Sarah Paine——日本为何输掉二战（演讲与访谈）

The warfare that went on wiped out the 2 barriers to communist expansion in Asia. likely Chiang Kai-shek—the Japanese wipe him out. And then what does the United States do? What’s the other barrier to communism? Well, it’s the Japanese. So, what do you get? A unified communist China. It’s a gift that keeps on giving.

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. Japan thought their entire existence was at stake, that they absolutely had to have territory in China to survive. Not only do I want to do regime change, but I want to kill all your people while I’m at it. 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.

1. Lecture begins

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.

Americans have a penchant for what I call half-court tennis, which is that 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. Americans, on the other hand, their beloved sport, I believe, is football. Those people who love football—many Americans, my understanding of it; I’m just someone who reads books, I don’t follow football—but that’s just qualifying, I suppose.

Anyhow, Americans who follow football study both sides, right? They look at their home team, but then they also look at not just 1 opposing team, but many, down to the individual player. They would no more follow a football game by looking at 1 half of the football field. And yet, Americans, when we do foreign policy, that’s often what we do. 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 things that the 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 POWs, civilians, but to their own wounded. 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 side of the tennis court?

Here are the 2 gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu for Asia, and the other one is Clausewitz, the big guru of warfare in the West. Both of them would say, “Hey, you want to understand the other side? You’ve got to make a net assessment.” What’s that? You would look at political, military, geographic, and economic factors—the strengths and weaknesses of all sides—to get a sense of things.

Today, I’m going to make a case for culture. You need to look at that as well. 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—a mirror image—onto you. That doesn’t work so well.

If I’m not supposed to generalize on the basis of my experience, what am I supposed to do instead? 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 1930s and 1940s. 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.

Culture is 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. Even if I could come up with that list, 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.

We’re going to look at it today, and we’re going to look at traditional Japanese theorists and belief systems. If you believe these things, how does this influence your practice?

Hideki Tojo said on December 1, 1941, that our country stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion. He got that right. He was in an Imperial Conference where he was confirming with Hirohito that Pearl Harbor was going to be a go. But he felt that Japan really needed to do something rather than being ground down, being passive.

Here is Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto, 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.

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, or you need to downgrade your strategy to something a little less costly or risky.

I suppose what you can do is go, “Oh, they’re stupid.” I guess if I call you stupid, that makes me so smart because I can denigrate you. It explains nothing. So, rather than do that, they’re very intelligent men. Why are they doing these things? Why do they consider their actions rational, and rational in what context?

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, after the battles of the Solomons, New Guinea, and Guadalcanal were all over, the Imperial Japanese Army had a war college. An instructor comes into class one day and 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, which was Soviet tactics. It 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 a seminar. Then think about it: where are the Japanese actually fighting most of the time? What is the country that matters most 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.

They’re clearly making a really bad net assessment about the United States. This country is also known for lousy net assessments. I don’t believe ours about Vietnam was particularly good, either. That’s 1 part of the problem.

2. The code of the samurai

Here’s my game plan for this evening. I’m first going to talk about traditional Japanese theorists, and then I’m going to talk about Japanese practice—how explanatory this belief system is for practice. This is my game plan right now.

The Japanese don’t have just 1 book like Sun Tzu’s The Art of War or Clausewitz’s On War. What they have is the 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.

What’s interesting about this literature from a Western perspective is that it’s really not about military strategy. It’s about deportment—how a samurai should conduct himself. This reflects Japanese values and the things that they emphasize. I’m going to go through it with you.

Here’s the game plan on the theorists. 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.

I’m going to use as my cultural bridge this man, Nitobe Inazō, who wrote a book much later, in 1900: Bushido: The Soul of Japan. Why am I doing this? He provides a concise definition of Bushido. You can see he’s an important figure in Japan. Not everybody gets their mug on the 5,000-yen note.

He had spent 18 years abroad and had 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. He spent his life trying to serve as a cultural bridge, and that’s how I’m going to use him today.

What he said is that, unlike in the West, where notions of morality come from religion, in Japan they come from Bushido. What is it? It’s a chivalrous code of honor for the warrior class, these precepts of knighthood.

There are 3 pillars of Bushido, according to Nitobe. They are Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism. From Buddhism is where you see Japanese fatalism, the origin of it. Here you have Nitobe saying it’s “this calm trust in fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, friendliness with death.”

It strikes Westerners reading this Bushido literature that there’s a preoccupation with death. For instance, Clausewitz will talk about violence in warfare, but he’s not interested in what constitutes an honorable death, let alone choreographing a soldier’s final moments. Different culture.

From Buddhism, there are 4 Noble Truths. One is that existence is suffering—a 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: it blooms for a day, and then it’s gone.

But there’s a good ending to it all, which is nirvana. 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 a focus on deportment. It's different from the West.

3. Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism

The second pillar is Shinto, with its extreme patriotism and reverence for the emperor. The third pillar is Confucianism, these imported ideas from China. Confucianism is at the heart of how society is organized and regulated through interlocking social obligations, hierarchy, 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 equality in China or Japan. Even twins have a birth order. And it's not about freedom either. It's about what you owe others.

So, if you think that these value systems seem really different, yeah, no kidding. It has nothing to do with the Greco-Roman, Judeo-Christian West. It's a completely different value system. And so, Alice, welcome to Wonderland. Buckle up. We're off for a ride.

I'm going to start with my first piece of Tokugawa literature: Yamamoto Tsunetomo's Hagakure, which he wrote in the early 18th century. It translates variously as “Hidden Leaves” or “Hidden by the Leaves.” I'm going to read you some short passages from it.

4. Could US have prevented war?

Who 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. And here's Yamamoto:

“The way of the samurai is imagining the most seemly 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 is leading his life. And here you can see the consequences of this, right? If you're focusing on no fear of death and if you can't succeed, living on is a disaster.

Think of the banzai 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 death, there's the Bushido literature's 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. 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 shame.

And I'm going to use Nitobe as 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 of World War II. There were complex problems like battle plans not working out and a war that was truly not working out.

All right. So, in addition to death and suicide and honor, we've got loyalty. It's another key value. 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. 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 or having property blown up, but in terms of honor.

Also, there's 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?”

5. Unusual brutality of WWII

Japan's reasons for being in China had to do with containing communist expansion and also stabilizing the place so that 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.

6. Bushido as bad strategy

Also, there's this focus on what constitutes an honorable death. It's not the Western focus. The literature is all about preparing the field of battle in advance for success, whereas this literature is all about what to do after disaster. So, 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: when you decide you're going to annihilate an entire culture, you put people on death ground, and then they have very few choices about what they do next.

That 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 calculation 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 a lieutenant likely named Onoda, who had been hanging out in Philippine jungles for 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 the soldiers in them. Different culture, different things you do with your life.

And here is Sir William Slim, field marshal of the British Fourteenth Army, which he led in Burma, commenting on his experiences:

“If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495. The last 5 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 samurai is one of immediacy and desperateness. Simply become insane and desperate, and it'll somehow work out for you.”

