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Comment by rquantz | Hacker News Reader

And untold millions died because of Japanese leaders' cautious stupidity. It seems like there are lessons to be learned here? Let's start with, whenever there are positions that are culturally unspeakable, you have a problem. Perhaps another is, whatever idiocy a foreign nation's leaders are spouting, it's a good bet nobody actually wants war (cough cough Putin)

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This is a problem in all organizations, not just governments. Few things predict failure better than an environment where criticism and negative feedback are suppressed, often because it's seen as not nice, or uncivilized. I've seen startups fail because big problems were readily visible and understood by most of the staff, but people were terrified to talk about them. By the time people were aware of how widely shared the suppressed opinions had spread, the damage was done. Just this week, I talked with employees of another high profile startup that claim they are heading in the very same direction, because discussing the technical problems in their platform leads to social ostracism.

It's not as if there's only one way to et into an unsafe culture: I have seen situations where people were intimidated by using abusive, aggressive behavior, and others where the same things were accomplished through smiles and backstabbing.

If you are leading a startup and you don't see dissent in your organization, beware, because what it means is that it's been forced to go underground.

So yes, we should learn from imperial japan that every organization needs ways for people to safely and politely express unpopular, honest opinions.

Or to phrase it in a slightly different way: followers ignoring their own judgement to root for ideas they think their leaders might like, combined with leaders trusting an overwhelming agreement between their followers more than their own initial opinion. It's a feedback loop than could even pick up random noise and amplify it to the level of ideology, if it wasn't for preexisting cultural seeds that have a headstart over that random noise. It would not even need the often cited climate of fear to work, even though that would certainly "help" a lot (and should therefore certainly be avoided): a uniform wish to get ahead, strictly positive reinforcement, should already be sufficient to make an organization collectively believe funny stuff none of the individuals would ever believe on their own.

Not for the first time, and perhaps not for the last time, these words are so relevant.

A war that need not have been fought was about to be

fought because of mutual misunderstanding, language

difficulties, and mistranslations.

Why did America drop the two bombs? Why did it not drop the first one over the Tokyo bay? Why Japanese leaders hesitated so much to surrender, despite being so much overwhelmed by foreign power? Why nobody managed to stop Hitler from inside Germany? Why all the genocides in the history had to happen?

The world is complicated, it does not always choose the right path. Decisions of even the greatest importance are sometimes made with insufficient information, and are subject to all kinds of cognitive failures. It's easy to judge after you know all the facts.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mokusatsu

I don't understand the debate of the meaning of ignore vs reject.

The US made ultimatum without a specific deadline. The hawkish press spoke in behalf of the government, but without authority. The US continued its plan to attack until surrender was communicated. No doubt powerful in US govt wanted to see what the bomb could do. Dropping two a-bombs in a week wasn't an accidental race condition against communication lines. The US leadership had two bombs and wanted to use them.

nobody expected them to surrender at the time, and they needed either to go trough a landings and ugly attrition war or display such force to let the parties surrender while saving face.

that's why the bombs and that's why the target were mid sized cities.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debate_over_the_atomic_bombing...

especially source http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/05/opinion/blood-on-our-hands...

''We of the peace party were assisted by the atomic bomb in our endeavor to end the war,'' Koichi Kido, one of Emperor Hirohito's closest aides, said later.''

We certainly hoped they'd surrender at the time.

The targets were mid-sized cities because by the time the target planning started, Kyoto was the only big one the B-29s hadn't burned to the ground (well, the important parts; I forget when, but we'd given up on Tokyo after destroying 17 square miles or so), and Secretary of War Stimson, who'd visited it and Japan in general, removed it from the list, despite Groves imploring him many times to not. That was wise, if for no other reason that it strengthened the Emperor's hand when he was finally in a position to end the war, for a long time Kyoto was the Emperor's city, Tokyo the military's.

One thing we could learn is that the pre-war Japanese Constitution had a serious problem. The Constitution gave all powers to the Emperor and let him govern the country through the parliament, cabinet, courts, army and navy. That was interpreted to mean the army and navy did not have to obey the cabinet as long as they obey the Emperor. The Emperor didn't actually govern just like UK, so there was no head of the country. Japanese leaders had variety of opinions, but once the atmosphere that a war was inevitable was made, no one had authority to stop that.

This is a pretty interesting point because Germany had the exact same problem - with Hitler able to have the Enabling Act passed. It's a more extreme example because it allowed the Reichstag to vote themselves out of power in favour of Hitler, but it's interesting that Japan similarly had a constitutional power balancing problem.

Not exactly. For example, you couldn't form a government without one member each from the Army and Navy, and the Army grossly abused this power.

And as I noted elsewhere, a culture of acceptable political assassination was well established by then, so e.g. being too strongly anti-war would only get you killed.

You only know the results in hindsight. When you make a decision, you can't guarantee what would happen next.

Yes, but you can use history to make an educated guess about what will happen.

History does not tell you about new things. For example, how will technology affect the outcome of war. Evolution is another such thing. You're poisonous caterpillar that no one can eat, you prosper, then suddenly you get decimated by a bird that can stomach your poison.

> For example, how will technology affect the outcome of war.

That's one thing you do learn from history. You'll win this one if you have the technology and your opponent does not. Otherwise you lose. The next war, you'll both have the technology.

Catch here is to know what is relevant technology.

In 1935 USSR was pioneer in monoplane fighters with retractable undercarriage. They we're two or three years ahead of anybody else, and the Russians had them in relatively large quantity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polikarpov_I-16

Problem was that they didn't know it was relevant. When war started they still mostly relied on biplanes. And only got the development rolling again in 1940 with MIGs and they could not compete with Nazis in the sky on even terms until 1943.

Japanese had total miss with Yamamoto class ships. Germany didn't invest enough in submarines and their tanks we're way too fancy for field repairs. Nobody understood how important submachine guns would be. Brits had some major naval defects, exposed by explosion of HMS Hood and problems with guns of King George V battleships. France and U.S. fucked up tank development. U.S. made thuderbolts, which we're about twice as costly and difficult to built than what was necessary.

It's complete hit and miss. Currently U.S. has global military hegemony because they can afford to miss more than anybody else. Also logistics. If you are committed to get more stuff to the front than the enemy, you can compensate quite lot.

I read somewhere on wikipedia that Japan did some research on nuclear weaponry but concluded it's not feasible.

Not feasible for them, they didn't have a supply of uranium ore, nor the industrial capability to make use of it. I think if the Germans had done everything right and started in earnest soon enough (they didn't, period), they could have rode the plutonium path to a working bomb in time.

But sometimes the smallest of things derails you. The scientists' saving throw for a real program failed when the bigwigs Nazis were invited to a seminar, but the secretary sending out the invitations accidentally included in the packets the agenda for a different and very technical seminar they'd have no interest in.

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