Sarah Paine

So 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 gonna be a much stronger feature of Japanese culture than some other places.

All right, last theorist is Miyamoto Musashi, who unlike the other two actually did a little fighting.

He was born a little earlier and he was a master samurai who taught people martial arts.

And 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 intolerance, because remember at the beginning, I started with the two 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 five or 10 people single-handedly in duels, that's what my military science is all about.

So what's the difference between the logic of one person beating up 10 people and a thousand people beating 10,000?

Logistics, my friend, but nevermind.

And then another thing that he emphasizes in addition, 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 it's going nowhere, which is what the China theater was for the Japanese, and how do you get out of it?

And the answer that Miyamoto has is not come up with a new policy objective,

But come up with a tactic that'll somehow put your enemy off balance and then get what you want that way.

And the way the Japanese did this was often by opening a new theater in a war, by surprising people by the new places that you were gonna start engaging in military operations.

And here's how it worked.