Sarah Paine — Why Japan lost WWII (lecture & interview)

1. 0:00 – 0:45

   Preview

   1. SPSarah Paine0:00

      The warfare that went on wiped out the two barriers to Communist expansion in Asia. Chiang Kai-shek, the Japanese wiped him out. And then what does the United States do? What's the other barrier to Communism? Well, it's the Japanese. So what do you get? A unified Communist China. It's the gift that keeps on giving. The 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. Japan thought their entire existence was at stake, that they absolutely had to have territory in China to survive. Not only do I wanna do regime change, but I wanna kill all your people while I'm at it. If you compromise with them, you are simply setting them up and putting them in a stronger position when they come at you for the final kill.

2. 0:45 – 7:43

   Lecture begins

   1. SPSarah Paine0:46

      Uh, before I get going, I've gotta make a disclaimer. What I'm saying are my ideas, they don't necessarily represent the US government, the US Navy Department, the US 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, uh, wars by focusing on Team America, what Americans did or didn't do and then that explains causation in, 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 an, uh, uh, someone who reads books. I don't follow football, but, now I'm, that's disqualifying, 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, uh, 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. For instance, in the Iraq War, uh, 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, uh, 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 things that Japanese did, uh, 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? Uh, is there any way to get a sense of the other side, of, of the tennis court net? Now here are the two gurus of warfare. One is Sun Tzu for, uh, 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, uh, we get into a situation and then I decide what I think you're gonna 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 gonna get at this problem today. How do you analyze the other side of the tennis court net by looking at the Jap- Japanese behavior in the '30s and '40s. But the method of analysis I'm using, you could apply to anyone you want. You wanna, uh, 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 gonna 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, uh, still, how would I figure out how, um, that would work in something like, uh, warfare? Hard to know. But the difficulty of the problem doesn't make it go away, and so, um, I'm gonna, we're gonna look at it today and, uh, we're gonna lo- uh, look at Japanese theorists and belief systems and that if you believe these things, how this influences your, uh, 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. General Tojo gave it a 50/50 chance. Admiral Yamamoto wasn't even sure that it was that good, but he felt it was the best possible plan for Japan to get out of its predicament. Now, from a Western point of view, this is makes no sense. Uh, you're talking about getting the United States potentially into a war with Japan that's already overextended in China. Who does this? Uh, either you need to ratchet that back the policy objective and/or you need to downgrade your strategy to something a little more costly or risky. And I suppose what you can do is go, "Oh, they're stupid." Okay. I guess if I call you stupid, that makes me so smart because I can......denigrate you, uh, explains nothing. So rather than do that, it's, they're very, uh, intelligent men and why are they doing these things? Why do they consider their actions rational, and rational in what context? So this is what I'm gonna be up to, and I can start with a little story to illustrate my point. In the summer of 1943, this is after the Battles of the Solomons, New Guinea, Guadalcanal, they're all over with, uh, the Imperial Japanese Army had war college. An instructor comes into class one day and he says, "From now on, the curriculum's changed. The main emphasis is going to be countering US tactics," instead of what they had been teaching was Soviet tactics, "and will become the A course. If anyone can teach this, go ahead because I don't know a damn thing about it." Uh, talk about being unprepared for seminar.

   2. NANarrator7:01

      (laughs)

   3. SPSarah Paine7:02

      Uh, and then think about it, where are the Japanese actually fighting most of the time? What is the country that most matters to them at the end of the day? It would be China, and that's not what their war colleges are studying. Something's up here. Now, they're clearly making a really bad net assessment about the United States. Okay. This country also is known for lousy net assessments. I don't believe ours about Vietnam was particularly good either, and that's one part of the problem. So here's my game plan for this evening. I'm first gonna talk about Japanese traditional

   4. NANarrator7:36

      (laughs)

   5. SPSarah Paine7:36

      ...Japanese theorists, and then it's gonna be talking about Japanese practice. How... If you have

3. 7:43 – 11:30

   The code of the samurai

   1. SPSarah Paine7:43

      this belief system, how explanatory it is- is it for practice? This is my game plan right now. So the Japanese don't have just the one book like Sun Tzu's The Art of War or Clausewitz's On War. What they have is bushido, code of the samurai. It's a whole literature and it was written in the Tokugawa period, which quite ironically was a period known for peace, not warfare. Never mind. And what's interesting about this literature from a Western perspective, it's really not about military strategy, it's about deportment. It's how a samurai should conduct himself, and this reflects Japanese values and- and what the things that they emphasize, and so I'm gonna go through it with you. Here's the game plan on the theorist. First, I'm gonna talk about the philosophical origins of bushido, then the values that underpin it, and then the operational preferences that grow out of it. That's the game plan for he- first half. And I'm gonna use as my cultural bridge this man, Nitobe Inazo, who wrote a book much later in 1900, Bushido: Soul of Japan. Why am I doing this? He provides a contai- concise definition of bushido, and you can see he's an important figure in Japan. Not everybody gets their mug on the 5,000 yen note, so he's an important figure in Japan. He had spent 18 years abroad and he had higher educa- c- received higher education in Japan and a variety of Western institutions. He married, believe it or not, I don't make up these things, uh, a Philadelphia Quaker, and he (laughs) converted to Christianity. And he (laughs) spent his life trying to serve as a cultural bridge, and that's how I'm gonna use him today. And what he said is, unlike in the West where notions of morality come from religion, in Japan they come from bushido. And what is it? It's a code of on- uh, chivalrous code of honor for the warrior class, these precepts of knighthood. Uh, there are three pillars of bushido, acc- uh, according to Nitobe. They're Buddhism, Shinto, and Confucianism. From Buddhism is where you see Japanese fatalism, the origin of it, and here you have Nitobe saying it's this calm trust in fate, a quiet submission to the ev- inevitable, a friendliness with death. And it strikes Westerners reading, um, this bushido literature is a preoc- preoccupation with death, uh, that, uh, for- for instance, Clausewitz will talk about, um, violence in warfare, but he's not interested in what constitutes an honorable death, let alone choreographing a s- a soldier's final moments. Different culture. And from Buddhism, there are, uh, four noble truths of Buddhism. One is that existence is suffering, pessimistic view of this life. Second, it's caused by craving an attachment, so don't cling to this life, uh, or the things in it. It's all ephemeral. It's like a cherry blossom. Blooms for a day and then it's gone. And but there's a- a... There's a- a good ending to it all, which is nirvana. And how do you get there? The f- the fourth, uh, 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 of Shinto is for this extreme patronism, 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,

4. 11:30 – 17:37

   Buddhism, Shinto, Confucianism

   1. SPSarah Paine11:30

      hierarchical, and through ritual and etiquette. So in the West there's much talk about, uh, equality, right? And, um, in- in the West- in the East, it's duty. It's what you owe other people. In the East, there is no such thing a- a social in Chi- in Japan of- of equality. Even- even twins have a birth order. And it's not about freedom either. It's- it's about what you owe others. So, uh, 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 ver- variously as Hidden Leaves, Hidden by the Leaves and in it, uh, he is describing, I'm gonna read you some s- short passages from it all. Wh- what was it? 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... (laughs)

   2. NANarrator12:50

      (laughs)

   3. SPSarah Paine12:50

      I will tell... (laughs) And it, 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, uh, how the, how the soldier's leading his life. And here, you can see the consequences of this, right? If you're focusing on, uh, 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. Uh, this is not the way other armies have behaved. Different value system. All right. In addition to, uh, death, this bushido literature has emphasis on hon- uh, 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 Ya- Yamamoto Isoroku. Now, and here's the, if you suffer a catastrophic defeat, here's the solution, uh, in the event of a mortifying failure, uh, you're gonna wind up committing suicide 'cause the alternative, if you live on in shame, you're bringing everyone you're associated with shame. And I'm gonna use Nitobe to ex- be the cultural bridge. He said, "In our minds, this mode of death is associated with the instances of noblest deeds and most touching pathos, so this vilest form of death assumes a sublimity and becomes a symbol of new life." It's a way to disgra- escape from disgrace. And in Japanese literature, there is the tragic hero who is pursuing noble but unattainable aims, and rather than making disagreeable compromises, goes down in flames. This is what seppuku is all about. And Nitobe is saying, "Look, death involving a question of honor was accepted in bushido as a key solution to many complex problems." And you can think in World War II, yeah, it was. Complex problems like battle plans not working out and a, a war that was truly not working out. All right. So in addition to death and suicide, uh, and honor, we've got loyalty as another key value, and back to Yamamoto. "Being a good retainer is nothing other than being a supporter of one's lord. A man is a good retainer to the extent that he earnestly places importance in his master having only wisdom and talent is the lowest tier of usefulness." So much for Silicon Valley.

