JDB Communications, LLC is proud and pleased (and relieved, after two years) to announce the publication of Why the Samurai Lost Japan: A Study in Miscalculation and Follyby John D. Beatty and Lee A. Rochwerger, a reworking of their earlier and acclaimed What Were They Thinking: A Fresh Look at Japan at War, 1941-1945 (Merriam Press, 2009).
Why the Samurai Lost Japan isn’t just another “west triumphant” hagiography of WWII. Nor is it a “Japan as victim” story of lost opportunities for peace. Instead, it is a study of agrarian and cash-poor Japan’s desperate need for resource independence, and of the warriors who sought to satiate that need…the samurai.
When Perry sailed to Japan in 1854, the whole of the Japanese Empire had fewer paved roads than a square mile of the city of London. In 1941, Japan sent the largest aircraft carrier task force in the world to attack the United States Navy at Pearl Harbor. How this three-generation, breakneck-paced modernization, and industrialization affected Japan is just one subject explored in Why the Samurai Lost Japan.
Beginning in the late 19th century, Imperial Japan embarked on a program of aggressive military overseas adventures in Asia and the Pacific. Yet, it wasn’t until the 1930s that Japan’s economy changed from largely agrarian to mostly industrial. Between 1904 and 1941 Japan conquered Korea, Manchuria, large parts of China, and French Indochina, and occupied large swaths of Pacific islands. This provided tremendous resources, but it still wasn’t enough: food riots wracked Japan right up to 1945. How this powerful-yet-weak empire managed these conquests is also explored by Why the Samurai Lost Japan.
Japan’s empire-building aggressions were driven by the ancient cult of samurai warriors who were answerable only to their Emperor. The samurai followed a freewheeling, freely interpreted “code” of bushido—a code better understood than it was understandable, more spoken of than written down with authority. Bushido left only one option for any failure, regardless of scale or import—death. Why the Samurai Lost Japan is also a study of that code and the warriors who followed it—their aspirations, successes, miscalculations, and follies.
In 1941 the samurai picked a fight with arguably the greatest western industrial power on the planet at that time—the United States. They led Japan into a horrible war—the Pacific Theater of World War II—stretching across a third of the Earth’s surface, and spanning an additional three years, eight months, three weeks and five days. Their early and easy victories convinced them of their invincibility. They refused to believe that their fighting spirit could be defeated by superior firepower. However, before they started the war, the samurai knew they could not win outright. The west had to stop fighting early on, or Japan was doomed…and they had no Plan B. Why the Samurai Lost Japan explores the expectations of the samurai planners, and their main planning tool—hope.
The samurai’s war ended after two nuclear devices were used over Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Most authorities believe that Japan’s seeking peace after the atomic bombings were connected to those bombings. Why the Samurai Lost Japandiscusses and challenges how the war in the Pacific really ended…and questions the popular assumptions about governance in pre-1945 Japan.
First I have to make sure that you all have your fireworks ready for Guy Fawkes Day, which is of course today. Got ’em? Good. On to more fireworks.
HMS Jervis Bay started life in 1922 as a Commonwealth Line passenger liner and ended her life as a 14,000-ton barely-armed target for Germany’s large cruiser/”pocket battleship” Admiral Scheer on 5 November 1940 while trying to protect eastbound convoy HX-84.
These are the stark and straightforward facts. But there’s a lot more to this story.
First is the concept of the AMC, or Armed Merchant Cruiser. These were a sensible development of the Royal Navy in the late 19th century when the speed and size of passenger vessels grew exponentially faster than the RN could keep up with. The first AMCs were developed to prove the concept, then quietly retired. When WWI began, the first batch of fast passenger and cargo vessels were modified and used mostly in enforcing the North Sea blockade, where they suffered from submarine attacks but were otherwise successful, if unable to confront German auxiliary cruisers, also called raiders. Notable exceptions included HMS Alcantara‘s success against Germany’s Grief in 1916.
But as a concept, the AMCs were obsolete before that. The Dreadnaught revolution in warship design had invited the development of smaller, heavier armed torpedo boat destroyers, that became simply “destroyers” that were better at surviving, cheaper to build, and faster than most raiders. Aside from that, commerce raiding had mostly passed to submarines, against which the AMCs had very little chance.
