Sarah Paine

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 Taira Shigesuke, who is a contemporary of Yamamoto, because he provides a really concise definition of the operative values of samurai culture.

Only three things are considered essential, loyalty, duty, and valor, so 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.

And for the Japanese society is divided by in-groups and out-groups.

The most basic in-group, biggest overarching one, is the Japanese people vis-a-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 groups.

companies, or they're in the military, they're in different branches, and you also have family loyalties.

And you owe each of these nested and overlapping groups different obligations.

And sometimes these obligations conflict, and if the conflict's really awful, that's another reason for committing suicide.

And then if you look at the Japanese language,

the moment a person opens their mouth to speak to another Japanese, you can immediately listen to the grammatical forms that are being used, the specific word choices to know what's the degree of hierarchy, like where do they sit in this unequal hierarchy, and whether it's in-group, out-group.