Sarah Paine

The Western focus of literature is all about preparing the field of battle in advance for success, and whereas this literature is focusing on what to do after disaster.

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, is that when you decide you're going to annihilate an entire culture, you put people on death ground, and then they have very few choices on what they do next.

That one is...

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 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 Lieutenant Onoda,

who had been hanging out in Philippine jungles for what, 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 soldiers in them.

Different culture, different things you do with your life.

And here is Sir William Slim,

Field Marshal, British 14th Army that he led in Burma commenting on his experiences.

If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495, last five committed suicide before we could take the place.