But in 1939 Britain had very few options, and not enough warships to protect all the convoys that she needed from the four corners of the Earth just to survive, let alone fight a war. Thus, Jervis Bay and another 40+ merchant ships were given navy crews, old guns, and missions more suited not only to real warships but to several of them. The convoy that Jervis Bay was to protect was 37 ships…and she was the only escort.
On that fatal day, Admiral Scheer found the convoy just before 4 in the afternoon, and Jervis Bay dutifully took her place to intercept, even though the issue was never in doubt. The uneven duel lasted 24 minutes, as the doughy AMC fired her old 6-inch guns at the pocket battleship and the pocket battleship fired her new 11-inch guns back. Ablaze and wrecked with most of the officers dead, Jervis Bay stopped shooting and quickly went down, her captain dead on the bridge. Sixty-five survivors of a crew of 254 were picked up by a Swedish freighter.
Lest the reader think it was all in vain, it wasn’t. Knowing that his ship wouldn’t survive, Captain Fogarty Fegen of Jervis Bay ordered the convoy to scatter in the gathering dusk, and only five of the merchantmen were sunk by Admiral Sheer that afternoon and evening. For his heroism, Fegen was posthumously awarded the Victoria Cross.
Putting Jervis Bay out there alone was a calculated gamble at that stage of the war, for most convoys were managing the crossing unmolested. The German surface fleet–built and equipped primarily for raiding–was small, and the transit for German submarines was still long before the bases in France were operational late in 1940. Of the 42 AMCs converted in 1939 and 1940, only one was still in service by 1944. The Armed Merchant Cruisers were always a stopgap, and though successful at times, were always meant to be secondary vessels.
And then there’s National Donut Day, of which there are two: the first Friday in June, and 5 November, though precisely why there are two of them is another mystery of the ages. The earliest with known origins is the one in June, dating from 1938 when the Salvation Army in Chicago chose to celebrate the 200-odd “doughnut lassies” that they sent to the battlefields of WWI. Dunkin Donuts, which is in the process of dropping the “Donuts” out of its name (go figure) observes this June date.
The November observation date may have been around as early as the 1930s’ as well, though exactly where and why is still unknown. Entenmann’s and Krispy Kreme observe the November date. This means, of course, a donut war brews for the stomachs of America.
No, not really. Donut consumption in the US has been declining for more than twenty years, so no, not really. Dunkin and Krispy Kreme have been expanding their menus in non-fat-pill directions for at least that long, driven by the explosion of Starbucks, primarily, and the general change in American consumer tastes.
And the spelling is supposed to be “doughnut,” but the more common “donut” has been around since, well, Dunkin put up his first sign. Either now is acceptable in most circles, but if the Spelling Police come after you…don’t say I didn’t warn you.
But National Donut Day is upon us, and if these photos don’t entice you to go out and at least think about a cruller…I can’t help you.
I CAN, of course, help you choose your next WWII-era book: Why the Samurai Lost Japan is now scheduled for release on 15 December. You should be able to go to your fave bookseller, including the online stores and our Bookpatch store, around then. Electronic versions (PDF, Kobo, e-book) should be available in January.
For those of you who are new here, for nearly two years I’ve been announcing the reworking of What Were They Thinking? A Fresh Look at Japan at War 1941-45. My co-author and I have gotten our book back under our control, reworked and expanded and renamed it into the magnum opus that you will see in December.
Why the Samurai Lost Japan is, as the subtitle says, a study in miscalculation and folly. More than that, it is an object lesson in modernization, industrialization, and what the Star Trek universe warned against with the First Prime Directive: overreaching contamination of a society not ready for tremendous changes in social fabric wrought by advanced machine-age technology. Japan went from a late feudal social organization to an early industrial one in a single generation, and a large and important part of Japanese society–the samurai–failed to understand all the ramifications of those changes. One unfortunate result of that misunderstanding was called the Pacific War of 1941-45. Look for it starting 15 December.
Demologos, laid down on or about 29 October 1814, was a floating wooden battery built to defend New York Harbor and the first warship in the world to be driven by a steam engine. She was ordered by Congress in June 1814, during the War of 1812 but wasn’t finished until that conflict was over. Demologos (Latin for “voice of the people”) was designed by Robert Fulton and was commissioned as Fulton after his death in 1815. Demologos never fired a shot in anger, saw no action, and actually sailed under steam for exactly a day, carrying President Madison on a boat ride.
