Stardate 20020323.1633

(Captain's Log): Since September, it's been politically necessary to cast this war as not being against Islam, but rather as being against Muslim extremists. It's not the overall religion we fight, but rather the fundamentalists.

There's truth to that, but in a real sense it may also be true that for this war to really end (without our defeat) then Islam may have to be shattered. You can describe that process in various ways, such as "Islam needs to go through its own equivalent of the Reformation", but what it amounts to is to change it on a deep level. It will have to become tolerant, cosmopolitan. It will have to give up its belief in inerrancy and universality.

We've had to do that before; it occurred to me a couple of days ago that there is a moderate similarity to the defeat of Japan.

Japan had a deep cultural ethnocentrism. Its religion told it that it was favored on earth; and its emperor was called the "Son of Heaven" because he was directly descended from God. In the 13th century, it had been saved by a heavenly miracle, the kamikaze.

The Mongols had conquered all of Asia at break-neck speed and had created the largest empire in the history of the world. Korea and China had been taken and the Mongols had moved deeply into Indochina. Only Japan held out, and in 1274 Khublai Khan created a fleet to send 40,000 men to conquer Japan. But the fleet was largely wiped out by a Tai fun, and Japan was saved. In 1282, Khublai Khan put together an even larger fleet intended to send 140,000 men to Japan (an invasion force larger than the one which landed at Normandy). It was the largest invasion fleet in history before World War II, and it, too, was destroyed by a Tai fun. That was the kamikaze, the "wind of the gods". Japan had been saved by divine intervention. The Mongols never tried again.

In all of recorded history before the 20th century, Japan had never been successfully invaded or conquered, partly because of the intervention of the Gods, and partly because of the clear superiority of its culture, especially its martial tradition. But by the late 16th century, Europeans were beginning to meddle in Japanese society big-time; Christian missionaries were spreading foreign ideas, and European traders (primarily the Portuguese) were becoming a major commercial influence. Western weapons, especially muskets, were being introduced in quantity, which was changing the traditions of war. Japan was not unified; it was "interesting times" and the culmination of the process was the military triumph by Tokugawa Ieyasu, who established the Tokugawa Shogunate.

Ieyasu was one of the greatest men in history, and like all great men who are not living gods, he was both magnificent and terrible, as were his sons and grandsons and many of his descendants. Tokugawa Hidetada and Tokugawa Iemitsu stamped out Christianity. Then they sealed up the island and forbade all foreigners from even entering except at one specific port where they were closely guarded. Muskets were outlawed and the caste system was hardened. It became illegal for anyone except the Samurai to bear weapons. For 250 years, Japan sealed off the world.

But that's a long time, and Western technology moved a long way in that time. In the middle of the 19th century, westerners became increasingly strident in requesting, and then demanding, that Japan open up its society and in particular its markets to western products and western ideas. The Shoguns refused. Still, even Japan had changed in that time. The Shogunate had united Japan and the samurai became less martial, more comfortable, even a bit decadent. The Japanese martial strength was not what it had been. Japan's population rose and a large merchant class developed, which controlled great wealth.

And then in 1853, Commodore Perry sailed an American fleet into Tokyo harbor and told the Shogun that Japanese isolation was at an end. It was, in a sense, the first defeat of Japan by foreigners in its history, and the Shogunate was deeply disgraced by it. There was rising discontent by traditionalists who wanted to restore the emperors to their former state of glory and to redeem Japanese honor, and in 1868 there was a revolution which deposed the Shogun, and gave power to the Emperor Meiji. This is known as the "Meiji restoration".

Emperor Meiji chose (or had chosen for him) to establish a system patterned after that of Queen Victoria. At the time, the British were the most successful imperial power on earth, and the Japanese decided to imitate the best. A civilian government was formed and the Emperor, though having enormous power in principle, largely stayed passive and rubber-stamped whatever his government gave him. His son Yoshihito and grandson Hirohito did the same.

During the Shogunate, all samurai had become retainers of the government and received stipends from tax money. But after the Meiji Restoration, it became clear that this was not economically viable, and the samurai were told that it would come to an end in a certain number of years. The problem is that the samurai largely didn't actually know how to make a living; they were soldiers and retainers of the government, and merchants were a lower caste (although many samurai were actually successful in business by that point.) Some samurai began to threaten a counter-revolution to return to a system dominated by them.

To counter that, the government created an army which included many samurai but which also included many men from other castes. And their leaders cre