And one can accomplish any feat. Think of Pearl Harbor. This emphasis on willpower and just trying harder denigrates strategy. Here you see a picture of the supreme example of honor, loyalty, and willpower. They're kamikaze pilots.

But if this is what you're doing, you're denigrating strategy. And here Yamamoto is 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 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're of the mind to win, you should be holding the first spear to strike.

So, here are the implications if you believe this. What you're doing is a very unanalytical way to approach wars. It's all about whatever it is you want. You just steel your 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 the bigger aim. 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. So, 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 and see how other people might react.” They just steel their will and march right on in.

Okay, that triggered the U.S. 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Operational success, strategic mess. So, this focus on just the operational level is the basis for this ill-founded operational optimism with which the Japanese just took territory after territory without saying, “Hey, what about the cost of actually occupying these places? And, oh, we're going to 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 Yamaga Sokō, who was a contemporary of Yamamoto because he provides a really concise definition of the operative values of samurai culture.

Only 3 things are considered essential: loyalty, duty, and valor. “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 Japanese society, it's divided into in-groups and out-groups. The most basic in-group—the biggest, overarching one—is the Japanese people vis-à-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 if they're in the military, they're in different branches. You also have family loyalties.

7. Military theorists

You owe each of these nested and overlapping groups different obligations. Sometimes these obligations conflict, and if the conflict is really awful, that's another reason for committing suicide. If you look at the Japanese language, the moment a person opens their mouth to speak to another Japanese person, you can immediately hear the grammatical forms being used and the specific word choices, and know the degree of hierarchy—where they sit in this unequal hierarchy—and whether it's in-group or out-group.

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

All right, the last theorist is Miyamoto Musashi, who, unlike the other 2, actually did a little fighting. He was born a little earlier, and he was a master samurai who taught people martial arts. 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 tolerance, because remember, at the beginning I started with the 2 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 5 or 10 people single-handedly in duels—that's what my military science is all about.”

What's the difference between the logic of 1 person beating up 10 people and 1,000 people beating 10,000? Logistics, my friend, but never mind. Another thing that he emphasizes, in addition, is 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. How do you get out of it? The answer that Miyamoto has is not to come up with a new policy objective, but to come up with a tactic that'll somehow put your enemy off balance and then get what you want that way. The way the Japanese did this was often by opening a new theater in a war, by surprising people with the new places where you were going to start engaging in military operations.

8. Shattering Japanese morale

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. The Japanese were appalled, particularly after the United States passed the likely Smoot-Hawley 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 1. But the rest of China is a mess, and it's coalescing into a bilateral communist-nationalist fight: nationalist under likely Chiang Kai-shek, communist under Mao Zedong, with increasing dosages of Soviet aid. The Japanese are appalled by all this, and so it's time to surprise everybody again in 1937. That's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze River.

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. 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—a really big one. On that infamous day in December 1941, 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 was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the map. After Pearl Harbor, they sure could. Suddenly, the United States isn't isolationist anymore, and they're coming to get the Japanese.

You can see the samurai values in operation here: just try harder, more doses of willpower. Eventually, you'll win, or you'll die trying. Another operational preference that you can see as part of the surprise is preemptive attacks. This is how Japan began all of its wars: the First Sino-Japanese War, the Second Sino-Japanese War, the Russo-Japanese War, and the Pacific War. This is how all of them begin.

Finally, Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy's willpower. In this case, you've already won conventionally, but they're waging an insurgency against you. I'm modernizing the terminology. The idea is that you want a psychological victory. You want them just to quit, and somehow you're going to break their will to resist. I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing in the Rape of Nanking and other atrocities: that they were going to do these horrifying things, and that would break the will of the other side.

Be careful whom you put on death ground. The Japanese were repeating a mistake made by the Nazis. If you're dealing with even a failing state—which Russia was; Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the 1930s, and then he inflicted a famine on Ukraine—but when the Nazis came in and they were going to wipe out not only the Russian government but also the Russian people, you will superglue people, government, and military together, and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary.

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.

There are strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis on the offensive and preemption. It's an emphasis on solving all your problems. 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 your plan has failed, you're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches and sequels, where there'll be unexpected events that take place and you'll adapt to them. None of that. You're a failure. Funny that stuff happens to you.

9. Embargo caused the war

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. You look at the Japanese at the end of the war and go, “Why didn'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.

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 in terms of using the military instrument and got themselves into trouble.

If you look at what the Japanese were doing, they had some vague ambitions and wanted to take advantage of opportunities, but there's no definition of what winning in this war is. How much territory should Japan take and then call it a day and say, “Done. It's been successful here”? Rather, their territorial acquisitions are really a function of what they were able to take and what, in 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.

10. Inter-service communication

Okay, that was Alice in Wonderland. Now we're going to get to how it works—how other people live—and, if you believe these things, how does it help explain what actually happened in World War II?

I'm going to start with 2 sins of omission: the Japanese neglect of paying more careful consideration to logistics, and then another sin of omission, a neglect of protecting their sea lines of communication. The last 2 are about these in-group and out-group divisions and the problems it caused within each military service—interservice rivalries—and then between the 2 services, the Navy and the Army, in the war that caused them such difficulties.

If you start at the beginning of the war, Japan never produced more than 1/13th of U.S. steel and coal production. It never did more than 10% of what U.S. munitions production was. I believe that if you do the math—taking all the battleships and dividing everything by the number of people—each U.S. soldier had 4 tons of equipment, whereas each Japanese soldier had about 2 pounds of equipment.

The Japanese main weapons in this war were the grenade and the bayonet. Their artillery and machine guns were very obsolete compared with what they had going into the Pacific War.

Then you flip it around and look at the United States. The United States had about 18 men in supply services—men and women, but mostly men—supporting each rifleman at the front. Other militaries in this period had about an 8:1 ratio. Japan had about a 1:1 ratio.

11. Strategic sins of omission

Japan was already suffering food shortages before Pearl Harbor. Then, when you get to the winter of 1942–43, the Japanese were having critical shortages of oil, so they could no longer deploy the fleet at will. That means you forget about convoying anything because you simply haven't got the oil to do it.

Yet by the time you get to 1945, when they were predicting they would have absolutely zero aviation fuel and other fuel by the end of the year, the government was still saying, “We're going to fight on” for this honorable—whatever it's going to be—these Bushido ideas that you just persevere: loyalty, honor, duty, keep going.

I'm going to be quoting this gentleman's diary: Admiral Ugaki Matome. He was the chief of staff of the Combined Fleet until his plane and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's plane were shot down. US code-breaking was quite good. We figured out where they were, and we killed Admiral Yamamoto, but this man survived.

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. Here is his last diary entry, written on August 15, 1945. This was after 2 atomic bombs had been dropped and after the Russians had deployed into Manchuria.

He said, “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 in natural resources between the 2 countries.”

It was too late to come to that conclusion. US 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. Those who knew better, who had done tours of duty in Britain or the United States, weren't promoted because they were defeatists.