Demologos was built to carry thirty 32-pounder guns all around and two 100-pounder Columbiads fore and aft. She served mostly as a hulk or receiving ship, and had her engines removed in 1821 and a two-masted lateen rig installed. While she was lying in ordinary the British and French governments expressed some interest in buying her, but the discussions ended as soon as they started. She was destroyed by a powder explosion 4 June 1829.
The most remarkable things about Demologos was her catamaran hull (not duplicated for warships until the 21st century) and single internal paddle wheel that protected the delicate machinery from gunfire. Future floating batteries and paddlewheel warships worldwide would emulate this construction, as would the City-class ironclad vessels built on inland rivers during the American Civil War.
American innovation often took leaps like this in the 19th century, but Japan in the 19th century went from having no railroads at all in 1854 to 5,000 miles by 1906. Doing this required far more than just buying trains and track: they had to adopt everything Western from clocks and calendars to calculus, coal-mining, and road-building to get there. In the meantime, they suffered three civil wars, imposed a constitution, introduced political parties, and modernized their military. In two generations, Japan technologically went from where Europe had been in about 1600 to where Europe was in 1900.
But doing all this was neither easy or cheap. Japan was still an agrarian nation when it defeated Russia in 1904. Not a single Japanese capital ship at the battle of Tsushima was designed in Japan. Gold reserves, a recent innovation in Japan, dipped to less than three week’s expenditures by the end of the war: Japan was paying for naval artillery fuses from Britain with tons of raw silk–having run out of cash–by the end of the war.
These and many other fascinating bits and pieces of history that you probably didn’t already know can be found in Why the Samurai Lost Japan, available in December. Look for it either on this blog or at your favorite bookseller.
Today is also National Cat Day which, while celebrating felines of all descriptions, was founded by the Animal Miracle Foundation in 2005, since shut down. The intent was to raise awareness of homeless and sheltered cats and help raise money for their support. Though the AMF was accused of fraud in Portland and ended operations, the quasi-holiday has been adopted by many others, for both charitable and profit-making reasons.
Those of us who have had cats recognize that they would as soon eat our livers as they would have us scratch their ears. We also must understand that modern domestic felines are perhaps the most prolific of all pets when it comes to reproducing save the rabbit. Feral cats in some areas are a severe problem enhanced by their prodigious rate of reproduction. In my neck of the woods, coyotes come into town to hunt them, finding them among the garbage that they also scavenge in.
But, yes, our domestic animals do have their moments, though, for the most part, our house cats are grifters. Dogs include their humans in their packs; cats include theirs in their staffs. Most dogs are at least alarm systems; cats are, mainly, foot warmers at best. The late Terry Pratchett, a scrivener of comic tales, once wrote:
Cats were once worshipped as gods; they have not forgotten this.
The leading historian and scholar of his time, Arnold J. Toynbee is best known for his 12-volume A Study of History published from 1931 to 1961, which incredibly enough was not a doctoral dissertation but a work of historical philosophy that took thirty years to write about 4,000 years of human civilization. But he was also writing or editing a score of other works at the same time, hard to imagine though that is today. And he did it all without a word processor.
But A Study of History, popular briefly before it sank into the obscurity where it is today, is remarkable not for its duration but for its somewhat consistent insight. Toynbee held that:
…civilizations are born out of more primitive societies, not as the result of racial or environmental factors, but as a response to challenges, such as hard country, new ground, blows and pressures from other civilizations, and penalization.
This is unremarkable to most of us, but to the current crop of historical scholars, it’s heresy. It’s mostly the same thesis that Jared Diamond came up with in his prize-winning Guns, Germs, and Steel, but that wasn’t popular with academics, either. For them, historical forces are sex, gender identity, national identity, race, and sexual preferences and none others are possible. They prefer to work with these narrow focuses because they are giving a voice to marginalized populations.
Which, as most of us know, is bilge.
Which brings us to the nature of what we call history. Toynbee died on 22 October 1975, a well-respected scholar. He published from 1915 to 1974, and several works were published posthumously. The Toynbee Prize for social sciences has been awarded to humanists as far apart as Jean-Paul Sartre and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr.
Yet Toynbee is best known for two things: his twelve-volume magnum opus, and a short meeting with Adolph Hitler in 1936, where he was persuaded that Hitler’s territorial ambitions were limited, and publicly said as much. After WWII this assertion was used against him again and again, even as he openly worried that nuclear weapons were too dangerous for anyone to use.