   4. NANarrator15:57

      (laughs)

   5. SPSarah Paine15:59

      Uh, "For a warrior, there is nothing other than thinking of his master." And so back in the day, it's thinking of your flute- feudal lord. In more recent times, it's prioritizing your company over family. In China, it's the reser- reverse priority, it's family over company. And it, it's different cultures, different priorities. All right. There are strategic implications. If this is your value system, this is what arises from it. First of all, you're looking at damage limitation, damage control, not in terms of the physical cost of losing lives, having property blown up, but in terms of honor. Also, there's an equate, a tendency to equate operational with strategic success. Operational success is I win this battle here and now. Strategic success is, okay, we're in a war for some reason. What is the reason you're in the war? Uh, Japan's reasons for being in China had to do with containing Communist expansion and also stabilizing the place so they, they could make money out of business. So, that's your strategic objective, it's not your operational one, but the Japanese samurai are equating the two saying, "If I take this hill, somehow it's automatically, uh, going to deliver the strategic objective." And in fact, they won most of the battles in China, but they lost that war. Also, there's this focus on what constitutes an honorable death. It's not the Western focus of literature is all about preparing the field of battle in advance for success and whereas this literature is all what to,

5. 17:37 – 24:19

   Bushido as bad strategy

   1. SPSarah Paine17:37

      is focusing on what to do after disaster. So that here are some more implications. Once the Japanese are failing in battle, operational failure, they are on death ground. What does that mean? It means that, uh, death ground means the only way you survive if you, is if you fight harder. Like, it's, it's, um, this is what's going on in Ukraine right now is that when you decide you're gonna annihilate an entire culture, you put people on death ground and then they have very few choices on what they do next. Uh, that one, uh, is, eh, means for the Japanese to feel that they're on death ground when they're failing means they're not gonna give up. They're gonna fight brutally, uh, against overwhelming odds. So, in the West, we like to mirror image, we want to think of the rational actor with some kind of-... mathematically based cost benefit of when you should give up, when the costs have just, are, of, are so high above whatever your value of the object is that you ought to call it quits. Well, that kinda calculation does not translate well across the, the divides between civilizations. I've got a nice picture here of Lieutenant Onoda, who had been hanging out in Philippine jungles for, what, 30 years after the end of the war, carrying on the war in isolation. I don't believe this is how most other armies work, or soldiers in them. Different culture, different things you do with your life. And here's Sir William Slim, Field Marshall, British 14th Army, that he led in Burma, commenting on his experiences. "If 500 Japanese were ordered to hold a position, we had to kill 495, last five (laughs) committed suicide, before we could take the place." And it was this combination of obedience and ferocity that made the Japanese so formidable. Uh, okay, this brings me to another value that's emphasized in Bushido, willpower. Back to Yamamoto: "There is nothing that cannot be done. The way of the samurai is desperateness. Simply become insane and desperate, and it'll somehow work out for you." (laughs) "One can accomplish any feat." Think of Pearl Harbor. And this emphasis on willpower and just trying harder, it denigrates strategy. And here you see a picture of the supreme example of honor and loyalty and willpower, and they're kamikaze pilots. But if this is what you're doing, you're denigrating strategy. And here, Yamamoto's gonna be talking about tactics, but it has operational and strategic implications. He says, "Learning such things as military t- tactics is useless. The way of the samurai is one of immediacy, and it is best to dash in headlong. Uh, if one were informed of military tactics, he would have many doubts." So the idea is if you think about these things in peacetime, you'll start, uh, hesitating in wartime. It won't work out for you if you do this. "Uh, during times of peace when listening to the stories of battle, you, we should never say, 'In facing such a situation, what would a person do?'" Well, so much for my job at the Naval War College. (laughs) So much for the case studies. "Uh, no matter what the circumstances might be, one should be of the mind to win, one should be holding their first, uh, spear to strike." So here's the implications, if, if you believe this. What you're doing, it's a very unanalytical way to approach wars. It's just all about whatever it is you want, you just steel the will and go for it, and somehow you'll get it if you want. There's a lack of grand strategy. What's grand strategy? It's impl- it's integrating all the instruments of national power, not just the army or the army and the navy, which is what the Japanese are trying to do, but all instruments of national power in pursuit of... If the bigger aim is to stabilize China and keep the communists out, there ought to be some diplomacy and some other things going on. But that's not what's happening. In the samurai literature, it's a focus on the military ex- uh, instrument exclusively. So I'll give you an example of how this works out. In w- before the Imperial Japanese Army and the Ch- Imperial Japanese Navy invaded French Indo-China, neither one of them did a little study saying, "Hey, if we do that, let's check the other side of the tennis court net and see what other people, how they might react." They just steel the will and marched right in. Okay, that triggered the US 100% oil embargo. That's a problem. Stri- uh, strati- uh operational success, strategic mess. So it is this focusing on just the operational level is, uh, the J- it's the basis for this ill-founded operati- uh, optimism with which the Japanese just took territory after territory without saying, "Hey, what about the cost of actually occupying these places?" And they're, "Oh, we're going for these places for resources, so maybe we ought to check it out with the Finance Ministry and others in, about Ind- how are we ever gonna get these resources back home?" None of that's going on. It's a disaster for them. Okay, I'm gonna talk about a couple of secondary theorists. One of them is Taira Shigesuke, who is a g- uh, a contemporary of Yamamoto, because he provides a really concise, uh, definition of the operative val- values of samurai culture. Only three things are considered essential, loyalty, duty, and valor, so steadfastly loyal, uh, in battle as to disregard his own life. What he's actually talking about is group loyalty. In the West, the basic unit composing so- uh, society is the individual. Well, in the East, it's the group, and group interests take, uh, primacy over individual interests. And for the J- uh, Japanese society is divided by in-groups and out-groups. The most basic in-group, biggest overarching one, is the Japanese people vis-à-vis everybody else. But within Japan, everybody comes from a different province, a different locality, uh, they go to different educational institutes, they graduate from different kindergarten classes, I kid you not, and college classes. They w- if they work for different companies or they work for the, or, uh, 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 they're really, the con- 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

