This is the second episode in the trilogy of a lectures by Professor Sarah Paine of the Naval War College.In this second episode, Prof Paine dissects the ideas and economics behind Japanese imperialism before and during WWII. We get into the oil shortage which caused the war; the unique culture of honor and death; the surprisingly chaotic chain of command. This is followed by a Q&A with me.Huge thanks to Substack for hosting this event!Watch on YouTube. Listen on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or any other podcast platform.SponsorToday’s episode is brought to you by Scale AI. Scale partners with the U.S. government to fuel America’s AI advantage through their data foundry. Scale recently introduced Defense Llama, Scale's latest solution available for military personnel. With Defense Llama, military personnel can harness the power of AI to plan military or intelligence operations and understand adversary vulnerabilities.If you’re interested in learning more on how Scale powers frontier AI capabilities, go to scale.com/dwarkesh.Buy Sarah's Books!I highly, highly recommend both "The Wars for Asia, 1911–1949" and "The Japanese Empire: Grand Strategy from the Meiji Restoration to the Pacific War".Timestamps(0:00:00) - Lecture begins(0:06:58) - The code of the samurai(0:10:45) - Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism(0:16:52) - Bushido as bad strategy(0:23:34) - Military theorists(0:33:42) - Strategic sins of omission(0:38:10) - Crippled logistics(0:40:58) - the Kwantung Army(0:43:31) - Inter-service communication(0:51:15) - Shattering Japanese morale(0:57:35) - Q&A begins(01:05:02) - Unusual brutality of WWII(01:11:30) - Embargo caused the war(01:16:48) - The liberation of China(01:22:02) - Could US have prevented war?(01:25:30) - Counterfactuals in history(01:27:46) - Japanese optimism(01:30:46) - Tech change and social change(01:38:22) - Hamming questions(01:44:31) - Do sanctions work?(01:50:07) - Backloaded mass death(01:54:09) - demilitarizing Japan(01:57:30) - Post-war alliances(02:03:46) - Inter-service rivalry Get full access to Dwarkesh Podcast at www.dwarkesh.com/subscribe
Chapter 1: What is the significance of the disclaimer at the beginning?
Before I get going, I've got to make a disclaimer. What I'm saying are my ideas. They don't necessarily represent the U.S. government, the U.S. Navy Department, the U.S. Department of Defense, let alone where I work, the Naval War College. You got it? This is just me here. Nobody else. All right.
Americans have a penchant for what I call half-court tennis, which is they like to analyze international affairs and wars by focusing on Team America, what Americans did or didn't do, and then that explains causation in the world. And Americans, on the other hand, their beloved sport, I believe, is football.
And those people who love football, many Americans, my understanding of it, I'm just someone who reads books, I don't follow football, but now that's just qualifying, I suppose. But anyhow, Americans who follow football, they study both sides, right? They look at their home team, but then they also look at not just one opposing team, but many down to the individual player.
And they would no more follow a football game by looking at one half of the football field. And yet Americans, when we do foreign policy, that's often what we do. And it gets us into all kinds of trouble.
Chapter 2: How does American sports culture relate to foreign policy analysis?
For instance, in the Iraq war, Americans thought that the Republican guard was gonna be really tough. And it turns out it wasn't so tough. But then there was this post-conventional phase, insurgency that went on and on and on that surprised Americans. Well, the problem isn't actually a new one.
In World War II, Americans were terribly surprised by the thing that Japanese did, starting with Pearl Harbor, right? That was a surprise. But also it was the entire way the Japanese fought the war, the way they fought to the last man, the suicides, the brutality. not only to the POWs, civilians, but into their own wounded.
And the question is, is there any way to anticipate in advance how other people are gonna behave? Is there any way to get a sense of the other side, of the tennis court net? Now here are the two gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu for Asia, and the other one, Clausewitz, is the big guru of warfare in the West.
And both of them would say, hey, you wanna understand the other side, you gotta make a net assessment. What's that? You would look at political, military, geographic, economic factors, the strengths and weaknesses of all sides to get a sense of things. And today I'm gonna make a case for culture. You need to look at that as well.
And it's often said that mirror imaging is not what you're supposed to do. What's mirror imaging? It's we get into a situation and then I decide what I think you're going to do based on what I would do. I project me and mirror image on you. And that doesn't work so well. Okay, if I'm not supposed to generalize on the basis of my experience, what am I supposed to do instead?
And I'm going to get at this problem today, how you analyze the other side of the tennis court net by looking at Japanese behavior in the 30s and 40s. But the method of analysis I'm using, you could apply to anyone you want. You want to think about Russians today or whatever, you can apply it that way. So culture, it's important, but it's as amorphous as it is important.
For instance, if I'm going to try to figure out the defining characteristics of another culture, it would be difficult to figure out what the list is of all the different things I would need to look at. And even if I could come up with that list, Still, how would I figure out how that would work in something like warfare? Hard to know. But the difficulty of the problem doesn't make it go away.
And so we're gonna look at it today, and we're gonna look at Japanese theorists. and belief systems, and that if you believe these things, how this influences your practice. Tojo Hideki said in December 1st, 1941, that our country stands on the threshold of glory or oblivion. He got that right.
