Sarah Paine Episode 2: Why Japan Lost (Lecture & Interview)
Episode publishedPodcast: Dwarkesh PodcastDwarkesh Podcast
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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. Alright. 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 in the world. And Americans, on the other hand, their beloved sport, I believe, is footbal
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Where's the well, a, I'm not an expert on Buddhism. But, see, you've got a lot of things conflated in there. If you're asking about 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 territory. They actually had no ability to take POWs. Or if they took POWs, 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, hostile civilians who also got slaughtered because I I don't know t
Okay. So here here's another thing that I wanna clarify. Look. If you were trying to understand Britain's conduct in World War 1, why they initiated it, and why they conducted it in the way they did, and you try 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 19 tens. What were the approximal strategic objectives? So with Bushido, why are why are we looking back at what people were writing in the 17 100?
I'm going to break up the British thing into 2 parts. So one one analytical framework is you can look at wars, 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 2 different sides, at least across 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 want to go to.
The, the loyalty precept, 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, and the young officers were insubordinate?
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 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 pr
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