The historical record can be used for one of three things:
To inform the future,
To criticise both the past and the present.
Informing the future is wrapped up in my favorite quote:
History is our only test for the consequences of ideas.
Looking at the past lets us know what a tyrant in the making sounds like, feels like, and what their supporters insist upon. Studying events of the past can tell us that “fascism” isn’t restricted to “right-wing” marchers-in-step. But contemporary observers–especially those in the mass media–lump American leaders in with the Nazis, and their audiences have no idea that the comparison is simply invidious…and these “experts” know they’re doing it only to boost ratings.
Most consumers of historical products use them for entertainment. They like the stories, and those of us who write blogs like this should cater to that audience. My co-author and I and especially our dauntless editor of Why the Samurai Lost Japan try to bring a relatively complex and unfamiliar version of the familiar story of Japan before and during WWII to a general consumer audience, though in the nature of military history this isn’t consistently possible. Our readers will be challenged by new concepts, especially as relates to the inability of 19th and 20th century Japan to get the samurai to put their swords away. Yes, it was a social problem, and it was one for Japan itself to address. But they didn’t, and the result was a devastating war.
However, when some scholars look at Hiroshima and say “racist Americans did that,” saying that is neither helpful or supported by evidence. Nonetheless, it’s done all the time. This is the third purpose for the historical record: as a weapon to punish the past to change the appearance of the present. Most accounts of the Pacific War written before about 1980 are pretty straightforward, US triumphalist stories. Few of them discuss what was going on in Japan before Pearl Harbor. It is usually assumed that Japan launched itself against the Americans with the intention of securing their needed resources.
Post-1980, however, the stories are darker, and center either on race or commercial/capitalist competition over Asian markets. The American presence in the Philippines was regarded as a colonialist expansion; Guam was to be liberated by altruistic Japanese; the American submarine blockade was inhuman and arguably illegal; the firebombing and atomic bombings were racially-motivated war crimes because they were not done elsewhere. While all these conclusions are backed by selected parts of the record, they are not supported by the whole record nor by reason…and that’s the point.
Worse, some observers believe that the inventors of suicide bombing were rational actors when it came to the end of the war. Many commentators claim that Japan was about to surrender before August 1945…but have no evidence for this other than stories of starvation and resource exhaustion. This doesn’t deter some critics of American actions to end the war that included the atomic bombs…but didn’t stop there.
Why the Samurai Lost Japan will be available at your favorite booksellers by Christmas. Look for it.
For those of you who read this far (bless you all), this is National Color Day for reasons beyond understanding, and National Nut Day because Liberation Foods, probably the one in the UK and not California, said it was. Liberation Foods touts its “fair trade” nuts–primarily small-scale growers worldwide who also own Liberation.
Nuts are an energy and nutrient source for humans, and essential to animals in temperate climates. Many are used in cooking, eaten raw, sprouted, roasted, and pressed for oil. Nut fats are mostly unsaturated. Many nuts are sources of vitamins E and B2, protein, folate fiber and essential minerals such as magnesium, phosphorus, potassium, copper, and selenium.
Studies (those again) have shown that those who consume nuts on a regular basis are less likely to suffer from coronary heart disease (CHD), which means those with allergies to nuts may be in trouble.
Now, everyone knows that nuts of all descriptions are seeds, right? Plant these things under the right conditions, and they propagate the plants that they came from. We consume these things–them what can–and end the propagation cycle. But, in fact, it took some time to domesticate most of these into seeds that we can digest. Acorns, on their own, are not fit for human consumption–they need processing. Coconuts are very large nuts. Most of the plants we consume were genetic mistakes that humans exploited and cultivated into food. The pecan, domesticated in the American south in the early 19th century, thrived on the depleted cotton ground that abounded there. Before the Civil War, it had become as important a cash crop as tobacco. Today, pralines are a southern tourist trap staple.
There’s also Chocolate Covered Nut Day (25 February), Grab Some Nuts Day (3 September), and Macadamia Nut Day (4 September) if you really want to go nuts about nuts.
Gonna try something different this month. Bear with me.
William Boeing, the founder of the Boeing Aircraft Company and United Airlines, was born on this day in 1881 to well-to-do parents in Detroit, Michigan. At an early age, he went into the lumber business in the American Northwest, becoming fascinated with aviation after seeing an airplane demonstration in 1909. He took flying lessons from Glenn Martin and bought a Martin TA floatplane. When it was damaged, Boeing decided to build a better one himself.
