Upheaval: Turning Points for Nations in Crisis

by Jared Diamond

Non-negotiable core values (factor #11) united the Japanese in their willingness to make sacrifices. High among those values was loyalty to the emperor. That was dramatically illustrated at the end of World War Two, when the U.S. demanded unconditional surrender. Even after the two atomic bombs, and in a hopeless military situation, Japan still insisted on one condition: “that the said [surrender] declaration does not include any demand which prejudices the prerogatives of His Majesty as a sovereign ruler.” Without acceptance of that condition, Japan was prepared to resist the threatened U.S. invasion of the Japanese mainland. The strength of Japanese core values was also illustrated in World War Two by the willingness of large numbers of Japanese soldiers to commit suicide, far beyond the willingness of the soldiers of any other modern nation. Best known were the kamikaze pilots of conventional aircraft and the baka pilots of rocket-powered gliders, who crashed their bomb-carrying machines into enemy warships; and the kaiten sailors who rode and piloted torpedoes launched from Japanese ships into enemy warships. The high-tech kamikaze, baka, and kaiten suicide weapons introduced only towards the end of World War Two were preceded by several years of low-tech suicides, when Japanese soldiers feigning surrender detonated hidden hand grenades to kill their captors as well as themselves. All of those forms of suicide served immediate military purposes by killing enemy troops....