6. 24:19 – 34:27

   Military theorists

   1. SPSarah Paine24:19

      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. So-Everybody feels, or most people feel some level of group loyalty. This is human. But in Japan, it's, 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, uh, 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 gonna go through all of these in turn. First is risk intolerance, 'cause remember at the beginning I, I started with the two flag officers saying, "Well, we're gonna do this war in the Pacific when it's unlikely we're gonna succeed but we're gonna do it anyway." And here's, uh, Miyamoto, "Furthermore, to fight even five or 10 people single-handedly in duels, uh, that's what my, uh, military science is all about." So what's the difference between the logic of one person beating up, uh, 10 people and, uh, 1,000 people beating 10,000? Uh, logistics my friend, but never mind. (laughs) Uh, and then another thing that he emphasizes in, in addition, don't expect long odds to deter, uh, the Japanese back in the day. Surprise is another one. Think about a situation that has stalemated and is 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 s- 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. Uh, and here's w- how it worked. China had been a failed state since 1911, and it had had an escalating series of warlords fighting each other in this multilateral civil war, and the Japanese were appalled, particularly after the United States passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff of 1930 that cut them off from international trade. So then they're thinking, "Now what? Well, we're gonna need an emper- empire big enough to survive since no one's gonna trade with us." And so they invade all of Manchuria in 1931, and they have it pretty much stabilized by 1933. Uh, so, okay, that was surprise number one, but the rest of China's a mess, and the Japanese, it's coalescing into a bilateral communist-nationalist, nationalist under Chiang Kai-shek, communist under Mao Zedong, fight with increasing dosages of Soviet aid, and the Japanese are appalled with all this. And so it's time to surprise everybody again in 1937, and that's when they invade all the way down the Chinese coast and up the Yangtze River. And it works. Uh, they, they take a lot of territory really fast, but then they get to the end of the railway system. Oh, and by the way, China's not pacified. It's just churning. And so now Japan is even more overextended. As a result of doing that, Russian aid goes up and then you're gonna get US aid in there, so the problem's actually getting worse. Okay, time for another surprise, really big one. Uh, on that infamous day in December '41, it wasn't just Pearl Harbor. That's Team America focusing only on Team America. The Japanese attacked all across the Pacific that day. Uh, okay, now what? Here, the United... Uh, China had never been able to threaten the Japanese home islands, while the United States... Here, the United States was totally isolationist. Most Americans couldn't find Japan on the na- map. Well, after Per- Pearl Harbor they sure could, and they, suddenly the United States isn't isolationist anymore and they're coming to get the Japanese. So, you can see the samurai values in operation here. Just try harder. More dosages of willpower. Eventually you'll win or you'll die trying. Okay. Another operational preference that you can see, which is these pre- as part of the surprise are preemptive attacks, and this is how Japan began all of its wars. The First Sino-Japanese War and the Second Sino-Japanese War, Russo-Japanese War, and the Pacific War. This is how all of them begin. And finally, uh, Miyamoto offers some advice on how you break the enemy will power. And in this case it's you've already won conventionally, but they're waging insurgency against you. I'm modernizing the terminology. And the idea is it's you want a psychological victory. You want them just to quit, and somehow you're gonna break their will to resist. And I suspect this is what the Japanese thought they were doing in the rape of Nanjing and other s- atrocities, that they were gonna do these horrifying things and that would break the will of the other side. Okay, be careful whom you put on death ground. Uh, the Japanese were repeating a mistake done by the Nazis, which is, uh, if you're dealing with even a failing state, which Russia was, uh, shot... Stalin had shot so many of his officers in the '30s and then he'd inflicted a famine on Ukraine. Uh, but when the Nazis came in and they were gonna wipe out not only the Russian government but also the Russian people, you will superglue people, government, and military and you will transform a failing state into a lethal adversary. And this is what Nazi brutality does to Russians, what Japanese r- brutality does to Chinese, and what Russian brutality today is doing to Ukraine. Don't do it. Bad strategy. All right.There are strategic implications from these values. One is this emphasis of, on the offensive, preemption, it's w- emphasis on military action to solve all your problems, and you have a fixed policy objective, whatever it is, it's... And if you're in a given battle, you have to win that battle. It's not, "Oh, I have an overarching objective. It's too costly here. I'm gonna call off this battle and I'm gonna try again somewhere else." Uh-uh. This, you're f- the moment your plan is failed, you're a failure. So they're not thinking of planning in terms of branches of sequels and there'll be uns- uh, unexpected events that take place you'll adapt to, none of that. You're a failure if any of that stuff happens to you. So there's a real insensitivity to risk and, uh, there's no grand strategy, but if you believe these things, you will be lethal in warfare. You're not gonna give up easily, at all. And so you, you look at, uh, the Japanese at the end of the war and go, "Why don't they quit a lot earlier?" Well, it's because, uh, they... in a way they're already dead men. They've suffered social death and so they're gonna keep on, uh, until the very, very end of all of this. And it's a great sin of omission, this absence of grand strategy. The Japanese aren't the only ones to have done this. The belligerents on all sides in World War I, uh, were thinking all in terms of using the military instrument and got themselves into trouble. So if you look at what the Japanese are doing, they had some vague ambitions and wanted to take advantage of opportunities, but there's no definition of what winning this war is. How much territory should Japan take and then call it a day and say, "Done. We've been successful here"? Uh, rather their territorial, uh, acquisitions are really a function of what they were able to take and what, in anger, they did take, but also a function of strategic failure. No matter what they did, it never pacified the, the China theater. Problem for them. Okay. That... A- Alice, that was Wonderland. Now we're going to get to how it works, how other people live of if you believe these things, how does it help explain what actually happened in, in World War II? And I'm gonna start with two sins of omission, the Japanese neglect of paying more careful consideration to logistics and then another sin of omission is an ac- neglect of, of protecting their sea lines of communication. And then I'm gonna... The last two are about these in-group, uh, out-group divisions and the problems it called- caused for within each military service, intra-service rivalries, and then between the two services, the Navy and the Army in the war that caused them such difficulties. Okay. The Japanese, if you start at the, uh, the, uh, beginning of the war, Japan never produced more than one, one-thirteenth US steel and coal production. It never did more than 10% of what uni- US munitions productions were. Uh, I believe if you do the math and take all the battleships and divide people into everything, that each US soldier had four tons of equipment per, whereas each Japanese soldier had about two pounds of equipment. Japanese main weapons in this war were the grenade and the bennet- bayonet. Their artillery and machine guns were totally, were very obsolete what they had going in the Pacific War. And then you flip it around and look at the United States. Uh, the United States had about 18 men in supp- or men and women, but mostly men, in supply services supporting each rifleman at the front. Other militaries in this period had about an eight to one ratio. Japan

7. 34:27 – 38:55

   Strategic sins of omission

   1. SPSarah Paine34:27

      had about a one to one. So Japan's already suffering food shortages before Pearl Harbor, and then when you get to the winter of 1942, '43, the Japanese are having critical shortages of oil, so they no longer can deploy the fleet at will. That means you, you c- forget about convoying anything 'cause you just haven't got the, the oil to do it, and yet by... when you get to '45 they have... when they're predicting they're going to have absolutely zero aviation fuel and other fuel by the end of '45, you have the government saying, "Still we're going to fight on for this honorable whatever it's going to be." Uh, these bushido, uh, ideas of that you, you just persevere, loyalty, honor, duty, keep going. All right. I'm going to be quoting this gentleman's diary, Admiral Ugaki Matome. He was the chief of the staff of the combined fleet until his plane and Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku's plane were shot down. US code breaking was quite good. We figured out where they were and, uh, b- we killed, um, Admiral Yamamoto, but this man survived, and by the time he wrote this entry, he was the head of an air fleet in, uh, on the home islands sending kamikaze flights out because Japan simply lacked the ability, uh, to do too much else this late in the day. And here is his last diary entry written on August 15th, 1945. This is after two atomic dr- bombs had been dropped and after the Russians had deployed into Manchuria and he said, "Okay, there are various causes for today's tragedy and I feel that my own responsibility is not light, but more fundamentally it was due to the great differences in natural... of national resources between the two countries." Okay? It's too late to come to that conclusion. US production statistics had been on the books forever, but the... when Japanese read these numbers, they thought they were ludicrously high and discounted them as propaganda, and, uh, those who knew better, who'd done tours of duty in Britain or the United States, they weren't promoted because they were defeatists. I believe that Admiral, uh, Ugaki kept and maintained his diary, is because he was an honorable samurai. He had believed in bushido, the ability of material, of willpower to more than compensate for inferior...... w-resources, but the war's outcome had proved him incorrect. And so as an honorable samurai, he paid with his life and he kept his diary to, nothing to be ashamed of. He'd done what he was gonna do. Here, I have the last prime minister of Imperial Japan, Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko, talking about his take on the war, and he said, "I think the basic cause of defeat was a loss of transport shipping." Okay. Uh, by the end of the war, Ja- 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 ar- the Navy had always focused on the, uh, mission by Alfred Thayer Mahan, who is from where I work back in the day, was all about fleet-on-fleet engagements and things. Uh, but it turns out that, uh, the, the Navy, 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 US submarine service is paralyzed. There are sea lines of communication. Go submarines. But, um, so here's, uh, Admiral, uh, Ugaki Matome who is talking ab- he eventually comes around to reco- 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're, 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 man-of-war, only merchantmen, while his disdain for the tar- target would cost him." And