The outcome of that was the Boeing B&W or Model 1, named for the co-designers Boeing himself and George Westervelt. There were two built–the aircraft above is a replica. The two units that were made were offered to the US Navy but eventually sold to New Zealand. Soon afterward, the US Navy ordered fifty Boeing Model C training seaplanes to prepare pilots for WWI, Boeing’s first real financial success.
After WWI, Boeing built airmail aircraft, fighters, seaplanes, and flying boats, producing the first aircraft intended for passengers, the Boeing 80 in 1928, followed by the 247 in 1933, recognizable as the first “modern” airliner.
As the firm grew, Boeing expanded his reach into commercial airline routes, eventually founding what would become United Airlines. That ended in 1934 when Congress compelled all aircraft manufacturers to divest themselves of their interest in airmail routes and airlines. Boeing himself backed away from the day-to-day business by 1937, exploiting a growing interest in horses.
Personally, popular history would excoriate Boeing for monopolistic practices (about which they would be right…sort of) and for racist attitudes for founding some communities north of Seattle that had segregationist covenants. These were fairly typical of the time, but contemporary historians also dismiss this explanation because, well, because.
Popular history also holds that Boeing’s business affiliation with the military made him a war-monger. That his firm built the B-29 Superfortress that would be used to firebomb Japan and deliver the atomic bombs to Hiroshima and Nagasaki only proves the case. So there.
While Walter Boeing had nothing to do with either starting the war or personally with the development of the B-29 or the atomic bomb, he gets at least part of the blame for them in some circles. Boeing died 28 September 1956, long before anyone thought to blame him personally for the tools of war and industry his company provided.
The illustration over on the left is the cover for Why the Samurai Lost Japan which is now in its final stages and is scheduled to be available by the end of the year. The subtitle, A Study of Miscalculation and Folly, is a not particularly glib attempt to summarize our conclusions.
Popular history and even academic history has been selling one of two versions of Japan in WWII. The first is what could be called a triumphalist version of the United States clawing their way back from the smoke and ruins of Pearl Harbor to dictating a just peace to a thoroughly prostrated Japan after whipping them like a poor relation.
The second is more nuanced but still ends the same way. Some popular historians and a few academics have questioned the “true” motives for the American response to the initial Japanese attacks. Some have even wondered out loud if there hadn’t been some very deep race-based motives for “pushing” Japan to war with the sanctions that started in 1933 and concluded in 1941. After all, at least one American naval officer after the Pearl Harbor attacks publicly stated that he wanted to exterminate all Japanese.
Did race play a part? Unlikely. Though John Dower in War Without Mercy tries to sell this message, frankly he does not connect the dots between attitudes and behavior on the part of either the West or the Japanese. The Japanese were as convinced of the superiority of their race as were the Germans, though they didn’t stoop to genocide the same way. The West, as suspicious of other races as other races were of them, was in no way particularly “racist” about how their war was fought against any of their enemies.
The goals of Japan for their conflict against the West in 1941 were both simple and complex. They earnestly expected an easy victory, piggybacking on Germany’s anticipated defeat of the Soviet Union. At the same time, they expected Asia to follow their “natural” leadership in resisting further encroachments into their territories.
Why the Samurai Lost Japanisn’t a popular history in the sense that it reads in the “USA triumphant” vein or in the “Japan was a victim of western capitalist/racist greed.” It is a study of why a supposedly defunct subgroup of Japanese society reached across the Pacific to engage in a trans-oceanic war with the leading industrial power of the time, expecting to succeed in their goals–but not “win” the war in the conventional sense. It is a study of miscalculation and folly on the part of not only Japan but of nearly everyone else that affected the samurai’s fateful decision to go to war. Look for it in December.
The lovely lass above is celebrating National Hair Day, proclaimed in 2017 by the National Day Calendar at the behest of NuMe, a purveyor of hair care products. I personally don’t get it (except to clean it out of the tub drain) but I don’t have to.
Hair, as we know it, is endemic to human society, as it is to all mammals–in fact, it helps define us, in part.
Define us…how? Is this definition or is this just showing off? But then there…this…which is…what?
Suffice it to say I’m glad I don’t have to clean your drains. My hair…as you may appreciate, I don’t have that much more than I did here…