Sarah Paine: uncertainty

Transcript context

…After the oil embargo. I'm a little confused about some of the Bushido stuff and how it explains Japan's actions in the war. 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’s like, where's the Buddhism there? Well, I'm not an expert on Buddhism, but you've got a lot of things conflated in there. If you're asking about the part of the brutality of the war is, Japan was totally out of resources. 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 put these people somewhere. So they just slaughtered them instead. 00:58:50 There were POWs and there were cases of hostile civilians who also got slaughtered. I don't know the "because," but they had very limited numbers of people to deal with this. 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. In the prison camps 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, showing 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. 00:59:50 So you can imagine a Westerner in a prison camp looks his guard in the eye, and the guard's going "Oh, who is this arrogant person? You’re a POW-" 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 the tragedy of human beings. I don't know if I answered your question. I don't know that I know the answer. Here’s another thing that I want to clarify: 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 tried to understand it using cultural explanations — what some British guy wrote in the 17th century — I don't know how far you'd get. Maybe the more illuminating thing is just to look at 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?…

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