The Sheila Variations

The return of the romanticized samurai culture did lead to a lot of the Japanese brutality during World War II, which is in stark contrast to their exemplary treatment of prisoners during the Russo-Japanese War and First World War. I think a lot of the people who surrendered to the Japanese during WW2 had no idea what was in store for them.

Bill - knew I could count on you to elaborate.

I love history - but my knowledge of it is very regionalized. There are huge gaps - and Japanese history is one of them.

But if you ask me about Kazakhstan or Armenia I could babble on for eons.

I was talking with my father several years ago about the issue of Japanese treatment of POWs, he pointed out how well they had treated prisoners in the past. I didn't believe him (he has a habit of inventing answers when he doesn't have them) and looked it up for myself. I hate telling him he's right.

I'll save Kazakhstan for the pre-ROTK talk.

I don't know if samurai culture (i.e. bushido ' the way of the warrior') was as much romanticized as perverted by the witches brew of shinto, emperor worship, militarism and nationalism that corrupted Japan in the decades before WWII. The notion that a warrior should be prepared to die at anytime in order to effectively carry out his duties became corrupted to the notion that a warrior should be prepared to die for the Emperor regardless of whther this 'advanced the cause.' Which led to such idiocies as bazai charges and the last cruise of the Yamato among other things.

"I don't know if samurai culture (i.e. bushido ' the way of the warrior') was as much romanticized as perverted by the witches brew of shinto, emperor worship, militarism and nationalism that corrupted Japan in the decades before WWII."

It was both. The Meiji Restoration really had been about an attempt to reject the samurai (and the Shogunate, since the two shouldn't be confused) as relics of a bygone age, which they were, but by the 1920's and certainly by WWII, there was hardly anyone left that had known premodern Japan firsthand. That made the "glorious golden age of the noble samurai," etc., far easier to conjure practically from thin air as an simple formula for the Army's nationalist pipedreams while they first ousted the civilian government from effective power and then engaged in an orgy of gratuitous expansionstic violence. I don't remember who, but someone once said that the point at which Japan was irretrievably headed for a disastrous clash with the US was when those in power there shifted focus from the westernization of Japan to the Japanization of the rest of Asia. Romaticizing the samurai obviously wsn't the cause of that, but it was a symptom and a big help.