Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)

**Sarah Paine** (0:00)
Before I get going, I've got to make a disclaimer. What I'm saying are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent the US government, the US. Navy Department, the US. Department of Defense, let alone where I work, the Naval War College. You got it? This is just me here, nobody else. All right. Americans have a penchant for what I call half-court tennis, which is they like to analyze international affairs and wars by focusing on Team America, what Americans did or didn't do, and then that explains causation in the world. 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 now, that's just qualifying, I suppose. But anyhow, Americans who follow football, they study both sides, right? They look at their home team, but then they also look at not just one opposing team, but many down to the individual player. And they would no more follow a football game by looking at one half of the football field. And yet Americans, when we do foreign policy, that's often what we do, and it gets us into all kinds of trouble. For instance, in the Iraq War, Americans thought that the Republican Guard was going to be really tough. And it turns out it wasn't so tough. But then there was this post-conventional phase, insurgency that went on and on and on, that surprised Americans. Well, the problem isn't actually a new one. In World War II, Americans were terribly surprised by the thing that Japanese did, starting with Pearl Harbor, right? That was a surprise. But also was the entire way the Japanese fought the war, the way they fought to the last man, the suicides, the brutality, not only to the POW civilians, but into their own wounded. And the question is, is there any way to anticipate in advance how other people are going to behave? Is there any way to get a sense of the other sides of the tennis court net? Now, here are the two gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu, for Asia, and the other one, Klausowitz, is the big guru of warfare in the West. And both of them would say, hey, you want to understand the other side, you got to make a net assessment. What's that? You would look at political, military, geographic, economic factors, the strengths and weaknesses of all sides to get a sense of things. And today I'm going to make a case for culture. You need to look at that as well. And it's often said that mirror imaging is not what you're supposed to do. What's mirror imaging? We get into a situation and then I decide what I think you're going to do based on what I would do. I project me and mirror image on you. And that doesn't work so well. Okay, if I'm not supposed to generalize on the basis of my experience, what am I supposed to do instead? And I'm going to get at this problem today. How you analyze the other side of the tennis court net by looking at a Japanese behavior in the 30s and 40s. But the method of analysis I'm using, you could apply to anyone you want. You want to think about Russians today or whatever, you can apply it that way. So culture, it's important. But it's as amorphous as it is important. For instance, if I'm going to try to figure out the defining characteristics of another culture, it would be difficult to figure out what the list is of all the different things I would need to look at. And even if I could come up with that list, still, how would I figure out how that would work in something like warfare? Hard to know. But the difficulty of the problem doesn't make it go away. And so we're going to look at it today, and we're going to look at Japanese theorists and belief systems, and that if you believe these things, how this influences your practice. Tojo Hideki said in December 1st, 1941 that our country stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion. He got that right. And he's in an imperial conference where he is confirming with Hirohito that Pearl Harbor is going to be a go. But he felt that Japan really needed to do something rather than being ground down, being passive. And here is Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who was the man who came up with the operational plan for Pearl Harbor. He thought it had really long odds of being successful. General Tojo gave it a 50-50 chance. Admiral Yamamoto wasn't even sure that it was that good. But he felt it was the best possible plan for Japan to get out of its predicament. Now, from a Western point of view, this makes no sense. You're talking about getting the United States potentially into a war with Japan that's already overextended in China. Who does this? Either you need to ratchet back the policy objective, and or you need to downgrade your strategy to something a little more costly or risky. And I suppose we can do is go, oh, they're stupid. Okay. 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. And why are they doing these? Why do they consider their actions rational and rational in what context? So this is what I'm going to be up to. And I can start with a little story to illustrate my point. In the summer of 1943, this is after the battles of the Solomons, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, they're all over with. The Imperial Japanese Army had a war college, an instructor comes into class one day, and he says, from now on, the curriculum's changed. The main emphasis is going to be countering US tactics instead of what they had been teaching was Soviet tactics. And we'll become the A-course. If anyone can teach this, go ahead, because I don't know a damn thing about it. Talk about being unprepared for seminar. And then think about it. Where are the Japanese actually fighting most of the time? What is the country that most matters to them at the end of the day? It would be China. And that's not what their war colleges are studying. Something's up here. Now, they're clearly making a really bad net assessment about the United States. Okay, this country also is known for lousy net assessments. I don't believe ours about Vietnam was particularly good either. And that's one part of the problem. So here's my game plan for this evening. I'm first going to talk about Japanese, traditional Japanese theorists. And then it's going to be talking about Japanese practice. How if you have this belief system, how explanatory is it for practice? This is my game plan right now. So the Japanese don't have just the one book like Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Klausowitz's On War. What they have is Bushido, Code of the Samurai. It's a whole literature and it was written in the Tokugawa period, which quite ironically was a period known for peace, not warfare, never mind. And what's interesting about this literature from a Western perspective, it's really not about military strategy. It's about deportment. It's how a samurai should conduct himself. And this reflects Japanese values and what the things that they emphasize. And so I'm going to go through it with you. Here's the game plan on the 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 first half. And I'm going to use as my cultural bridge this man, Nitobe Inazo, who wrote a book much later in 1900, Bushido's Soul of Japan, Why Am I Doing This? He provides a concise definition of Bushido. And you can see he's an important figure in Japan. Not everybody gets their mug on the 5,000 yen note. So he's an important figure in Japan. He had spent 18 years abroad, and he had received higher education in Japan and a variety of Western institutions. He married, believe it or not, I don't make up these things, a Philadelphia Quaker, and he converted to Christianity. And he spent his life trying to serve as a cultural bridge. And that's how I'm going to use him today. And what he said is, unlike in the West, where notions of morality come from religion, in Japan, they come from Bushido. And what is it? It's a code of, a chivalrous code of honor for the warrior class, these precepts of knighthood. There are three pillars of Bushido, according to Nitobe. They're Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism. From Buddhism, it's where you see Japanese fatalism, the origin of it. And here you have Nitobe saying, it's this calm trust and fate, a quiet submission to the inevitable, a friendliness with death. And it strikes Westerners reading this Bushido literature as a preoccupation with death, that, 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. And from Buddhism, there are four noble truths of Buddhism. One is that existence is suffering, pessimistic view of this life. Second, it's caused by craving and attachment, so don't cling to this life. Or the things in it, it's all ephemerals, like a cherry blossom blooms for a day and then it's gone. And, but there's a good ending to it all, which is nirvana. And how do you get there? The fourth noble truth is through forms of right conduct. So the emphasis isn't on what you achieve in your life. It's how you lead it. It's this focus on deportment. It's different from the West. The second pillar is Shinto is this extreme patronism reverence for the emperor. And the third pillar is Confucianism, these imported ideas from China. Confucianism is at heart of how it's organizing a society and regulating it through interlocking social obligations, hierarchical and through ritual and etiquette. So in the West, there's much talk about equality, right?