8. 38:55 – 41:43

   Crippled logistics

   1. SPSarah Paine38:55

      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 in s- of supply and transport to the front has not en- even been half fulfilled each time. It led those on the verge of death," i.e. the Army, "uh, 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, uh, maintain your supplies there, and they're thinking, the Army's thinking, "You Navy are being irresponsible not doing any of these things." Uh, 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, the disagreements were brutal. Uh, but before I get there, uh, the in-group/out-group, uh, differences that stovepipe things and cause problems aren't simply between Army and Navy. They're within each service, so I'm gonna start there, and I'm gonna be, to be fair, I'm gonna provide one example for each service, and I'll start with the Army. It was the Kwantung 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, s- a lot, uh, more of them with the Army that's dealing with it, uh, going back and forth, and at the very end when Emperor Hirohito is capitulating, there was one last coup attempt which, amen, it failed, because the war might not have terminated quite the way it did if it had, had succeeded. So the point is, if you've got coups running on, th- that, that is not called unified command. It's a mess. And the Navy wasn't any better. I have a different sort of example here. During the war, the US, um, air ser- the people who were in- flying planes, they would alternate combat and training missions so that you would bring back someone who had survived and learnt something from combat to tell new people the things to avoid, how not to get yourself killed, and some other things. Well, in Japan, in-groups/out-groups. You sign up together, you train together, you fight together,

9. 41:43 – 44:16

   the Kwantung Army

   1. SPSarah Paine41:43

      and you die together. It doesn't mean the Japanese couldn't have grafted people between groups, it's just culturally it's not the natural thing that comes to mind. Moreover, the, and this apparently applies to the present, that, uh, in the US military they have what are called hot washes after different operations where you come back and you're very self-critical about all the things that went wrong, uh, to figure out how to do it better the next time. Well, there are cultural reasons why you would not wanna do that in Japan. Just, it's different. So, if these, uh, in-group/out-group things are causing problems within services, it gets toxic between the services, and I've got four examples and I'm gonna start with organizational issues. So, it's only in 1944 that the Army and Navy finally get it together to have regular liaison meetings in Tokyo. Great. Just in time to, uh, you know, figure out how you, how the, uh, capitulation's gonna work, and then the Army wanted to unify the, the two high commands. The Navy wanted nothing to do with that one 'cause they knew they'd just become the box lunch delivery service for the Army, didn't wanna do that. So by 1945, they did unify their information department. Great. They can spew the same propaganda and maybe share Tokyo Rose on a good day. Who knows?But there was no planning, even under the eminent threat of invasion, to how they're gonna coordinate their assets to protect the home island. They aren't even coordinating their air assets. Disaster. And this disaster goes back way in time. They had very, uh, far back in time. They'd had a very successful war against Russia that ends in 1905, but afterwards, in 1906, immediately afterwards, the Army and Navy are allowed to have completely separate war plans. The Army plan is all about fighting Russia for the big land grab in Eurasia. The Navy plan has a completely different set of enemies. It'd be the United States and Britain for the big gambit. You're not gonna use ships in Siberia. Eh, uh, the big gambit for empire in the Pacific. And each of these plans, A, they're secret from the other service, and B, each plan assumes the other surface- service is gonna do all kinds of important things for them. Okay, great. So, um, I guess the idea of secrecy and surprise, normally you apply that to your enemies, not your sister service. But that's

10. 44:16 – 52:00

    Inter-service communication

    1. SPSarah Paine44:16

       how it works, uh, in this setup. Now, the Army does come around to the Navy plan. Why? Because they get walloped by the Russians on the Mongolian border at the Battle of Nomonhan. The, the Bro- the Russians just decimate them in 1939. So now, the A- Army, it says, "Okay, okay, maybe that southern advance thing wasn't such a bad idea." And, um, so the Navy thinks this is great, and they do their, uh, southern advance. They go zooming down. Uh, the Japanese mind over matter stuff seems to be going really well because in 1942 the Army takes more land than, or, over a more dispersed theater than any country on the planet. The Navy hasn't, uh, lost a single ship. I mean, it's looking really good. Uh, except there are a few little details here that are a problem. Um, what the Navy hadn't told the Army is that actually they weren't ready for this whole thing, that they needed this outer perimeter reinforced by airfields in order to make the thing work, and that wasn't complete, and the Army learned about this on August 17th, 1942 because one of these airfields was being built in this tropical nightmare called Guadalcanal that the United States knew about, even though the Army didn't. And all of a sudden, the Navy is in deep, dark trouble and needs the Army to help them out of Guadalcanal. So now, think samurai. The Japanese 17th Army had been ordered to take Port Moresby in New Guinea. That's what they were up to. But with Guadalcanal, they are told, "Uh, you need to tack on Guadalcanal to that Port Moresby event." Okay, and in logistics, they're 1,000 kilometers apart. So now, the Army, uh, is gonna be lying to the Navy about how many people they've got at Guadalcanal because they're scared the Navy won't provide enough rations and things. They, uh, the Navy doesn't provide enough rations. People starve anyway. And then the Navy that got the Army into this mess wants to call it off and move out, but the Army good samurais want to fight on, and, uh, they just expend all kinds of resources. And this thing has enormous strategic effects. Prior to Guadalcanal, the Japanese Army wanted to continue their strategy of chasing the, the Nationalists out of China. Back in 1937, the Japanese had conquered Nanjing, which is the original Nationalist capital, and the Nationalists had fled up the Yangtze River to Chongqing beyond some gorges and some other things and beyond the r- the rail network. And in 1943, the Japanese were planning to attack Chongqing and then af- at that point, I think if you're a Nationalist, you're fleeing into Burma. And if that had happened, then your, the Japanese could have probably pulled hundreds of thousands of people out of the China theater and put them elsewhere, and that would've caused all kinds of problems. Also, the Japanese had to call off their plans to, uh, invade Australia. So Guadalcanal has enormous strategic implications, so if you're focusing samurai on one battle, Guadalcanal, well, it has implications in places called China and Australia that are a long way off. Okay, the United States also had inter-service rivalries, right, between our Army and Navy, and that's why you have two separate campaigns for Admiral Nimitz and General MacArthur, big egos, one campaign for each ego, and apparently that wasn't even big enough for MacArthur, okay? Uh, but even so, I don't believe the inter-service rivalries in the, the United States were remotely on the scale that they were in Japan. I have one final example to prove that one. So, after Pearl Harbor, uh, that had been tremendously successful for Admiral Yamamoto, he wanted to do the next thing was to attack Midway 'cause U- US basing there. And the Army said, "I don't want, we're not gonna do this." And Yamamoto goes, "I'm gonna resign." And the Army, "We don't care." "I'll commit suicide." "Go buy popcorn." Uh (laughs) - (laughs)

    2. NANarrator48:21

       (laughs)

