Stardate 20030211.0959

(On Screen): Having made the case that French and German opposition to the US is motivated by a desire to dominate the EU, or by fear of damaging revelations coming out of post-war Iraq, there is an entirely different way of looking at it: it's a clash of cultures. It's a great big miscalculation. It was never intended to become this serious but it got out of hand because everyone trapped themselves.

You can have cases where the cultures of nations are tuned just exactly right so that each side, for the best of intentions, does exactly the wrong thing. American and Japanese soldiers fought a particularly brutal and unforgiving war in the Pacific for exactly this reason. The Americans were largely motivated by the Jacksonian attitude described by Mead:

Jacksonian America has clear ideas about how wars should be fought, how enemies should be treated, and what should happen when the wars are over. It recognizes two kinds of enemies and two kinds of fighting: honorable enemies fight a clean fight and are entitled to be opposed in the same way; dishonorable enemies fight dirty wars and in that case all rules are off.

An honorable enemy is one who declares war before beginning combat; fights according to recognized rules of war, honoring such traditions as the flag of truce; treats civilians in occupied territory with due consideration; and—a crucial point—refrains from the mistreatment of prisoners of war. Those who surrender should be treated with generosity. Adversaries who honor the code will benefit from its protections, while those who want a dirty fight will get one.

So the breakdown began with the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The bumbling Japanese ambassador in Washington was sent an enciphered message which contained the English text of a message he was to deliver to the US government, and with a clear statement that it absolutely must be delivered before a certain time on a certain date. But he didn't manage to get it typed up on time, and delivered it late.

Which meant that he delivered what amounted to Japan's declaration of war several hours after the attack began. For Jacksonians, that's the worst kind of treachery; it indicates an enemy with no honor.

The individual soldiers fighting against the Japanese also saw what seemed to American eyes to be dishonorable behavior. For instance, Japanese soldiers would pretend to surrender but would conceal weapons (often they held grenades with the pins pulled) and would try to kill the American soldiers who tried to accept their surrender.

Worst of all was the Japanese treatment of allied soldiers who had surrendered to them. The British and Australian troops from Singapore, for example, were sent to work camps where conditions were beastly. A lot of allied troops ended up in Burma working on a railroad through the jungle. This episode is dramatized in the movie "Bridge on the River Kwai" but that account is fictionalized in several ways. But though it may seem as if the conditions suffered by the British troops in that film were terrible, the reality was far worse.

And the Bataan Death March loomed large in the minds of American soldiers. The Battling Bastards of Bataan had fought a hopeless battle against great odds but had lasted for months, even with no hope at all of succor, and eventually did surrender to the Japanese. They were then forced to march a hundred kilometers to a POW camp. Men who fell would be shot or bayoneted; other men who tried to help them risked death themselves. Some of the prisoners were killed just because the Japanese guards felt like killing someone. 70,000 men began the trip, but only 54,000 arrived at the far end.

Through American eyes, this is sheer barbarity. It is the act of people who have no honor. The Jacksonian impulse is to be strong against opposition, but magnanimous to the defeated. To mistreat prisoners in this way is unforgivable, and given the Japanese predilection for Banzai charges at the end rather than surrender, it soon became standard policy to assume that nearly every Japanese soldier on any given island would have to be killed. Few were actually taken prisoner.

But the reality is that the Japanese did have their own honor code. It was very strong. It was not the Bushido, contrary to what some may think, and the history behind how it was developed and how it became a guiding force which could lead to such atrocities as the Bataan Death March and the Rape of Nanking is an interesting and complicated story best explained in the book Soldiers of the Sun.

In brief, when Japan was forcibly opened to the world by the visit of Commodore Perry, this began a process which finally led to the collapse of the Tokugawa Shogunate and the Meiji Restoration. The reformers needed to create an army which did not rely on the Samurai, but which needed to be disciplined and powerful, so they dipped into the Bushido and extracted some but not all of it, and added some new ingredients. The Bushido had only applied to the Saumurai; this new doctrine would apply to everyone in Japan. All would see themselves as serving the Emperor, and their greatest goal in life was to die for him. Duty is a heavy weight, but death is light as a feather. When there was a coun