Sarah Paine

We're really having major problems with our institutions, wondering whether we've got a stalemated legislature, whether we've got a skewed court system or whatever it is, and we're sorting these things out.

And then to criticize the Japanese because they couldn't do it all in 25 years.

Well, I'm going to flip it around and look at how the West has done it.

It's all about – it's supposed to be, and of course there are exceptions, that it's not that it's about you if you have a particular job.

It's that your job gives you certain authority by law to do things, and then we have courts to adjudicate when you in that position –

Other people think that you've exceeded your authority and they start suing about different things.

And that's how it goes in the West.

It's very legalistic, goes all the way back to the Romans.

When I think about what is the West, it's Greek logic, it's Roman law, and then it's these Judeo-Christian moral values.

Those are essential pillars of what the West is all about.

So in Japan, yeah, they get laws and they westernize, but they have their own indigenous way of dealing with things.

And it's very much about different in-groups and out-groups handling things in whatever the committee is.

And so we're going, well, who actually did that?

Whose fault is it?

Because we have this very legalistic way and fault in law, we're going to either put you in jail or whatever.

It's different ways of organizing ourselves.

But we in the West assume, because going back to Roman times, is that institutions are going to be a really big thing, that that's how things are going to work.

So then when we get into somewhere like Iraq, and we think the police is going to still be functioning after we blow the government, it's like, whoa, whoa, whoa, it's not an institutionalized thing.

I'm no expert, but you're projecting the kind of institutional setup that Western countries typically have to other people.

They may name these things the same thing, police or whatever, but they may function in very different ways.