    3. SPSarah Paine48:22

       And here's what changes this. So after Pearl Harbor, Americans wanted to let the Japanese know that we were thinking about them. And so, this is where Lieutenant Colonel James Doolittle, uh, the Doolittle raid's named after him. In April 1942, it was a one-way trip, uh, off an aircraft carrier 'cause they had so much fuel to, i- in order to get to Japan that the idea was they were gonna go bomb Japan then ditch in China, whoever survives. Very brave people who did this. And are they gonna cause massive damage in Japan? Well, yeah. If you're directly underneath, you won't appreciate it. But in general, it causes minor damage. But it has a major unimpes- ticipated strategic...... benefit, think samurai. Uh, the army, all of a sudden, is backing the navy that they're gonna now do Midway with them. It, and it's, right, don't think, retaliate, avenge your honor. The army was appalled that anyone had been able to bomb Japanese skies, so now they're all over it. Okay, so how does Midway work out? Really poorly for the Japanese. They lose four aircraft carriers. Uh, they've only got 12. They've lost a third. Oops. And here we go, ingroup, outgroup. The navy doesn't tell anyone for three or four months. Incredible, in a war, right? So, they're thinking about their little stovepipe and they're ignoring Japanese interests when this is going on. Okay? Different story. So, they do get their operational end to the whole thing. Uh, it's called, um, I mean, this is the firebombing of Tokyo, the whole place went up in flames. In fact, it got so hot, the canals boiled. It's an operational solution, it's, uh, unconditional surrender after a protracted war of annihilation that destroys just about every single Japanese city, minus a couple that survived. Uh, what, what broke the stalemate? And here's what happened. It's a, it's three really bad things that happened in four days. Talk about a concentration of really bad events from a Japanese point of view happening all at once. When you wanna talk about, this is, you know, the psychological shattering that actually happens to the Japanese. First, the United States drops an atomic bomb on Hiroshima. Two days later, the Jap- uh, the Russians pour 1.5 million people into Manchuria, the nightmare scenario of the Japanese army. And they know if this war protracts, the Russians are gonna come down through Manchuria, down the Korean Peninsula, onto Hokkaido, and down the home islands. It'll yield a divided Japan if it goes on for a long time. And then, you have the next day, the United States drops the second atomic bomb with a bluff. The idea being, we're gonna keep doing this daily or every other day, except we don't have any more atomic bombs and we cannot build them quickly for a long time. So, that's a big bluff. But the emperor then has had enough and he breaks the deadlock in the cabinet, and the cabinet allows the deadlock to be broken the next day. And then he makes an unprecedented ra- radio broadcast, never had, had that happened before, to his subjects telling them, "Game over." And then the next day, he sends, uh, three imperial princes to the Manchurian, Chinese, and Southern Thetans conveying his orders that game over. 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.

11. 52:00 – 58:20

    Shattering Japanese morale

    1. SPSarah Paine52:00

       And at the end of the war, the United States, um, came to understand the Japanese. At the beginning, uh, totally misread the situation with the embargo, oil embargo that's meant to deter and stay the... it precipitates the war that we didn't want. But at the end of the war, the United States realizes you're gonna need some level of Japanese cooperation if you're gonna occupy the place, and they're gonna 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, his son, and then that, 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 j- uh, Constitution of Japan that is gonna change their civil and military institutions, demilitarize the place, and try to get a democracy going there. It's, uh, the Constitution was written in one week by MacArthur's staff, they're running around raiding, um, bombed out libraries for examples of Western constitutions and they cobble this thing together. And this is the unamended Constitution of Japan still in, in power as, in effect to this very day, MacArthur's gift to Japan. All right, I've been incredibly, uh, critical of the Japanese, but to sum up here, there are cultural expla- 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, uh, they're explanatory of what may well happen when things get set off. But I've been really critical of Japan, I wanna even out the story by ending on the United States a little bit. Because the United States played a good game, or a bad game, of half-court tennis and mirror imaged at the beginning of this war. So, when the Japanese go into Manchuria in 1931, "We want them out." We don't ask, "Well, why are you doing this?" And their answer would be, "Well, hey, you passed the Hawley-Smoot Tariff. That means that, uh, this, we're trade dependent. Whom are we gonna trade with?" And once you did the tariff, everyone retaliated, so you've now shut down international trade. So, we need an empire that's big enough to survive, so that's why we're in Manchuria. And by the way, there are way too many communists here and we gotta get rid of those. And then in 1937 when they up, uh, the ante going into the rest of China, we didn't inquire, "What's going on?" And the, from the, what the Japanese want to do is wall off communism, don't want that, and then they wanna stabilize China so that you can have some productive economic growth. And if you go, "Well, what were US post-war objectives for China?" Ooh, sounds remarkably familiar. Communists out, stabilize the place. Okay. Well, how does the, the war affect all this? Well, actually, the, the warfare that went on wiped out the two barriers to communist expansion in Asia. What, what are the barriers? Well, one is Chiang Kai-shek and the nationalists in China, the Japanese wipe him out. Uh, they don't totally defeat him, but they have so weakened him and so discredited him by the, by the end of the, World War II, uh, he is really poorly positioned to win the Chinese Civil War, which he promptly loses.And then what does the United States do? What's the other barrier to communism? Well, it's the Japanese. We wipe them out, so what do you get? A unified communist China, which makes really complicated wars in the Korean War and the Vietnam War, and the problem, it's the gift that keeps on giving. We're still dealing with this problem today. So, take a little word from Sun Tzu, uh, know your enemy, or the other side. Know the, uh, the person you're talking to. Uh, don't play half-court tennis. It's a really dangerous game. Rather, try to analyze why, ask yourself why is someone doing whatever they're doing? And just because you're trying to understand it doesn't mean you're condoning it. It's just trying to figure out the logic of the other person. It'll set you up for more informed choices.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel56:07

       Before we move on to the interview, a quick word from our sponsors, Scale AI. The AI race is the Manhattan Project for the modern age. Whoever wins reshapes the balance of global power. That's why Scale partners with the US government to fuel America's AI advantage through their data foundry. The Air Force, Army, Defense Innovation Unit, and Chief Digital and Artificial Intelligence Office all trust Scale to equip their teams with AI-ready data and the technology to build powerful applications. 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. Whether through its work with the government or businesses like OpenAI, Google DeepMind, or Meta, Scale is at the forefront of US AI innovation. If you're interested in learning more about how Scale powers frontier AI capabilities, go to scale.com/dwarkesh. All right, back to Sarah. I'm a little bit confused on some of the bushido stuff and how it explains Japan's actions in the war.

    3. SPSarah Paine57:21

       Uh-oh.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel57:21

       So, look, this Zen Buddhism stuff, the, the, the cherry orchards that are blossoming and you must act with the generosity of a samurai, all this bushido moral stuff, how does that square with the conduct of Japan during the war, the rape of Nanking, the killing of millions of Chinese, the, uh, treatment of prisoners of war, which rivaled the fatality rates of the Nazi extermination camps? It seems like there's a... Where's the Buddhism there?

    5. SPSarah Paine57:50

       Where's the Bu- well, A, I'm not an expert on Buddhism. Um, but see you've got a, a lot of things conflated in there. Uh, if you're asking about, um, the, part of the brutality of the war is Japan's totally out of resources, and you're thinking it's going through a massive area of tier- uh, territory. They actually had no ability to take POWs, or if they took POWs,

12. 58:20 – 1:05:47

    Q&A begins

    1. SPSarah Paine58:20

       they'd have to halt the military operation, and then you gotta put these people somewhere. And so they just slaughtered them instead, and not... There were POWs, and, or, or there were cases of, uh, hostile civilians who also got slaughtered because... I, I don't know the because, but, uh, they had very limit- limited numbers of people to deal with this. So the one hand you've got absolute desperation. I don't think any people behave well when they're desperate. The war had been going on for years by the time we get interested in it, right? It starts in '31. So you have desperate people. Uh, there's another piece. I can just add little pieces. I can't explain a whole people. That in the prison camps... So in Japan, if I'm gonna be... Let's say you were Japanese. You and I are looking each other in the eye. That's how you do it in the West, show that you're paying attention. That's not how you do it in Japan. In Japan, if you're Japanese, I'm looking at your shoulder. It's rude to look people in the eye. It's just too intrusive. You're getting too much information, probably, from that person's face. So you can imagine a Westerner in a pri- prison camp looks his guard in the eye (laughs) and the eye's going, uh, the g- the guard's going, "Oh, who is this arrogant person?" You're a PO- you can imagine bad things are then gonna be happening. These are guesses on what's going on of... Uh, there are f- certain values that I've talked about. There's certain desperation that's going on, and then there's, uh, the dehumanization of what wartime's all about, right? Initially, s- conscripts go in of all armies, uh, having trouble killing people, and then they get better at it over time. This is the tragedy of human beings. I don't know if that answered your question. I don't know that I know the answer.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:00:09

       Hmm. Okay, so here- here's another thing that I wanna clarify. Look, if you were trying to understand Britain's conduct in World War I, why they initiated it and why they conducted it in the way they did, and you tried to understand it using cultural explanations, what some British guy wrote in the 17th century, I don't know how far you'd get. And maybe the more illuminating thing is just to look at, like, immediately what was happening in the 1910s, what were the, uh, proximal strategic objectives. So, w- with bushido, why are, why are we looking back at what people were writing in the 1700s?