I believe that Admiral Ugaki kept and maintained his diary because he was an honorable samurai. He had believed in Bushido, the ability of willpower to more than compensate for inferior resources. But the war's outcome had proved him incorrect.

As an honorable samurai, he paid with his life, and he kept his diary to show that there was nothing to be ashamed of. He had done what he was going to do.

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

By the end of the war, Japan was down to 1/9 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 described by Alfred Thayer Mahan, who was from where I work back in the day. It was all about fleet engagements and things, but it turns out that the Japanese Navy hadn't focused on convoy duty. Mahan called that a promising secondary operation. Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific: the US submarine service paralyzed Japan's sea lines of communication.

Go, submarines.

Here's Admiral Ugaki Matome, who eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy, rather than having these fleet-on-fleet engagements, because they had lost a lot of the fleet and didn't have the fuel to run it. But by the time he was recommending a more defensive strategy, they didn't have the fuel or the assets to do that either.

Earlier in the war, before all that bad stuff had happened, here's his take: “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.”

12. Crippled logistics

His disdain for the target would cost him. Later, when he was trying to account for why the Battle of Guadalcanal was going so badly for Japan, he noted, “The maintenance of supply and transport to the front has not even been half fulfilled each time. It led those on the verge of death”—that is, 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 and to maintain your supplies there. The Army was thinking, “You Navy are being irresponsible, not doing any of these things.”

There were tremendous interservice rivalries between the Army and Navy in Japan, and it goes back to the prewar budget wars, when Japan was a resource-poor country and both services had what they considered absolutely essential things to be funded. Japan didn't have the money to fund both, and then when you get into war and start expending these things, you need even more money. The disagreements were brutal.

But before I get there, the in-group and out-group differences that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between the Army and Navy. They're within each service. To be fair, I'm going to provide 1 example for each service.

I'll start with the Army. It was the Kwantung Army, or Japan's army in Manchuria, that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in 1931. It was not the home office back in Tokyo, but this branch turned out to kick off a 15-year war.

These folks thought that they knew what was best for Japan and how best to defend the empire, and they were just off and running. Meanwhile, there were a series of coup attempts, some of which involved the Navy, and many more of which involved the Army.

At the very end, when Emperor Hirohito was capitulating, there was 1 last coup attempt. It failed, because the war might not have terminated quite the way it did if it had succeeded.

The point is, if you've got coups running, that is not called unified command. It's a mess.

The Navy wasn't any better. I have a different sort of example here. During the war, the US air services—the people who were flying planes—would alternate combat and training missions. That way, 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 other lessons.

13. the Kwantung Army

In Japan, you signed up together, trained together, fought together, and died together. It doesn't mean the Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups; it's just that culturally, it wasn't the natural thing that came to mind.

Moreover, this apparently applies to the present: in the US military, they have what are called hot washes after different operations, where you come back and are very self-critical about all the things that went wrong, to figure out how to do it better the next time. There are cultural reasons why you would not want to do that in Japan. It's just different.

If these in-group and out-group dynamics are causing problems within services, it gets toxic between the services. I've got 4 examples, and I'm going to start with organizational issues.

It was only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally got it together to have regular liaison meetings in Tokyo. Great—just in time to figure out how the capitulation was going to work.

The Army wanted to unify the 2 high commands. The Navy wanted nothing to do with that, because they knew they would just become the box-lunch delivery service for the Army. They didn't want to do that.

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, for how they were going to coordinate their assets to protect the home island. They weren't even coordinating their air assets. Disaster.

This disaster goes way back in time. They had a very successful war against Russia that ended in 1905. But in 1906, immediately afterward, the Army and Navy were allowed to have completely separate war plans.

The Army plan was all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia. The Navy plan had a completely different set of enemies: the United States and Britain, for the big gambit of empire in the Pacific. You're not going to use ships in Siberia.

Each of these plans was secret from the other service, and each plan assumed that the other service was going to do all kinds of important things for it. Great. I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise normally applies to your enemies, not your sister service, but that's how it worked in this setup.

The Army did come around to the Navy plan. Why? Because it got walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of Nomonhan. The Russians decimated them in 1939.

Now the Army said, “Okay, okay, maybe that southern advance thing wasn't such a bad idea.” The Navy thought this was great, and they did their southern advance. They went zooming down.

The Japanese mind-over-matter stuff seemed to be going really well, because in 1942 the Army took more land over a more dispersed theater than any country on the planet. The Navy hadn't lost a single ship. It was looking really good—except there were a few little details that were a problem.

What the Navy hadn't told the Army was that it actually wasn't ready for this whole thing.

They needed this outer perimeter reinforced by airfields in order to make the thing work. That wasn't complete. The Army learned about this on August 17, 1942, because one of these airfields was being built in this tropical nightmare called Guadalcanal, which the United States knew about even though the Army didn't. All of a sudden, the Navy was in deep, dark trouble and needed the Army to help them out of Guadalcanal.

So now, think samurai. The Japanese 17th Army had been ordered to take Port Moresby and New Guinea. That's what they were up to. But with Guadalcanal, they were told, “Ah, you need to tack on Guadalcanal to that Port Moresby event.” Okay. And in logistics, they're 1,000 kilometers apart.

So now the Army was going to lie to the Navy about how many people they had at Guadalcanal because they were scared that the Navy wouldn't provide enough rations and things. The Navy didn't provide enough rations. People starved anyway. Then the Navy that got the Army into this mess wanted to call it off and move out, but the Army samurai wanted to fight on, and they just expended all kinds of resources.

This thing had enormous strategic effects. Prior to Guadalcanal, the Japanese Army wanted to continue its strategy of chasing the Nationalists out of China. Back in 1937, the Japanese had conquered Nanjing, which was the original Nationalist capital. The Nationalists had fled up the Yangtze River to Chongqing, beyond some gorges and other things and beyond the rail network.

In 1943, the Japanese were planning to attack Chongqing. At that point, I think if you're a Nationalist, you're fleeing into Burma. If that had happened, then the Japanese could probably have 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 had enormous strategic implications. If you're focusing the samurai on one battle, Guadalcanal, it has implications in places called China and Australia that are a long way off.

The United States also had interservice rivalries, right, between our Army and Navy. That's why you have 2 separate campaigns, for Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur. Big egos, 1 campaign for each ego. Apparently, that wasn't even big enough for MacArthur.

Even so, I don't believe the interservice rivalries in the United States were remotely on the scale that they were in Japan. I have 1 final example to prove that.

After Pearl Harbor, which had been tremendously successful for Admiral Yamamoto, he wanted the next thing to be an attack on Midway because of the U.S. basing there. The Army said, “I don't want to. We're not going to do this.” Yamamoto said, “I'm going to resign.” And the Army said, “We don't care. I'll commit suicide. We'll buy popcorn.”

Here's what changes this. After Pearl Harbor, Americans wanted to let the Japanese know that we were thinking about them. This is where Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle comes in—the Doolittle Raid was 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 were going to bomb Japan and then ditch in China, whoever survived.