And he's in an imperial conference where he is confirming with Hirohito that Pearl Harbor is gonna be a go. But he felt that Japan really needed to do something rather than being ground down, being passive. And here is Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who was the man who came up with the operational plan for Pearl Harbor. He thought it had really long odds of being successful.
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Chapter 3: What are the cultural influences on Japanese warfare?
But there's a good ending to it all, which is nirvana. And how do you get there? The fourth noble truth is through forms of right conduct. So the emphasis isn't on what you achieve in your life. It's how you lead it. It's this focus on deportment. It's different from the West. Second pillar is Shinto, this extreme patronism doctrine. reverence for the emperor.
And the third pillar is Confucianism, these imported ideas from China. Confucianism is at heart of how it's organizing a society and regulating it through interlocking social obligations, hierarchical, and through ritual and etiquette. So in the West, there's much talk about equality, right? And And in the West, in the East, it's duty. It's what you owe other people.
In the East, there is no such thing as social, in Japan, of equality. Even twins have a birth order. And it's not about freedom either. It's about what you owe others. So if you think that these value systems seems really different, yeah, no kidding. It has nothing to do with the Greco-Roman Judeo-Christian West, completely different value system. And so Alice, welcome to Wonderland.
Buckle up, we're off for a ride. And I'm gonna start, here's my first piece of the Tokugawa literature. Yamamoto Tsunetomo's the Hagakure that he wrote in the early 18th century. It translates variously as hidden leaves, hidden by the leaves. And in it, he is describing, I'm going to read you some short passages from it all. What was he? He was a retainer for a daimyo, a feudal lord in Japan.
He hadn't actually done any fighting, even though he's writing all about it. So if you don't do, what do you do? You publish. And I will tell you what the man had to say. So here we go. One of the first things is this preoccupation with death. And here's Yamamoto. The way of the samurai is imagining the most sightly way of dying.
Merit lies more in dying for one's master than in striking down the enemy. The way of the samurai is found in death. It is not necessary to gain one's aim, but if you live on without achieving it, it's cowardice. However, if you don't gain your aim and die, that's okay. This is really different from Clausewitz, where it's all about achieving the policy objective.
It's not about how the soldier's leading his life. And here you can see the consequences of this, right? If you're focusing on no fears of death, and if you can't succeed, living on is a disaster. Think of the Banzai charges, when Japanese remnants would go headlong into oncoming machine gun fire, knowing full well what was gonna happen. This is not the way other armies have behaved.
Different value system. All right. In addition to at death, this Bushido literature's emphasis on honor. Back to Yamamoto. The way of avoiding shame is different. It's simply death. Even if it seems certain that you will lose, retaliate. Think of General Tojo and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku. If you suffer a catastrophic defeat, here's the solution.
In the event of a mortifying failure, you're going to wind up committing suicide because the alternative, if you live on in shame, you're bringing everyone you're associated with shame. So how does the suicide work? It's seppuku or harakiri. The samurai who's doing it kneels down with short sword. He plunges it into his belly, tries to do a full revolution.
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Chapter 4: How does the concept of Bushido impact strategic decisions?
He said, I think the basic cause of defeat was a loss of transport shipping. Okay. By the end of the war, Japan was down to one ninth of its transport shipping. It meant the empire was paralyzed. What's the point of taking all these territories if you can't get the resources back? The Navy had always focused on the mission by Alfred Theramahan, who's from where I work back in the day.
It was all about fleet-on-fleet engagements and things. But it turns out that the Japanese Navy hadn't focused on convoy duty. Mahan had called that a promising secondary operation. Actually, it turned out to be primary in the Pacific, that U.S. submarine services paralyzed their sea lines of communication. Go submarines. So here's
Admiral Ugaki Matame, who is talking about, he eventually comes around to recommending a more defensive strategy of not having this fleet on fleet because they don't have, they've lost a lot of the fleet and then they don't have the fuel to run it. But by the time he's recommending a more defensive strategy, they don't have the fuel or the assets to do that either.
earlier in the war, here's his take before all that bad stuff had happened, it's too bad for the officers and men of the submarine service that they have not yet sunk any important men of war, only merchant men. Well, his disdain for the target would cost him.
And he noted later on, when he's trying to account for why the Battle of Guadalcanal is going so badly for Japan, he said, the aim of supply and transport to the front has not even been half fulfilled each time. It led those on the Army, to be extremely skeptical about the Navy and thinking that the Navy is just sacrificing the Army. Well, no kidding, that's what the Army thought.
Because for an expeditionary force, you absolutely need the Navy to deliver you there, to maintain your supplies there. And they're thinking, the Army's thinking, you Navy are being irresponsible, not doing any of these things. So there are tremendous inter-service rivalries between the Army and Navy in Japan.
And it goes back to the pre-war budget wars where Japan's a resourced poor country and both services have what they consider absolutely essential things to be funded. Japan didn't have the money to fund both. And then when you get in war and you start expending these things, you need even more money. And so the disagreements were brutal.