    3. SPSarah Paine1:00:42

       I'm gonna break up the British thing into two parts. So one p- one analytical framework is you can look at wars, uh, in terms of underlying causes and proximate causes. The underlying causes are like the tinder of grievances on both sides, and there can be cultural components to that or other components. And so there's this accumulating tinder of where you've got two different sides, at least, at cross-purposes. But then there's the match, the proximate cause, which is a whole series of matches, and finally the last one's Pearl Harbor, and you are off and running to a place you might not wanna go to, right? So there's that. And then there's, um, culture. Let's look at Britain strategic culture, and I'm no expert on British strategic culture but these are some basics. So they're an island, and they wanna be able to trade with the world, but...... they don't want any one power dominating the continent, so this is their strategic thinking from way back. And so if there is a power that's on the verge of dominating the continent, you wanna back the other side to prevent that outcome. So, that's very much a part of British thinking, goes back a long time, and you can read, uh, things going aback a long time of describing that situation. There's another piece that goes back a long time in the British. Uh, navies are rarely decisive in warfare. What I mean by decisive, it means you actually g- uh, get the goal that you're after for fighting, whereas armies can be. If your goal is, "I wanna occupy all of France," or m- better yet, the Hol- uh, the- the Holland, something smaller, um, yeah, an army can probably- might be able to do that for you, one instrument of national power. But Britain's reliant on a navy and doesn't like to have a big standing army, and so they're thinking in terms of diplomacy and allies, uh, and working e- economics, making money from trade. And so they are the ones who coined the term grand strategy. It is their gift to us, and it absolutely informs their f- uh, thinking at a very macro level. So, n- no one thing is e- entirely explanatory. Also, we human beings game the system. The moment I tell you you're Japanese and you think this way is the moment go, "Oh, that's what she thinks? Ha ha ha ha, we're gonna do something different." Right? So, this is the problem with human beings.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:03

       Hmm. The, um, the loyalty precept, uh, b- h- uh, m- wasn't one of the problems with the Japanese military that they weren't loyal, that they were trying to do these coups all the time-

    5. SPSarah Paine1:03:14

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:03:14

       ... and the young officers were insubordinate?

    7. SPSarah Paine1:03:16

       Yeah, it's an excellent question, and what you're doing is feeding me back the Greek principle of logic, which is the law of non, uh, contradiction. You cannot simultaneously believe mutually exclusive things. So, what's going on? You're telling me it's all hierarchical, and now you're telling me junior officers are doing, or mid-level officers are doing things. What's going on here? Ah, but that's a fundamental principle of logic that the West puts great credence on. Not the case in, uh, the East necessarily. Now, now people have educations that are different, so we're going back in the day where people are not looking in terms of, okay, we gotta have a, a, a logically consistent argument. Rather, uh, there are these social values that we are gonna... If, if it's all about g- group loyalties, that's what we're gonna prioritize, and if my subgroup, uh, is gonna be my unit or whatever, that's how that's gonna go. So, you're, you're doing a wonderful piece of Western logic. It's excellent, and this is why, uh, other cultures find dealing with Westerners like battery acid, because they have these o- these wha- these different belief systems and you go like, "Okay, you have women and we got women. Uh, our women drive cars and yours are, like, where? Uh, is there something wrong with your women?" It, it, it's, it's battery acid on other cultures.

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:04:41

       Mm-hmm. I, I was struck when you were describing, you know, that the Nazis were putting their em- enemies on d- death ground, the Japanese were putting their enemies on death ground, and in both cases it was detrimental because you were preventing the other side from surrendering. That seems even worse than what was happening before that period in history where, look, you can think over time that our norms about civility and w- war, um, uh, war crimes are improving over time, but it seems like in World War II, the way people were acting was even worse than they were acting in World War I. The way, like, Germany and Russia were fighting in World War I was probably more civil than how they were a- fighting in World War II. What, o- and then obviously th- what Japan was doing in China at the time, what was going on around the world that people just got so, like, demonic, uh, o- during this period?

    9. SPSarah Paine1:05:25

       Uh, no, it's not. Warfare's not civil. You're killing people. I know a lot of people talk about just wars and it's rather a, a hu- a horrible piece of human existence. So, there are a number of things have gone on. With the Industrial Revolution, you can now kill people on an industrial scale. When you're doing it with bows and arrows, it takes a lot more time to create the mayhem, so that's

13. 1:05:47 – 1:12:15

    Unusual brutality of WWII

    1. SPSarah Paine1:05:47

       one thing, the ability just to wipe out people. World War I on the Western Front was all entrenched. On the Eastern Front, there was a great deal of movement, but on the Western Front, it was entrenched, which meant civilian populations weren't really touched by it.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:06:02

       Hmm.

    3. SPSarah Paine1:06:02

       Right? W- where the initial fighting, yeah, they're leveled, but once you get a trench, you're not. And then we in the West don't actually study too much what happened, uh, to the civilians on the Eastern Front where it's moving around. This is back to my h- half-court tennis, so we're not paying attention to those civilians. So, uh, for the West, very few civilian casualties, whereas when you get to World War II, you're bombing people. You now have technologies you can get at people and, uh, invading. Also, it's the lesson of World War I, the feeling that, um, the Germans really hadn't felt their defeat and that allowed them to make up this story about how it was they weren't defeated, the Jews did it or whoever, they were betrayed. And, uh, Churchill and Roosevelt decided there would be a, a march to Berli- Berlin to disabuse them of that, and that involves killing a lot of civilians to get to Berlin. And of course, the Russians were determined to pay back for what the J- the Nazis had done to them. And we had no sympathy for, uh, what, uh, we weren't gonna... We were gonna turn a blind eye what the Russians were up to because the Nazis had been so heinous.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:07:10

       Hmm. This is probably wrong. C- I want you to correct me, but, uh, maybe one way you can explain why the Japanese were so brutal in their campaign around this time is if you, 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 a- 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 i- in some sense, like, it was just, like, applying the principle of social death to their enemy.

    5. SPSarah Paine1:07:47

       Uh, w- the whole war is brutal. So, um, we, they're doing a lot of hand-to-hand brutality, and part of it has to do with lack of equipment. Uh, that firebombing of Tokyo happened in one night, 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 a 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 reasoning that went into the atomic bombing. That's controversial, right? The Americans, why, why did they drop atomic bombs on the Japanese? And it's, there was no, um, disagreement about that in the United States at the time, because it was a question of, are you gonna send American young men, your age, and, uh, millions of them would've died hitting the home islands, or are you gonna 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.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:09:03

       Was there any way for the West to, or for America to win the Pacific War without the firebombing?

    7. SPSarah Paine1:09:08

       Well, okay, let's, 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, uh, 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 gonna be. I think it's a miracle, uh, well, A, okay, the win, if you're gonna 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 g- 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, to, um, 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, uh, in Japan, uh, I think, uh, at some stage, you deci- 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, a new North Korea, just this inevitable, uh, these eternal non-functioning society, so no.

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:10:52

       Mm.

    9. SPSarah Paine1:10:53

       Uh, these, wars are tragic, and also, don't think that you have all the cards that you're gonna make the decisions about what's gonna happen. The other side's gonna put you into corners where you're gonna choose from very unpleasant alternatives.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:08

        I wanna, uh, ask you about how the war starts. So there's obviously the, go- 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- it's striking to me how much m- miscommunication and the ability for both sides to just understand that there was a compromise here was such a big factor here, where, uh, I- I feel like if, uh, Prince Konoye and, uh, uh, FDR could get on, like, a Zoom call, I feel like the war (laughs) ...

    11. SPSarah Paine1:11:45

        You're an optimist.