Very brave people did this. Were they going to cause massive damage in Japan? Well, yeah, if you're directly underneath, you won't appreciate it. But in general, it caused minor damage and had a major, unanticipated strategic benefit.

Think samurai. The Army all of a sudden backed the Navy, and they were now going to 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 4 aircraft carriers. They've only got 12. They've lost a third. Oops. In-group, out-group. The Navy doesn't tell anyone for 3 or 4 months. Incredible. In a war, right? They're thinking about their little stovepipe and ignoring Japanese interests while this is going on.

Okay, different story. They do get their operational end to the whole thing. It's the firebombing of Tokyo. The whole place went up in flames. In fact, it got so hot that the canals boiled. It's an operational solution, and 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? Here's what happened: 3 really bad things happened in 4 days. Talk about a concentration of really bad events, from a Japanese point of view, happening all at once. What you want to talk about here is the psychological shattering that actually happens to the Japanese.

First, the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. 2 days later, the Russians pour 1.5 million people into Manchuria, the nightmare scenario of the Japanese Army. They know that if this war is prolonged, the Russians are going to come down through Manchuria, down the Korean Peninsula, onto Hokkaido, and down the home islands. It will yield a divided Japan if it goes on for a long time.

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

But the emperor has had enough, and he breaks the deadlock in the cabinet. The cabinet allows the deadlock to be broken the next day, and then he makes an unprecedented radio address to his subjects, telling them, “Game over.” The next day, he sends 3 imperial princes to the Manchurian, Chinese, and southern theaters, conveying his orders: “Game over.”

From that moment on, his samurai obeyed him and absolutely cooperated with the occupation. There was no insurgency, nothing going on after this.

At the end of the war, the United States came to understand the Japanese. At the beginning, we totally misread the situation with the oil embargo that's meant to deter and instead precipitates the war that we didn't want. But at the end of the war, the United States realizes that you're going to need some level of Japanese cooperation if you're going to occupy the place. They're going to use Emperor Hirohito for this.

Hirohito is scared to death—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. So he's willing to sign any piece of paper that MacArthur puts under his pen. One of those is the Constitution of Japan.

It's going to change their civil and military institutions, demilitarize the place, and try to get a democracy going there. The Constitution was written in 1 week by MacArthur's staff. They're running around raiding bombed-out libraries for examples of Western constitutions, and they cobble this thing together.

This is the unamended Constitution of Japan, still in effect to this very day. MacArthur's gift to Japan.

I've been incredibly critical of the Japanese, but to sum up here, there are cultural explanations for their neglect of grand strategy, inability to cut their losses, inability to coordinate, and the ferocity with which they fought. If you look at their values, they're explanatory of what may well happen when things get set off.

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.

When the Japanese went into Manchuria in 1931, we wanted them out. We didn't ask, “Why are you doing this?” Their answer would be, “Well, hey, you passed the likely Smoot-Hawley Tariff. That means we're trade-dependent. Whom are we going to trade with? Once you passed the tariff, everyone retaliated. So you've now shut down international trade. We need an empire that's big enough to survive. That's why we're in Manchuria.”

“And by the way, there are way too many communists here. We've got to get rid of those.” Then, in 1937, when they upped the ante by going into the rest of China, we didn't inquire what was going on.

What the Japanese wanted to do was wall off communism. We didn't want that. And then they wanted to stabilize China so that you could have some productive economic growth. If you go, “What were U.S. postwar objectives for China?”—ooh, sounds remarkably familiar: communists out, stabilize the place.

Okay. How does the war affect all this? Actually, the warfare that went on wiped out the 2 barriers to communist expansion in Asia. What are the barriers? One, it's Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists in China. The Japanese wiped him out. They didn't totally defeat him, but they so weakened and discredited him that by the end of World War II, he was really poorly positioned to win the Chinese Civil War, which he promptly lost.

Then what does the United States do? What's the other barrier to communism? Well, it's the Japanese. We wipe them out. What do you get? A unified communist China, which makes for really complicated wars in the Korean War and the Vietnam War.

The problem is a gift that keeps on giving. We're still dealing with this problem today.

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. Rather, try to analyze why. Ask yourself, “Why is someone doing whatever they're doing?” Just because you're trying to understand it doesn't mean you're condoning it. You're just trying to figure out the logic of the other person.

It’ll set you up for more informed choices.

I’m a little bit confused about some of the Bushido stuff and how it explains Japan’s actions in the war. This Zen Buddhism stuff—the cherry blossoms that are blossoming, and how you must act with the generosity of a samurai, all this Bushido moral stuff—how does that square with Japan’s conduct during the war: the Rape of Nanking, the killing of millions of Chinese, and the treatment of prisoners of war, which rivaled the fatality rates of the Nazi extermination camps? It seems like—where’s the Buddhism there? Where’s the Bushido?

14. Q&A begins

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

There were POWs, and there were cases of hostile civilians who also got slaughtered because—I don’t know the reason—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 1931, so you have desperate people.

There’s another piece I can add. I can’t explain a whole people, but in the prison camps, if you were Japanese, let’s say you and I were looking each other in the eye—that’s how you do it in the West, to 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.

You can imagine a Westerner in a prison camp looking his guard in the eye, and the guard’s going, “Who is this arrogant person? You’re a POW.” You can imagine that bad things are then going to happen. These are guesses about what’s going on. There are certain values that I’ve talked about, there’s a certain desperation that’s going on, and then there’s the dehumanization of what wartime is all about, right? Initially, conscripts in all armies have 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. 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, based on 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 immediately happening in the 1910s and what the proximal strategic objectives were. 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 2 parts. One analytical framework is that 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. There’s this accumulating tinder where you’ve got 2 different sides at cross-purposes. But then there’s the match, the proximate cause, which is a whole series of matches. Finally, the last one is Pearl Harbor, and you’re off and running to a place you might not want to go to, right?

Then there’s culture. Let’s look at Britain’s strategic culture. I’m no expert on British strategic culture, but these are some basics. They’re an island, and they want to be able to trade with the world, but they don’t want any 1 power dominating the continent. This is their strategic thinking from way back. 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. That’s very much a part of British thinking, going back a long time, and you can read things going back a long time describing that situation.

There’s another piece that goes back a long time in British strategic culture: navies are rarely decisive in warfare. What do I mean by “decisive”? It means you actually get the goal that you’re after for fighting, whereas armies can be decisive. If your goal is, “I want to occupy all of France,” or better yet, the whole of Holland—something smaller—an army might be able to do that for you, as 1 instrument of national power.

Britain is reliant on a navy and doesn’t like to have a big standing army, so they’re thinking in terms of diplomacy and allies, and using economics—making money from trade. They’re 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. No 1 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 you go, “Oh, that’s what she thinks. Ha-ha. We’re going to do something different,” right? So this is the problem with human beings.