But before I get there, the in-group, out-group differences that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between Army and Navy. They're within each service. So I'm going to start there. And to be fair, I'm going to provide one example for each service. I'll start with the Army. It was the Guangdong army or Japan's army in Manchuria that decided to invade all of Manchuria back in 31.
It was not the home office back in Tokyo, but it's this branch that turns out kicks off a 15-year war. So these folks think that they know what's best for Japan and how best to defend the empire, and they're just off and running. Meanwhile, there are a series of coup attempts, some of them where Navy is part of it, more of them with the army that's dealing with it. going back and forth.
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Chapter 5: What were the consequences of the oil embargo on Japan?
And then we in the West don't actually study too much what happened to the civilians on the Eastern Front where it's moving around. This is back to my half-court tennis, so we're not paying attention to those civilians. So for the West, very few civilian casualties. Whereas when you get to World War II, you're bombing people. You know, technologies, you can get at people and invading.
Also, it's the lesson of World War I, the feeling that... The Germans really hadn't felt their defeat and that allowed them to make up this story about how they weren't defeated, the Jews did it or whoever, they were betrayed. Churchill and Roosevelt decided there would be a march to Berlin to disabuse them of that. That involves killing a lot of civilians to get to Berlin.
Of course, the Russians were determined to pay back for what the Nazis had done to them.
Chapter 6: How did Japanese cultural values influence their wartime behavior?
And we had no sympathy for what we weren't going to, we're going to turn a blind eye to what the Russians were up to because the Nazis had been so heinous.
This is probably wrong. I want you to correct me, but maybe one way you can explain why the Japanese were so brutal in their campaign around this time is if you think that when you lose, you have this idea that you have social death, it's better to kill yourself than go back to your family and say, I surrendered.
Maybe they just applied this is their failure to empathize with or think it from the perspective of their enemy. But they were just thinking like, listen, if we lost, we would commit seppuku. When they lose, they forfeit human rights. And in some sense, it was just like applying the principle of social death to their enemy.
The whole war is brutal. So they're doing a lot of hand-to-hand brutality, and part of it has to do with lack of equipment. That firebombing of Tokyo happened in one night.
Chapter 7: What were the strategic implications of Japan's military decisions during WWII?
I think it's 80,000 Japanese are incinerated. Okay, let's talk about brutality. Now, the reason why Americans did that is because they knew the alternative was sending American kids onto Japan who would die doing that. And so the decision was it was better to kill a lot of Japanese civilians than it was to kill American soldiers. And that's also the reason that went into the atomic bombing.
That's controversial, right? The Americans, why did they drop atomic bombs on the Japanese? And there was no...
disagreement about that in the united states at the time because it was a question of are you going to send american young men your age and uh millions of them would have died hitting the home islands or are you going to do the the bombing and of course the americans did the bombing so there's brutality all around in this war wars don't come up with clean hands
Was there any way for America to win the Pacific War without the firebombing?
Chapter 8: Why was the demilitarization of Japan after WWII considered a mistake?
Well, okay, this is a whole other topic. Win in wars. What does win mean? For us, it was put Japan back in its box, right? But this is a whole problem for Japan. What's win? Or this country in Afghanistan, what's win? Is it booting Osama bin Laden out of Afghanistan once that happens? It's a day. Is it overthrowing the Taliban at a particular period?
Or is it trying to turn the whole place into a democracy? Okay, those are all radically different things, but you need to make up your mind what it's going to be. I think it's a miracle. Well, A, okay. If you're going to have the win be that the United States transforms Japan into a functional democracy, Or sets them on the road so that they will become them. If that's what the win is, no.
Because if you don't, I showed you the three horrible events in four days. That's quite incredible to have that much bad news happening in a half a week. And that absolutely shattered the Japanese. And it also opened the door for those who thought they were in crazy land to capitulate. If you don't do that, okay, we invade the home islands. Americans were sick of the war.
And you start losing lots of American kids in Japan. I think at some stage we decide to pull them out of Japan and blockade them eternally. And then you've got, I don't know, Japan is like a new North Korea, just this inevitable, this eternal non-functioning society. So no. Mm-hmm. These wars are tragic.
And also don't think that you have all the cards that you're going to make the decisions about what's going to happen. The other side is going to put you into corners where you're going to choose from very unpleasant alternatives.
I want to ask you about how the war starts. So there's obviously the go 10 years before and you've got the tariffs and that creates the incentive to build an empire.
But even months before when there's negotiations between Japan and America to get rid of the embargo, it's striking to me how much miscommunication and the ability for both sides to just understand that there was a compromise here was such a big factor here. I feel like if Prince Kanoi and FDR could get on like a Zoom call, I feel like the war... You're an optimist.
Think about, let's talk about sunk costs. And I'm going to talk about sunk casualties. By the time you're there, the Japanese have suffered 600,000 casualties in China. There is no easy out of that one. And so the United States' minimum program is you get out of China. Not happening if you're Japanese.
You look at the government, the government's definitely on death ground with that one because there's no way they stay in power if they get out of China. And particularly, this is why Hirohito is Mr. Silent for most of the war. Initially, he's all for it until it goes sour, and then he's less so.
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