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:46

        (laughs)

    13. SPSarah Paine1:11:46

        You know what-

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:11:47

        But-

    15. SPSarah Paine1:11:47

        ... the, the, think about, uh, let's talk about sunk costs, uh, and I'm gonna talk about sunk casualties. By the time you're there, the Japanese have suffered 600,000 casualties in China. Uh, 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. Uh, there's,

14. 1:12:15 – 1:17:33

    Embargo caused the war

    1. SPSarah Paine1:12:15

       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, uh, and particularly, this is why Hirohito is Mr. Silent for most of the war. Initially, he's all for it until it goes sour, then he's less so. Uh, is he knows that he'll be, uh, if not assassinated, declared insane, and then his, his, uh, perfectly serviceable adolescent son, or however old his son was, would be the token emperor. So I- I don't think, uh, no matter, uh, the Zoom call is not gonna change the fundamentally high stakes that are involved for both sides.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:12:55

       Well, oh, uh, uh, y- you really think if Hirohito had, like, stepped in and been like, "No, we're not doing this," that they, he would have been, uh, you served as emperor?

    3. SPSarah Paine1:13:02

       Yeah, early on. Oh, and there's another piece. Let's look at the United States in 1941. Great d- uh, Great Depression, isolationists, this is where the first America firsters are, they're the ones who created the idea, they didn't wanna know about all these foreign places, uh, the, totally isolationist. Hawaii wasn't even a state, doesn't become a state until 1959. If you're Japanese looking at the place, "Oh, it's a colony." So it'll be like sort of the dog that barks, you take a newspaper and thwap them a few times and maybe the dog will start barking, 'cause what, uh, what the Japanese want is the United States just mind its own business, stay out of Asia. It's our backyard, it's not your backyard, and, uh, looks at the United States, United States doesn't have that much, uh, trade with Asia compared to the rest of the world. Sure, it sells Japan most of its oil, but that's not most of US trade.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:13:53

       I was, I was reading about this before, uh, preparing to interview you, and, uh, the, the particular cases where diplomacy broke down. So, there's examples where the translators between-

    5. SPSarah Paine1:14:01

       Oh.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:01

       ... Japan and America are, and I can't believe that this is true, you can tell me if this is not, but they're exaggerating what each side is saying to make them more vivid to read. Like, uh, y- you know, if Tojo says something conciliatory, it's exaggerated to make it s-

    7. SPSarah Paine1:14:15

       (laughs) .

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:15

       And that's, like, obviously not the role of a diplomatic translator. Um, and there's many cases where, after the war, Tojo says, "If we had gotten the Modus Vivendi that FDR apparently was contemplating sending to us, if we saw those agreements, we would've agreed." Or th- there, uh, apparently they were, they misunderstood that the final agreement they got from Secretary of State Hull, where it said that you must return China, they thought it included Manchuria. Hull didn't intend it to be included in Manchuria. They might have said yes to that. It seems like the war really could've been averted if, like, a couple of mistranslations were avoided.

    9. SPSarah Paine1:14:44

       Uh, okay. I wouldn't take Tojo as my source for anything.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:14:48

        (laughs)

    11. SPSarah Paine1:14:49

        Uh, he's a guy who, uh, I, uh, it was before graduating class of cadets or something, and he, he was talking about how even medi- people had said that he was mediocre, and, but look where he'd risen to be, and he's this great man. Uh, also at the end, he's got this whiny answer of, "Oh, it wasn't my fault. It's all your translators," and...

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:08

        Hmm.

    13. SPSarah Paine1:15:09

        Uh, and, oh, the peace on Manchuria, no, I don't know that that would've been a compromise, 'cause the League of Nations had sent in something called the Lytton Commission, which had told the Japanese they had to get out, and oh, by the way, it is a fiction that Manchuria's not a part of China. It is an integral part of China, has been for the longest time. What the Japanese did is they kidnap the last Qing emperor, Manchu, Manchuria, uh, whose f- uh, ancestors came from Manchuria, popped him in, Henry Puyi, made him the emperor, to try to come up with this fiction that, oh, Manchuria's a separate place. Uh, excuse me, it's not. It's part of China. It's the internationally recognized territory of China.

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:15:50

        So I wonder if one of the problems here is, uh, look, w- uh, it was not in the vital strategic interest of America to secure or liberate China. In fact, the out- the outcome of the war obviously is the nationalist suits the communistic power. And as we'll talk about in the next lecture, that was the very opposite of liberating China. Um, uh, so basically America puts in this oil embargo and goes, uh, knows that the outcome of failed negotiations on getting rid of that embargo is a total world war of this kind, and it's not even for the main strategic objective, which is, you know, y- you gotta get Hitler, you gotta get, uh, beat Germany. What, I mean, w- wasn't this just our failure of grand strategy to realize, why are we doing this? Why, what, what's our strategic objective here?

    15. SPSarah Paine1:16:34

        Well, hold on, we weren't fighting Germany. The only reason we fought Germany is 'cause Hitler made a major blunder. He had an alliance with Japan that said if Jap- if Japan was attacked, he would come in. Not if Japan attacked someone else that he would come in. He interprets it broadly, and he declares war on this country. That is how the, the United States got into World War II, uh, Europe. If Hitler had not made that blunder, FDR would've been in a world of trouble trying to explain why he's suddenly gonna be fighting Nazis over an attack on Pearl Harbor by Japanese, so that's a separate issue. The main thing that, um, uh, Americans who thought deeply cared about is the international system, that we should deal with each other through laws, through freedom of navigation. So this is how you run your commercial transactions, that big countries don't get to overrun small countries, 'cause if they do, the entire international system goes down. And the

15. 1:17:33 – 1:22:47

    The liberation of China

    1. SPSarah Paine1:17:33

       logic that you're describing is excellent logic, and this is what the Japanese are saying. It's like, "Why would the Americans care about this?" Uh, Americans care deeply about the international system, or, uh, people who are thoughtful about it, and it's also like, "Why, why not let the Russians eat all of Euro- uh, of, uh, Ukraine? Why are the Europeans suddenly all over this problem," right? And they've unified very recently, uh, on, on this. It's because the whole system is at stake.

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:05

       Yeah.

    3. SPSarah Paine1:18:06

       So it's m- it's, it is really high stakes at a strategic level. The Japanese are all looking at the operational level and going, "Why do you care about these countries?" Uh, we care about the entire system 'cause our prosperity's based on it.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:18:17

       So, I wonder if the problem here is that, uh, America d- isn't, at least at the time, wasn't willing to give enough concessions to the factions within Japan in, that care about peace so that they can save face and actually argue for ending war, where th- just the idea that they're gonna give up Manchuria as well, obviously that's not gonna happen. And when Secretary of State Hull just sees these vacillating, uh, telegrams, uh, from the Japanese, he assumes it's because they're like, they're fickle or something. It's like, no, it's a civilian part of the government, like, trying its best to prevent the military from taking over, and you gotta give, you gotta give them something to save face, you know?

    5. SPSarah Paine1:18:53

       Um, the Jap- that faction had already lost, and they lost in 1936. Um, Takahashi Korekiyo is Japan's longest-serving finance minister, and he was a very distinguished man. In fact, he brought the Japanese economy out of the Great Depression before, uh, anyone in the West was doing. It was through government spending and trying to get people to spend at home. And he told the army, he said, "Fellas, if you go on this bend for empire, uh, you need, you're not gonna actually get resources, because you're gonna spend a lot of money fighting with people, resources doing that, and then it's gonna take you years of investments to access these resources. So you gotta be able to cover these investments for years and years and years." And he's like, "Cooperate within the international system. That is the way to prosperity for Japan." Well, uh, the, that was the February Young Officers' Revolt, where he and I can't remember how many others were murdered. They came to his home in the middle of the night, and as he stood up to talk to them, they literally hacked him apart.... they lost. That, that, that whole game is over.

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:19:59

       But Prince Konoye doesn't, like, he knows he's gonna ... The person who was Prime Minister in 1941 realizes that they're gonna lose a, a war against America, and he doesn't want to do that. It's just that Tojo, the War Minister at the time, doesn't answer to him. Like, there, there are people that the Prime Minister's like, doesn't want war-

    7. SPSarah Paine1:20:14

       Oh, wait a minute-

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:20:14

       ... and, and we don't give him enough to save face, right?