The loyalty precept wasn’t 1 of the problems with the Japanese military—that they weren’t loyal, that they were trying to do these coups all the time, and that 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, 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. It’s not necessarily the case in the East. Now, people have different educations, so we’re going back to a time when people were not looking in terms of, “Okay, we’ve got to have a logically consistent argument.” Rather, there are these social values that we are going to prioritize. 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 it’s going to go.

You’re doing a wonderful piece of Western logic. It’s excellent. This is why other cultures find dealing with Westerners like battery acid, because they have these different belief systems. You go, “Okay, you have women, and we’ve 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 that the Nazis were putting their enemies on death ground, and the Japanese were putting their enemies on death ground. In both cases, it was detrimental because you were preventing the other side from surrendering.

That seems even worse than what was happening before that period in history. You can think, over time, that our norms about civility and war crimes are improving, 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, there was 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, and it’s a horrible piece of human existence. 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.

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 happened, yeah, they were leveled, but once you get a trench, they’re not. We in the West don’t actually study too much what happened to the civilians on the Eastern Front, where it was moving around.

This is back to my half-court tennis. We’re not paying attention to those civilians, so for the West there were very few civilian casualties, whereas when you get to World War II, you’re bombing people. With new technologies, you can get at people, and you can invade. Also, it’s the lesson of World War I.

The feeling that the Germans really hadn't felt their defeat allowed them to make up this story about how they weren't defeated. The Jews did it, or whoever—they were betrayed. Churchill and Roosevelt decided there would be a march to Berlin to disabuse them of that, and that was killing a lot of civilians to get to Berlin. Of course, the Russians were determined to pay back for what the Nazis had done to them, and we had no sympathy for—we weren't going to turn a blind eye to—what the Russians were up to, because the Nazis had been so heinous.

This is probably wrong, and 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 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 because they failed to empathize with or think from the perspective of their enemy. They were just thinking, “Listen, if we lost, we would commit seppuku. When they lose, they forfeit human rights.” In some sense, it was just applying the principle of social death to their enemy.

The whole war is brutal. They're doing a lot of hand-to-hand brutality, and part of it has to do with lack of equipment. The firebombing of Tokyo happened in 1 night. I think 80,000 Japanese were incinerated.

Okay, let's talk about brutality. The reason why Americans did that is because they knew the alternative was sending American kids onto Japan, who would die doing that. The decision was that it was better to kill a lot of Japanese civilians than it was to kill American soldiers.

That's controversial, right? Why did the Americans drop atomic bombs on the Japanese?

There was no disagreement about that in the United States at the time, because it was a question of whether you were going to send American young men your age—and millions of them would have died hitting the home islands—or whether you were going to do the bombing. Of course, the Americans did the bombing.

Was there any way for the West, or for America, to win the Pacific War without the firebombing?

This is a whole other topic: winning 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, it’s a day. Is it overthrowing the Taliban at a particular period, or is it trying to turn the whole place into a democracy? 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, okay, if the win is going to be that the United States transforms Japan into a functional democracy, or sets them on the road so that they will become one, then no. Because if you don’t—I showed you the 3 horrible events in 4 days. That’s quite incredible, to have that much bad news happening in half a week. That absolutely shattered the Japanese.

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. Then you’ve got—I don’t know—Japan as a new North Korea, just this inevitable, eternal, nonfunctioning society.

So, no. These wars are tragic. Also, don’t think that you have all the cards, 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. There’s obviously the invasion 10 years before, and you’ve got the tariffs, and that creates the incentive to build an empire. But even months before, when there are 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 understand that there was a compromise here—was such a big factor.

I feel like if Prince Konoe and FDR could get on a Zoom call, the war—

You’re an optimist. Think about sunk costs. 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 way out of that one.

The United States’ minimum program is: you get out of China. Not happening if you’re Japanese. The government is definitely on death ground with that one, because there’s no way they stay in power if they get out of China. This is particularly 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. I don’t think a Zoom call is 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 removed as emperor?

Yeah, early on. There’s another piece. Let’s look at the United States in 1941: the Great Depression, isolationist. 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. They were totally isolationist.

Hawaii wasn’t even a state. It doesn’t become a state until 1959. If you’re Japanese, you look at this place and think, “Oh, it’s a colony.” It’ll be like the dog that barks: you take a newspaper and flap him a few times, and maybe the dog will start barking.

What the Japanese want is for the United States to just mind its own business. Stay out of Asia. It’s our backyard; it’s not your backyard. The Japanese look at the United States, and the United States doesn’t have that much trade with Asia compared to the rest of the world. Sure, it sells Japan most of its oil, but that’s not most of U.S. trade.

I was reading about this before preparing to interview you, and there are particular cases where diplomacy broke down. There are examples where the translators between Japan and America—and I can’t believe this is true, so you can tell me if it’s not—were exaggerating what each side was saying to make it more vivid to read.

If Tojo says something conciliatory, it’s exaggerated to make it more vivid. That’s obviously not the role of a diplomatic translator. There are many cases where, after the war, Tojo says, “If we had gotten the modus vivendi that FDR apparently was contemplating sending to us, if we saw those agreements, we would have agreed.”

Apparently, they misunderstood the final agreement they got from Secretary of State Hull. It said that they must return China, but they thought it included Manchuria. Hull didn’t intend it to include Manchuria. They might have said yes to that.

It seems like the war really could have been averted if a couple of mistranslations had been avoided.

I wouldn’t take Tojo as my source for anything. He was talking before a graduating class of cadets or something about how even mediocre people had said that he was mediocre, but look where he had risen to be—and he was this great man. Also, at the end he’s got this whiny answer of, “Oh, it wasn’t my fault. It’s all your translators.”

And the piece 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. By the way, it is a fiction that Manchuria is not part of China. It is an integral part of China; it has been for the longest time.

What the Japanese did is kidnap the last Qing emperor, a Manchu whose ancestors came from Manchuria—Henry Pu Yi—and pop him in there, make him the emperor, to try to come up with this fiction that Manchuria was a separate place. Excuse me, it’s not. It’s part of China. It’s the internationally recognized territory of China.

I wonder if one of the problems here is that it was not in the vital strategic interest of America to secure or liberate China. In fact, the outcome of the war obviously is a communist power, and as we’ll talk about in the next lecture, that was the very opposite of liberating China.

America basically 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. It’s not even for the main strategic objective, which is that you’ve got to get Hitler, you’ve got to beat Germany. Wasn’t this just our failure of grand strategy to realize, “Why are we doing this? What’s our strategic objective?”

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 in Europe.

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

The main thing that Americans who thought deeply cared about was the international system: that we should deal with each other through laws, through freedom of navigation.

15. The liberation of China

So this is how you run your commercial transactions: big countries don’t get to overrun small countries, because if they do, the entire international system goes down. The logic that you’re describing is excellent logic, and this is what the Japanese are saying: Why would the Americans care about this?

Americans care deeply about the international system—or at least 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? They’ve unified very recently on this. It’s because the whole system is at stake.

So it’s 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 wasn’t, at least at the time, willing to give enough concessions to the factions within Japan that cared about peace so that they could save face and actually argue for ending the war. The idea that they’re going to give up Manchuria as well—obviously, that’s not going to happen.

