Sarah Paine

And from that moment on, his samurai obeyed him, and they absolutely cooperated with the occupation.

There's no insurgency, no nothing going on after this.

And at the end of the war, the United States

came to understand the Japanese.

At the beginning, totally misread the situation with the oil embargo that's meant to deter and state that it precipitates the war that we didn't want.

But at the end of the war, the United States realizes

You're going to need some level of Japanese cooperation if you're going to occupy the place.

And they're going to use Emperor Hirohito for this.

Hirohito is scared to death that it's not so much that he'll be hanged, but that the United States will extinguish his dynasty, kill him and his son, and then it's over.

And so he's willing to sign any piece of paper that MacArthur puts under his pen.

And one of those is the Constitution of Japan that is going to change their civil and military institutions, demilitarize the place and try to get a democracy going there.

The Constitution was written in one week by MacArthur's staff.

They're running around raiding bombed-out libraries for examples of Western constitutions, and they cobble this thing together.

This is the unamended constitution of Japan still in power in effect to this very day, MacArthur's gift to Japan.

All right, I've been incredibly critical of the Japanese, but to sum up here, their cultural explanations for their neglect of grand strategy, inability to cut their losses, inability to coordinate, and the ferocity with which they fought.

So if you look at their values,

And they're explanatory of what may well happen when things get set off.

But I've been really critical of Japan.

I want to even out the story by ending on the United States a little bit.

Because the United States played a good game or bad game of half-court tennis and mirror-imaged at the beginning of this war.