    9. SPSarah Paine1:20:15

       Oh, wait a minute. They have a huge army there that's more than capable of assassinating people and they get in the way. So it, it's, that ship has sailed. I- i- it, that you can make... This is what a pivotal decision is. Once you've made it, there's no going back to the way the world was, and Japan, uh, d- lost too many people, and, uh, there are too many figures in the army. It, it's, um, we think that it's an inevitable outcome of the, of having the world the way it is now with this Japan that's a, a wonderful country now. Uh, uh, they, uh, just, uh, at, at the lead of so many different level, uh, areas of human endeavor, and we think, "Oh, that's th- the, that's the inevitable outcome." It's not.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:03

        Yeah. I guess what I'm trying to ask you is, is it, like, is there anything America could have done in the immediate years leading up to the war that could have prevented this outcome? Because-

    11. SPSarah Paine1:21:12

        Uh-

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:12

        ... the fact that there is a world... Like-

    13. SPSarah Paine1:21:14

        A Hawley-Smoot.

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:14

        ... prima facie, you should assume that if there is a world war, things weren't done optimally, right?

    15. SPSarah Paine1:21:18

        Oh, yeah.

    16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:18

        And that not, that doesn't mean everybody's equally at fault, but i- i- is there anything that could've been done differently?

    17. SPSarah Paine1:21:23

        Yeah, a Hawley-Smoot.

    18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:24

        But maybe like in the years-

    19. SPSarah Paine1:21:25

        No, no, no. It's-

    20. DPDwarkesh Patel1:21:25

        ... directly before.

    21. SPSarah Paine1:21:26

        It, but this is serious, is, uh, we all live, that Hawley-Smoot Tariff is a game of half-court tennis, so you're looking at the United States. It's in a terrible depression. You wanna pr- protect jobs here, and so you raise these big tariff walls, and then, okay, what's the other side in that gonna do? They're gonna raise their tariff walls and pay you back. What's that gonna do? It's gonna cost a lot of American jobs if you play that game. You need to be talking with other people. So, uh, once you have set the conditions, hothouse conditions, for fascists to take over in Germany and in Japan, you are in a world of hurt. The, that sh- uh, uh, the easy solutions are no longer there anymore.

    22. DPDwarkesh Patel1:22:07

        So, uh, uh, maybe I'll ask the question this way. The oil embargo, was it a mistake? Because it's the, uh, the idea is to protect the international system, prevent empire. Well, we got more empire. We got a world war. We got communists taking over in China. Whatever's gonna happen if you got rid of the oil embargo can't have been worse than that, right?

    23. SPSarah Paine1:22:22

        Well, uh, what, yeah, it was. What Roosevelt was really scared of was that the Japanese would attack Russia. He was so, because then he thought Russia would fall, and if Russia fell, he thought the Nazis would win. So at least when the Japanese attacked, they attacked us. That was actually better than attacking Russia. So I, the oil r- embargo, um, uh,

16. 1:22:47 – 1:26:15

    Could US have prevented war?

    1. SPSarah Paine1:22:47

       if you wanna... Eh, I, I, and so let's say you don't do it and Japan never attacks us, and then the, uh, uh, Russians are down, and you've got, um, Nazis in control of the world, so must we better?

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:23:03

       Doesn't seem... And, but you don't have that world war with America. Like, it doesn't seem insane to think that, I mean, we're still gonna fight the Nazis, but-

    3. SPSarah Paine1:23:08

       You're not gonna have an international system. Oh, and you've, um, if that's the ca- and the Nazis were gearing up 'cause eventually they're gonna fight us 'cause... So this is another problem, th- another, um, concept that I think's useful is limited versus unlimited objectives. A limited object- or an unlimited objective is, "I wanna do regime change in your country." The most unlimited variety is that, "Not only do I wanna do regime change, but I wanna kill all your people while I'm at it." So, um, if that is what the, your opposite number is planning, if you compromise with them, you are simply setting them up and putting them in a stronger position when they come at you for the final kill. If they have limited objectives, then by all means compromise with them and negotiate away on what is it. You want, uh, just this little sliver or, of territory, or you want some preferential treatment, we can do that for you. But, um, you're talking about, uh, a world order here, whether it's gonna be based on laws increasingly or, uh, these opposing spheres of influence.

    4. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:18

       To keep pushing back on this, the-

    5. SPSarah Paine1:24:19

       I don't have an answer beyond-

    6. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:20

       (laughs)

    7. SPSarah Paine1:24:20

       I mean, I've given you what little I can think. I'm, uh, but I, hey, I'm not the grand profiteer in this world. These com- these questions you're asking me are way above my pay grade. (audience laughs)

    8. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:32

       So people in the YouTube comment section get mad at me when I a- uh, when I keep asking about, like, counterfactuals, um, and I understand, you know, obviously I don't understand what was happening at the time. I'm naive about history, whatever, but I do think it's important that what, what, what are we trying to do when we try to understand history? We're trying to understand if we had done things differently-

    9. SPSarah Paine1:24:48

       Yeah, yeah, yeah.

    10. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:48

        ... what would have happened? What are the lessons we take?

    11. SPSarah Paine1:24:50

        I'm all-

    12. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:50

        And counterfactuals are the main way we can do that.

    13. SPSarah Paine1:24:52

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. I'm all for it. Um, uh, we teach by counterfactuals.

    14. DPDwarkesh Patel1:24:55

        Yeah.

    15. SPSarah Paine1:24:55

        It's, uh, replay it and, and can you come up with different options? I think you're in a series of really awful options.

    16. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:01

        Mm-hmm. The difference between the Japanese and the Nazis is that the Nazis had, the ideology was that we gotta kill millions of people. Th- that's like, that is what they believed. The Japanese didn't in the same way-

    17. SPSarah Paine1:25:12

        Yeah.

    18. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:12

        ... have the ideolo- and then naturally they had, um, their, they were a continental empire. They also wanted trade. Uh-

    19. SPSarah Paine1:25:19

        Well-

    20. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:19

        And they, th- you know, they, they don't like communists. They don't want the communists to take over in China. It just seems like naturally, if we didn't go to war with them, we might have been allies as we ended up being later on.

    21. SPSarah Paine1:25:29

        Well, they attacked us, and, uh, and so-

    22. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:32

        Under the oil embargo.

    23. SPSarah Paine1:25:33

        Yeah, yeah. Yeah, but, but-

    24. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:34

        But the question is like, should we have gotten out of the oil embargo-

    25. SPSarah Paine1:25:35

        Yeah, yeah, yeah. But wait, wait, wait, wait-

    26. DPDwarkesh Patel1:25:35

        ... so that oil attack wouldn't have happened?

    27. SPSarah Paine1:25:36

        But wait a second. The Japanese are saying, "We have the rights to your oil." Excuse me, we have the right to sell it or not sell it to anyone we feel like. All right? It's, uh, I mean, wha- since when do they have the rights to it? Okay, great. So you're gonna do all this crazy stuff and then still think we have to sell you oil? And oh, by the way, this oil is being used to kill Chinese all over the place. Uh, this is what the, what their Japanese bombers are running on.

    28. DPDwarkesh Patel1:26:00

        Yeah, I- I- I feel like...

    29. NANarrator1:26:03

        (laughs)

    30. DPDwarkesh Patel1:26:03

        No, I mean, uh, uh, morally, I agree, we don't, like, they don't own our oil. The question is, like, sh- g- there's nothing about the, uh, like, do, are they entitled to it? It's like, should we have given it to them? Would the outcome have been better if we did? Um, but would-
17. 1:26:15 – 1:28:31

    Counterfactuals in history

    1. SPSarah Paine1:26:15

       the outcome wouldn't have been better, but I don't know, right? And you're asking me things where, um, my experience is, I'm just a professor. I just, you know, show up at seminar on time-

    2. DPDwarkesh Patel1:26:27

       (laughs)

    3. SPSarah Paine1:26:27

       ... and (laughs) I try to do reading as, and prep, and my experience has not been in government, let alone at the highest echelons of government of what's feasible and what's not feasible. And I'm, I'm, the answers I've given you are, uh, where I'm at, but I don't, I can't tell you more.

Episode duration: 2:07:19