That faction had already lost, and they lost in 1936. Takahashi Korekiyo was 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.

He told the army, “Fellas, if you go on this bent for empire, you’re not actually going to get resources, because you’re going to spend a lot of money fighting with people and using resources to do that. Then it’s going to take you years of investment to access these resources, so you’ve got to be able to cover these investments for years and years and years.”

He was saying, “Cooperate within the international system. That is the way to prosperity for Japan.” Well, that was the February 26 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. It was over. But Prince Konoe, the person who was 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.

There are people where the prime minister doesn’t want war, and we don’t give him enough to save face. They have a huge army there that’s more than capable of assassinating people, and they get in the way. So that ship has sailed. You can’t go back to the way the world was.

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 Japan—a wonderful country now, at the leading edge of so many different areas of human endeavor. 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 war—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 been done?

Holy smokes. But, in the United States directly before—this is serious—we all lived through that Smoot-Hawley Tariff. A 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.

Then, okay, what’s the other side 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 Japan, you’re in a world of hurt. The easy solutions are no longer there anymore.

So maybe I’ll ask the question this way: The oil embargo—was it a mistake? The idea is to protect the international system and prevent empire. Well, we got more empire, we got a world war, and we got communists taking over in China. Whatever was going to happen if we got rid of the oil embargo can’t have been worse than that, right?

What Roosevelt was really scared of was that the Japanese would attack Russia, because then he thought Russia would fall. 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 let’s say you don’t do it, and Japan never attacks us. Then the Russians are down and you’ve got Nazis in control of the world, so it must be better. It doesn’t seem insane to think that. You don’t have the world war with America, and we’re still going to fight the Nazis.

You’re not going to have an international system. And if that’s the case, the Nazis were gearing up, because eventually they’re going to fight us.

Another concept that I think is useful is limited versus unlimited objectives. A limited objective—or an unlimited objective—is, “I want to do regime change on your country.” The most unlimited variety is, “Not only do I want to do regime change, but I want to kill all your people while I’m at it.”

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 it. What is it you want? Just this little sliver of territory, or do you want some preferential treatment? We can do that for you.

But you’re talking about a world order here that’s going to be based increasingly on laws, or on these opposing spheres of influence to keep pushing back on this. I don’t have an answer beyond that. I’ve given you what little I can think of, but I’m not the grand puppeteer in this world. These questions you’re asking me are way above my pay grade.

People in the YouTube comment section get mad at me when I keep asking about counterfactuals. I understand that I don’t understand what was happening at the time, and that I’m naive about history, 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? Counterfactuals are the main way we can do that.

Yeah, 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 that they had to kill millions of people. That is what they believed. The Japanese didn’t, in the same way, have that ideology. Naturally, they had their continental empire. They also wanted trade, and they didn’t like communists. They didn’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, and there was the oil embargo.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But the question is: Should we have gotten rid of the oil embargo?

But 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. 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 the Japanese bombers are running on.

I feel like—no, I mean, morally, I agree. They don’t own our oil. The question is not whether they’re entitled to it; it’s whether we should have given it to them. Would the outcome have been better if we did?

16. Counterfactuals in history

I’m telling you, I suspect the outcome wouldn’t have been better. But I don’t know, right? You’re asking me things where my experience is that I’m just a professor. I show up at seminars on time, and I try to do reading and preparation.

My experience has not been in government, let alone at the highest echelons of government, where you understand what’s feasible and what’s not feasible. 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 did think they were led by a living deity? Did that make them think they could win, or is that related to why they thought they could win?

No. But you’re looking at the United States—it’s isolationist. If you’re Japanese and you’re looking at these absolutely isolationist Americans, who are letting Britain, their closest ally, potentially go down to the Nazis, right? Because think about Britain.

How did it all work? The fall of Norway, the fall of France, then they lost Crete. We aren't even in the war. They're about to lose everything, and we're not doing anything.

So wait a second. Now I'm losing track of my train of thought. Revisit the question again, please. Can somebody in the audience remember the question? Oh, the optimism of the Japanese.

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 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 trade is elsewhere.”

17. Japanese optimism

They're looking at it as isolationist: “Won't the isolationists go, ‘This is expensive. Let's get out of here’?” Of course, that's not understanding Americans. I remember I was in a seminar the day that 9/11 happened. There was a TV in the seminar rooms, and there was a break. At the end of the break, the students had the TV on, and we were watching Tower 1 go down. Then, while we were in the seminar, we watched the next one go down, and I thought, “Oh my, there's going to be hell to pay for this one.”

That's how Americans are: if you mess with us, boy, does it get ugly. I thought, “This is like, don't think—retaliate.” The Japanese didn't understand that part of us. In fact, a lot of people don't. We look like a bunch of hedonists, but if you mess with us, it's ugly.

If you were in the Japanese government a couple of 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 were the finance minister or the prime minister. Was there anything they could have done to prevent an inevitable conflict with America?

They brought it up, and they said, “Well, we can't afford this. The resources aren't here.” 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 an advanced industrial nation in a generation, there just isn't enough time for the culture to evolve? 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, and the Meiji Restoration happened too fast.

No, it didn't happen too fast. 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. We no longer have slavery. Amen. But you look at today, at really consequential things about our own institutions.

Now we're going to pick on the Japanese because they managed, in one generation, to westernize their political, judicial, legal, and educational systems—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 Genrō.

This was a very distinguished generation of Japanese who all knew each other. Their career paths were very broad, covering both civil and military areas. 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 groups to discuss things without giving primacy to the military.

18. Tech change and social change

And then understand the tradition in Japan: the shogun. That's what Japan had before. What's a shogun? Shogun is a Japanese word for general. The long history of Japan is military rule. So when it comes back in World War II, in a way, that is a kind of normality. It would have taken a long time.

This comes back to the United States fooling around with tariff walls and 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 about just a number of years. Let's 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. 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—the officers—but nobody was even in charge of the military. There was no one in charge. I think you called it a system of irresponsibility, where it was basically government by committee. Tell me more about that. Why does that lead to mistakes?

I'm going to flip 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—if you have a particular job, that job gives you certain authority by law to do things. Then we have courts to adjudicate when other people think that you've exceeded your authority, and they start suing about different things. That's how it goes in the West. It's very legalistic.

It goes all the way back to the Romans. When I think about what the West is, it's Greek logic, Roman law, and these Judeo-Christian moral values. Those are essential pillars of what the West is all about.

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

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

I'm no expert, but you're projecting the kind of institutional setup that Western countries typically have onto 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 banzai charge that they knew was hopeless and where they were all going to die, and they knew they were put in this hopeless situation because of these destructive, petty fights between the navy and the army, where one of them wasn't willing to supply the other one, why didn't that break their morale? Why wasn't it just, “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”?

I don't know the answer, because I'm not a social historian, where you would really be doing that kind of work. I've always done more diplomatic and military history, so you're looking top-down. But what you're asking is a very important question for how individuals react to all this, and I do not know the answer.

