Sarah Paine: evaluation

Transcript context

…How then do we explain the famously high morale of the Japanese military, where they would refuse to surrender even after given orders by their superiors? Despite knowing about these things that you're talking about. Oh, it's true. It's because it's a different culture. In Japanese culture, you belong to in-groups or out-groups. So the biggest in-group that Japanese belonged to was Japanese people and everybody else. But within Japan, you come from a province, a locality, etc. You go to school and get your education at various places. You belong to a job wherever you are and there are various units within your job. And you owe loyalty. It's obligation. In the West, it's all about liberties and my rights. In the East, it's about obligations to other people. So you owe obligations to all of these organizations. When soldiers are thinking about war, they're not thinking about grand strategy. They're thinking about operational success. In the west, the moment you as a soldier start losing a battle, you can retreat and surrender and it's not dishonorable because you're going to live to fight another day. In Japan, you're a failure. And therefore, if you come home back as a failed soldier, you bring dishonor to yourself, your family, your locality, anyone you are associated with. So that's why it is so difficult for them to surrender. However, by the time you get to the end of the war, they are so exhausted. Their economy is something like a tenth of our economy. They have something like a 13th of our coal or steel production. And they don't have any local oil production. They're importers of food and they're not getting that food. So by the time you get to ‘45, they're exhausted. And a shattering occurs. Finally, at the very end, you have Emperor Hirohito, who knew full well earlier that he would be assassinated or proclaimed deranged if he disagreed. And he had a perfectly good underage son to be used as a figurehead. He knew that he couldn't do much about it. At the very end, when he decided he was about to get nuked, that's when he intervened to break the deadlock at the cabinet meetings and there were a variety of people at the very top who realized it's over. Could Hirohito have intervened earlier?…

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