Mark Gagnon

The eventual surrender of the Japanese in 45, which is what I said according to the edit, that the emperor came out and basically gave this speech, basically like, hey, the war's not over.

We're just shifting our fight to an economic fight.

And so like these salarymen like kind of take on the honor of these soldiers to be like, yeah, we're going to continue to fight through economic means.

Yeah.

So as a result, they become like an economic powerhouse or like what, the fifth largest economy in the world despite being a tiny island?

Yeah, these were... Bad hombres.

Bad hombres, dude.

They were buck wild.

And I don't know why or how.

I think there is more of... I actually heard an interesting theory, anthropologically speaking, that societies that subsist by rice are more...

embedded culturally, whereas wheat societies are much more like, hey, we're going to focus on our internal thing, we're gonna build up our wheat fields, and we can control it internally, and what you do on yours doesn't affect mine, whereas the way that the rice paddies actually develop, it's like, if you mess up your thing, you mess up my thing, so it creates more of a collectivist society.

So I can see, again, this is one anthropological theory,

But I can see societies that are more collectivist could be maybe easier to turn into machines.

You could literally mechanize a military effort, potentially through an Asian country or an Asian army.

Easier maybe because there's more of a collectivist ideal that you could easily like I think it's harder to get Americans to be like hey you're fighting for your countrymen because we have less of a connection to what it actually means to be nationally American versus someone that's like a million generations Japanese weren't the Japanese historically before we were to the country that was conquered or is it I make that up.

I don't know.

I don't think so.

I think technically the island of Japan are historically ethnic Chinese.

Yeah.

I think they're Han.