You'd have to look at another piece that makes it hard in Japan: 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 that we're all sinners, right? Original sin. We're all defective goods from the very beginning. So there isn't this expectation of perfection, because it's known that you're kind of a mess to begin with.

That's a whole other problem of getting people to open up about truly horrible events. I don't know the answer. I know that the World War II generation came home, and they just didn't talk about it with their children. It just wasn't a matter for discussion. So I can't answer 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. 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 in what young men are willing to do when their officers start telling them.

The way the Russians solve this problem in Ukraine—and Stalin would do this, too—is that you send people up ahead, and then you've got the NKVD or whatever, the killer unit. Anyone who tries to go the wrong way on the battlefield gets 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, in more democratic places, people aren't willing to go along with this now. 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, “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 hash it out?

It's more that someone's decided what the curriculum is going to be, and then you teach it. As of about 6 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. I think the whole point of the curriculum at the war college is to get people out of the operational level. The junior course is about the strategic effects of operations.

It’s like, okay, Pearl Harbor is an example I’ll use. It’s an A+ military operation. They sink everything. Of course, it’s shallow water, and we raise most of it afterward. They lose nothing. Boy, how can you do a more perfectly choreographed military operation than that one? Except it turns an absolutely isolationist country into one hellbent on coming after Japan, and that would be called a strategic disaster.

19. Hamming questions

You’ve got to be cautious about your military actions and think about what the strategic consequences are, 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 how to use armies; in the Navy, 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?

Economics is a huge one. There is no definitive answer in these wars; rather, you can give analytical concepts. This is my reason for doing these lectures: 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 better shape.

Or take limited versus unlimited wars. Unlimited wars are putting people on death ground. Does that answer the question? No. But you go, “Okay, if Vladimir Putin has an unlimited objective vis-à-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, history isn’t over. The great, long-standing struggle is between continental powers that want to divide the world up into mutually exclusive spheres of influence and butcher each other over territory. Very negative, and they tend to be very authoritarian. Whereas this maritime order says, “Hey, surely, join the party, follow the rules, you’ll make money,” right?

Angela Merkel, who was German chancellor for many years, was thinking, “Hey, we’ll sell Putin a lot of 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: killing people to get things. It’s more promising to spread the other one.

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. If you just said, “We can’t compromise with people who have these unlimited goals, like Putin, who have these territorial goals,” and we’re using the analogy as you’re explicitly making it to Japan during World War II, what it took, if we wanted to say, “We’re not going to compromise with your territorial goals; we will stop you in every way,” was a world war that led to an unconditional surrender. If we’re using that analogy, does that imply that no compromise requires some unconditional-surrender-type event?

No, no, no.

Isn’t this the death-ground thing?

No. There’s something called a 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. 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. This is where the sanctions and things come in: you give people a timeout from the world order. You don’t solve it.

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 timeout and being more malign at home. It’s more like that: not recognizing, for instance, conquests. 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—I think—oh, yeah, the Baltic states had their funds in U.S. banks. So when Stalin overran them, I think those funds became what funded their embassies. Generations later, we recognized their independence. You can’t solve these things on anyone’s watch.

Basically, the reason 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 minds?

Unknown.

But just to finish the point—because you’re advocating that as the way we should proceed with this—it’s worth asking. If we 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,” 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 what are we? We’re just making the people poor. We’re not even changing the government’s decision. What’s the idea here?

I don’t know the answer. 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.

Well, you want to learn things, and so I’ve done a lot of edited books to learn things—one on different kinds of naval operations, and then they feed into the books that are more overarching. This one’s on sanctions, and we’re in the process of writing the concluding chapter now.

The things that you’re bringing up are important. 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. 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.

20. Do sanctions work?

I don’t have the answer. The other piece is that you’re dealing with these expansionist powers with a limited toolkit, and the question is which tool to use. I truly don’t have the answer. But what you’ve mentioned is a really good counterargument. I’ve given you an argument, and I don’t know which rebuttal is the better one, honestly.

I think the whole approach—this is another thing about what you were asking, what you’re worried about—but here’s something to help you with what you’re worried about: thinking in terms of arguments, counterarguments, and rebuttals. 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 not another. 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. If you try to do sanctions, it doesn’t seem to work that well. Well, if you try to replace a regime, people said, “Look at Saddam’s regime after his invasion of Kuwait. This is somebody who has territorial goals, so we can’t have somebody who’s 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 the idea of what you do with the reprehensible regimes—well, that seemed like a big open question.

In the Gulf War, Bush Senior fought a limited war for a limited objective. Their limited objective was to get Iraqi troops out of Kuwait and restore the Kuwaiti government. Those are the 2 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.

Right, because when you have run a successful limited war, it’s over, and 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. 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 at least boot Osama bin Laden out of the country, then proclaim it victory and leave.

Going back to Japan.

Yeah.

Okay, 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 1930s and 1940s?

I don’t know. It was also becoming more and more authoritarian, and I have no idea on that subject. Again, it’s a social historian’s question that would require really detailed knowledge that I don’t have.

I had Daniel Yergin, 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. One of the interesting points he made was that he thinks a big part of the motivation behind the kamikaze missions 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. As we learned in 9/11—sorry to bring it back—it’s really much easier to learn how to take off in 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 a guided missile. It was an act of having very few assets at the end of the war and not enough fuel to fly anyone anywhere. So it’s going to be a guided missile into an aircraft carrier, a battleship, a destroyer, or something.

One of the things I learned from your book is that the overwhelming fraction of deaths 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 according to your book—1.8 million of the total 2.1 million Japanese deaths occurred. That’s 85% of the total, in the last 14 months of the war.

A similar thing is true with Germany, where I think 43% of the deaths happened in the last year of the war—2.3 million out of the 5.3 million. Walk me through what is going on inside the 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, common will, common weal is the 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 reason why the deaths are 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 you’re talking about mass starvation as a result of having done a number of previous years of warfare.

21. Backloaded mass death

And also, this mass starvation helps account for why one side gets shattered and quits. 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 when 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 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 and they’ll go away.” They’re going to come in for the whole thing.

Yeah, I still feel like I don’t understand exactly what’s going on. There are a couple of options, and maybe the correct answer isn’t one of these. One is denialism: They genuinely do not understand that they’re going to lose the war. Another is, look, they know they’re going to lose, but they would prefer to just go out dying. They’re dead anyway, so who cares, right?

Well, this is the problem with nuclear weapons. Push someone into a large corner—or a tight enough corner—and maybe they think, well, it’s my last day, so guess what? It’s going to be 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 unconditional surrender, maybe we could reach a peace earlier. Most of the deaths could have been spared.

Oh, I think by the time those 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. We’re not worried about Japanese civilian deaths or Japanese military deaths. We’re looking: 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.

Yeah, it’s ugly by the time you’ve killed this many people. There’s a kind of bitterness on both sides.

Was it a mistake to demilitarize Japan after the war? There are a couple of things. One is, look, they did become an ally afterward, and if they had had a military, they could have helped us in the Korean War. The outcome might have been different with military help.

