to do this. It's going to wind up being a bloodbath.

Surely they don't want to. So Neville Chamberlain makes the compromise at Munich thinking, surely this will be it. We'll compromise them when they'll go. Wrong. They're going to come in for the whole thing. Yeah. I still feel like I don't understand the...

What exactly? So there's a couple of options and maybe the correct answer is in one of these. But one is that there's just denialism. They genuinely do not understand that they are going to lose the war. Another is that, look, they know they're going to lose, but it's better to like they would prefer to just go out dying. Well, they're dead anyway. So who cares? Right. Well, this is the problem with nuclear weapons. Push someone to a large corner or tight enough corner. Maybe they think that, well, it's my last day. So guess what? It's your last day, too.

How much should we question the demand for unconditional surrender, knowing that most of the deaths in World War II happened? Because, look, if there wasn't an unconditional surrender, maybe we could have reached a piece earlier, most of the deaths could have been spared. Oh, I think by the time those deaths are Japanese deaths for us.

We're looking at these things and we've lost a lot of people. And our idea is, hey, we're almost there. And we're not worried about Japanese civilian deaths or Japanese military deaths. These are the people that have killed how many Chinese? And I don't believe China was ever part of Japan. What were they doing there? So then you're asking for tender mercies out of Americans for the Japanese in those days? No.

after all that had happened. So yeah, it's ugly by the time you've killed this many people, the kind of bitterness on both sides. Was it a mistake to demilitarize Japan after the war? Because a couple of things. So one is, look, they did become an ally afterwards. And if they did have a military, they could have helped us in the Korean War. The outcome might have been different.

With military help? Yeah, it was the secret part. Yeah, how do you think? They were the ones who knew about demining. So we had a big military drawdown after the end of World War II, and the Navy really got cut back because it was going to be all nuclear weapons and the Air Force was going to deliver, so the Navy didn't get a whole bunch of things that it cared about, including minesweepers. So when the North Koreans are throwing a lot of mines around, it's Japanese that are helping. It was secret.

That's why you don't know about it. It's not your fault. It came out in research just recent. And another thing, when MacArthur does his Inchon landings, it's very tricky because the tides are, I don't know how many feet, it's like 30-foot tides. It's enormous. So you can really get stuck on mudflats if you don't time that right and have to know where you're going. Who are the pilots who bring it all in? It's Japanese. And also, they've always had a self-defense force. And they have a very competent...

Navy. It's called a self-defense force, but anybody else would call it a Navy. But that then fits in with what the Constitution says we're supposed to have. But why is it a mistake to demilitarize Japan? Another reason is they had a vested interest in making sure the communists don't take over in China. And so they could have provided some amount of support. If the nationalists, it's obvious the nationalists are going to lose.

At that point, maybe they would have decided to support the nationalists against the communists. It's too late. They've gutted the nationalist armies. That was a massive strategic error on the... And part of it comes from arrogance of don't denigrate the other side. And so the Japanese thought they could... China's a failed state. These people are hopeless. They can't even decide what they're doing. They got warlords everywhere. We'll just...

Push them around and we'll get what we want. And they do really well moving into Manchuria. Manchuria is bigger than Germany and France combined. The Japanese actually stabilize it, do lots of investment. That's why it becomes the most industrialized part of Asia outside the home islands, more so than Shanghai. And this is in the 30s. And so they're looking at things look pretty good and they'll get away with it.

They didn't. Let's say in the couple of decades before the war, if you looked at somebody who's young and ambitious in Japan, the kind of person who might come to Silicon Valley today if they're in America, what do they want to do? Do they want to join Zaibatsu? Do they want to become a general of the military? This is social history. I just don't. I don't know. And you don't see a lot. Well, yeah, I just truly don't know. It has to do with...

There's so much to know in this world that all of us, all we can do is know a corner of it. So my corner has been a top down. And actually, if my expertise, I started out with a major field in Russian history and a minor field in Chinese history. And then I realized to deal with those two, you had to understand Japan. So you asked me in my weak suit about the social history of that country, and I can't answer it.

many of the powers that we fought in the 20th century, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, not fought directly, but at least fought over, we ended up becoming allies with them later on. And in fact, they're some of our best allies. So there's two ways to think about it. One is that we had especially good diplomacy with them after the war. The second is that despite having the same interests, despite being in a position where we should naturally have been friends,

We basically screwed up the diplomacy beforehand and we didn't ally ourselves with the peaceful factions within these countries. Basically, it illustrates a failure of diplomacy on our part that the natural allies we ended up going to war with. There's no matter of diplomacy that's going to solve Hitler. One of the lessons is don't let the world global economy melt down. When that happens, people who are...

And not only Americans will get desperate when that happens, but people who are poorer than Americans, which is lots of the world, will be truly desperate. So you don't want to do that. As for why the Japanese and the Germans are such wonderful allies as they are, it's a testament to having a generous peace. So the peace after that war was not to get even.

which is what had been the peace in World War I. It was the Germans had done all this terrible stuff. We're going to make them pay all kinds of money, and we're going to tell them it was all their fault, and blah, blah, blah. That doesn't work well. But rather, the peace, that was, of course, what the Russians did to East Germany. But for West Germany, it's how you reintegrate them back into Europe and get them back on in, and the Japanese as well. And also...

A serendipitous fact of the Korean War, the Japanese economy was a total mess at the end of this war. And the United States, of course, is overtaxed because there's Europe to rebuild and there isn't enough money to do everything. But when the Korean War hits, which is immediately in 1950, tons of the supplies were bought in Japan. And that's how the Japanese economy initially is restored is through the Korean War and then the Vietnam War, because it's the local place to buy.

or more local in the United States to buy a lot of supplies. So that's another piece of why things work out. And then there's also the Germans and Japanese who live, you were asking about, well, what do conscripts think?