Yeah, that was the secret part. They were the ones who knew about demining. So, in the aftermath, 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.

When the North Koreans are throwing a lot of mines around, it’s the Japanese who are helping. It was secret. That’s why you don’t know about it. It’s not your fault. It came out in recent research.

Another thing: When MacArthur does his Incheon landings, it’s very tricky because the tides are—I don’t know how many feet—30-foot tides. It’s enormous. So you can really get stuck on mud flats if you don’t time that right and know where you’re going. Who are the pilots who bring it all in? They’re Japanese.

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. That then fits in with what the Constitution says they’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 didn’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.

22. demilitarizing Japan

It’s too late. They’ve gutted the Nationalist armies. That was a massive strategic error on the Japanese side. Part of it comes from arrogance: Don’t denigrate the other side. The Japanese thought, China’s a failed state. These people are hopeless. They can’t decide what they’re doing. They’ve got warlords everywhere. We’ll just push them around and get what we want.

They do really well moving into Manchuria. Manchuria is bigger than Germany and France combined. The Japanese actually stabilize it and do lots of investment. That’s why it becomes the most industrialized part of Asia outside the home islands, more so than Shanghai. This is in the ’30s.

So they’re looking at that, and 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? Are they trying to join zaibatsu? Do they want to become a general in the military?

I have no idea. This is social history. I just truly don’t know. You don’t see a lot—well, yeah, I just truly don’t know.

It has to do with there being so much to know in this world that all of us can do is know a corner of it. My corner has been top-down. Actually, my expertise—I started out with a major field in Russian history and a minor field in Chinese history, and then I realized that to deal with those 2, you had to understand Japan. So you ask me, in my weak suit, about the social history of that country, and I can’t answer it.

My friend Edgardo has a theory that, look, 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 later on. In fact, they’re some of our best allies.

So there are 2 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 didn’t ally ourselves with the peaceful factions within these countries.

It basically illustrates a failure of diplomacy on our part: The natural allies we weren’t allied with, we ended up going to wars with.

There’s no amount of diplomacy that’s going to solve Hitler. One of the lessons is: Don’t let the global economy melt down. When that happens, not only will Americans get desperate, but people who are poorer than Americans—which is lots of the world—will be truly desperate.

As for why the Japanese and the Germans are such wonderful allies as they are, it’s a testament to having a generous peace. The peace after that war was not to get even, which is what the peace after World War I had been. The Germans had done all this terrible stuff, and we were going to make them pay all kinds of money, and we were going to tell them it was all their fault, and blah blah blah. That doesn’t work well.

23. Post-war alliances

Rather, the peace was—of course, what the Russians did to East Germany—but for West Germany, it was: How do you reintegrate them back into Europe and get them back in? And the Japanese as well.

There was also a serendipitous effect of the Korean War. The Japanese economy was a total mess at the end of this war, and the United States, of course, was overtaxed because there was Europe to rebuild and there wasn’t enough money to do everything.

But when the Korean War hits, immediately in 1950, tons of supplies are bought in Japan. That's how the Japanese economy is initially restored: through the Korean War and then the Vietnam War, because Japan is the local place—or more local, for the United States—to buy a lot of supplies. So that's another piece of why things work out.

When you were showing the things we learned from the diary entries of different admirals or generals on the Japanese side, as you were going through the archives and looking at these things, I'm curious: 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 the Japanese archives. I was doing strictly diplomatic stuff. Admiral Ugaki Matome's diary—which is the one thing I cited on these subjects—was translated. Someone ran into it, translated it into English, and so I just read the whole thing.

The other quotations, I think I was taking from secondary sources where someone else had done the archival research, and then I pulled those. That's where the quotations came from. So again, I haven't done this deep read into all of the Japanese thinking about what motivated them in their careers. I have not done that.

Was there some big aha moment when you were going through all this Japanese material, where you thought, “Now I understand why certain things transpired in a certain way”?

When I came to the Naval War College in 2000, they assigned me a couple of lectures. Because it's a group-taught class, everyone only gives 2, 3, or 4 lectures, and I was junior, so I think I got 1 or 2. I was told to lecture on the World War II Pacific, and I thought, “Oh, great, the U.S. Navy. This will be a joke—me telling them about the World War II Pacific, right?” I'm a historian whose major field is Russia, whose minor field is China, and I've dabbled in Japan, and now I'm supposed to talk about this.

My husband said, “Well, hey, I've taught this survey of Japan. Read this Bushido stuff.” He had some of the books hanging around the house, so I read them, and then I read some basic things about World War II. This is why I'm telling you that I think it's a useful way to approach other cultures: read what they read. What are the key books? Apparently, these were key books.

Then you go, “Okay, if I believe this, then I'm going to take Western analysis rather than mirror-imaging. I'm going to basically take their software, put it in my brain, and then say, ‘Okay, does this inform me of what they're doing in the banzai charges?’” It's like, “Oh, yeah, that actually makes sense now,” instead of saying, “What are these nut jobs doing?” It's, “No, no, actually, if you believe these things, then this would explain how you're doing things.” So that's how it all came about.

One thing I was wondering about when you were talking about the interservice rivalries is: how did the Allies avoid this? Not only between the branches of the military, but I mean, the Allies—the word literally says it—they had to coordinate with each other. Japan wasn't coordinating with Germany in the way that America was coordinating with Britain. What were the institutions or the culture that made this possible for the Allies?

This institutional rivalry is terrible all over the place, but there are other concepts that are useful. When you're looking at people and you have disagreements with them, it's really helpful to ask: who is their primary adversary or rival, not their secondary one? They probably have a whole list of people who annoy them, but who's number 1? And where is the primary theater of whatever that disagreement is? Look at that.

Then, on the disagreement, how big a deal is it? Is it existential? Japan thought—and the reason why it was incomprehensible to us, which we couldn't figure out—was that their entire existence was at stake. They absolutely had to have territory in China to survive. Whether that's correct or not is a completely different story. If they believed it, that's what was motivating them.

24. Inter-service rivalry

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. And what about the ultimate goals? Well, actually, those don't align at all, 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: Hitler has to go. That's superglue for an alliance.

Now let's flip it to the Axis. Italy: what does Italy want? The Roman Empire, whatever it is. Who's the primary enemy? Britain, because that's where British interests are. Hitler: what's he all about? He wants to do his Lebensraum, a 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've got a whole new problem on their hands. None of this aligns, so the Axis aren't going to be trading many resources with each other.

Whereas the Allies—and it really goes back to your original question about the British—their way of running wars is that you absolutely coordinate with allies. You give them serious resources, which is what they finally figured out at the end of the Napoleonic Wars, when they were paying big money to support different allies. Then you've got to put skin in the game and actually send your armies.

The British—and we take this from them; we're students of the British on this—do massive sharing with Lend-Lease, and Stalin isn't sharing too much with us. Then we've got 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 Murmansk. It's hardly anyone who's up there. So this is a different cultural tradition in 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.