There are two brilliant generations in Japan's modern history, and one's the Meiji generation, and the other's the post-World War II generation that did this incredible makeover. And I think of all these wonderful, high-quality products they built. Like, I love my Toyota. I want to rent an American car. I can't find anything. I'm going to kill everyone as I'm trying to figure out how to adjust something.

toyota is like and we're good when you were showing the uh things we learned from the diary entries of different animals or generals on the japanese side as you were going through the archives and looking at these things i'm curious if um was yours did were they writing knowing that they were writing for future historians or was that actually just a

personal record-keeping thing? What was the motivation behind it? I did not read that stuff in archives. Japanese archives, I was doing strictly diplomatic stuff. Admiral Ugaki Matamai's diary, which is the one thing I cited on these subjects, it was translated, someone ran into it, it was translated into English, and so I just read the whole thing.

And then the other stuff, the quotations, I think I was ripping off secondary sources where someone else had done the archival research. And then I pulled those. But those are where the quotations came from. So again, I haven't done this deep read into all of the Japanese thinking about all of these.

of what motivated them in their careers that I have not done. Was there some big aha moment when you're going through all this Japanese stuff where like I get why they did a certain, like why certain things transpired in a certain way? Oh, well, this lecture, when I came to the Naval War College in 2000, they assigned me a couple of lectures because it's a group talk class and everyone only gives.

two, three, four lectures. And so I was junior. I think I got one or two. And so I was told to lecture on World War II Pacific. And I'm like, oh, great. U.S. Navy, this will be a joke, me telling them about World War II Pacific, right? Because I'm a historian, major field Russia, I'm a minor field China, and I've dabbled in Japan. And now I'm supposed to talk about this.

And so my husband said, well, hey, I've taught this survey of Japan, read this Bushido stuff. And he had some of the books hanging around the house. So I read that. And then I had read some basic things about World War II. And then I just, this is why I'm telling you, I think it's a useful way to...

approach other cultures is read what they read. What are the key books? And apparently these were key books. And then you go, okay, if I believe this, then I'm going to take Western analysis of going rather than mirror imaging, I'm going to basically take their software, put it in here and my brain, and then say, okay, does this inform me of what they're doing in the bonsai charges? I was like, oh yeah.

That actually makes sense now. Instead of saying, what are these nut jobs doing? And it's everyone. It's no, no. Actually, if you believe these things, then this would explain how you're doing things. So that's how that all came about. One thing I was wondering about when you were talking about the inter-service rivalries is what were the allies doing that they avoided this? Not only between the branches of the military, but...

I mean, allies, the word literally says it. Japan wasn't coordinating with Germany in the way that America was coordinating with Britain. How were the institutions set up or the culture set up that made this possible in the West? A, this institutional rivalry is terrible all over the place. But there's more concepts that are useful. So it's really helpful in looking at people when you have disagreements with them. Who is their primary?

adversary or rival? Not their secondary. They probably have a whole list of people who annoy them, but who's the number one? And then where is the primary theater of wherever that disagreement is? Look at that. And then on the disagreement, how big a deal is it? Is it existential? Japan thought, the reason why it's undeterrable that we didn't figure out, they thought their entire existence was at stake, that they absolutely had to have territory in China to survive.

And now whether that's correct or not is a completely different story. If they believe it, that's what's motivating them. So when you're looking at the war on the Allied side, who's the primary enemy? Hitler. Where's the primary theater? Germany. Even though there's Japan, it was Germany first.

What about the ultimate goals? Well, actually, that doesn't align at all. But because the Russians want a communist wonderland, we want everyone decolonized, and the British want the empire on which the sun never sets. But they all shared an intermediate objective that Hitler has to go. And that's a superglue of an alliance. Now let's flip it to the axis. Okay, Italy.

What does Italy want? Roman Empire, whatever it is. So who's the primary enemy? Well, Britain, because that's where British interests are. Okay. Hitler, what's he all about? He wants to do his Lebensraum, Nazi wonderland all over Eurasia. So who's his primary enemy? That would be Russia. Japan, what do they want? They want the big Japanese empire. Who's their primary enemy? It's China. And then when they get us in, they got a whole new problem in their hands. None of this aligns. And so...

the Axis aren't going to be trading many resources with each other, whereas the Allies, and it's really, it goes back to your original question about the British.

Part of their way of running wars is you absolutely coordinate with allies. You give them serious resources, which is what they finally figured out at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, where they're paying big money to support different allies. And then you've got to put skin in the games, actually send your armies. So the British, and we take this from them, we're students of the British on this.

do the massive sharing with Lend-Lease. And Stalin isn't sharing too much with us. And then we've got the unified commands with the British because they're all about doing that. The Russians won't even let us on their territory to do things. And there are only little bits with the Arctic convoys going up to Mermansk, and it's hardly anyone who's up there. So this is a different...

cultural tradition and how to deal with things all right we've come full circle i think that's a great place to close things this was excellent thank you so much sarah thank you for coming

Please consider watching the other two episodes in this series with Sarah, the former one on India and how the USSR, US, China, Pakistan all fought over India during the Cold War. And the next one is about how Mao unified a continent and ultimately caused the greatest catastrophes in human history. If you're interested in sponsoring this podcast, go to dwarkeshpatel.com slash advertise to learn more.

Otherwise, it's super helpful if you just share it with people who you think might enjoy it. Send it on your group chats, social media, friends. It's all very helpful. All right. I'll see you on the next one. Cheers.