← History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
History 102 with WhatifAltHist's Rudyard Lynch and Austin Padgett
Explaining Japanese History
02:48:38
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- [00:03]
Host
Welcome to History 102, where YouTube creator Whatifalth hist, Redyard lynch and Austin Padgett dive into critical moments in history and tease out patterns to help us predict the future. Let's jump right in.
- [00:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Konnichiwa, everybody. Today's episode is on Japanese History with Austin Padgett and. Hi. And Japanese history is particular in that it's basically the only area on Earth that's had a continuous trajectory for its entire recorded history. And what I mean by that is for a frame of reference for a place that's comparable is Scandinavia. Where I was. I read to someone who said there's a sociological and anthropological concept called getting to Denmark, which is Denmark always scores the highest on any given stat. You'll look at and people will think, what did Denmark do? Right? And I don't like the getting to Denmark concept. I just think it's frankly just unrealistic for most cultures. I don't think Somalia or India will ever get to Denmark. They could succeed, but it would be playing into very different strategies than what the Danes did. And you look at America and where America can't be Denmark because we're just huge. I don't like these things where if you were to isolate, let's say the New England states, which are an area with multiple times the New England states, which are this tiny corner of America, have twice Denmark's population, and they still score higher in human development stats. So that point notwithstanding what someone said, the reason Denmark is the way it is, because it has practically never faced conquest. There's a few periods where it almost did, where back in the high medieval period, the German Hanseatic League fought the Danes. And there was a period when German knights colonized, like, half of Denmark, but that was like a state failure, internal colonization thing, where because both Germany and Denmark failed as governments, it was this just. I don't want to say peaceful, because it's the Middle Ages. It was this gradual migration of German knights and people on behalf of Denmark. And then the Danes pushed back centuries later and took parts of North Germany. The Spanish also, the Spanish and Austrians also fought their way up the peninsula, but never took the capital in the 17th century. But when you're looking at Scandinavia, you're seeing a population where the aryans went in 4,000 years ago, and it's just stayed constant ever since. And you look at Sweden or Norway, they haven't even faced the conquest Denmark has. And you look at Japan, that's on a completely different level, where the Japanese ruling family, the house of Yamato, they supposedly go back to 500 BC and they probably really go back to 600 AD, but 680 is still a really long time. It's comparable to how the ruling family of Morocco can claim descent from the prophet Muhammad, where that's impressive. And Japan has never faced external conquest. And the only thing that's comparable is America dropping the two nukes on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But besides that, the Japanese gave up and America did briefly militarily occupy Japan, but it's not comparable to a legitimate conquest. And so Japan is a sort of experiment of what happens when you leave one group of people who happen to be ingenious and cooperative and hard working in a single place for thousands of years and what happens to them.
- [04:19]
Austin Padgett
And then you've got these other interesting effects where it's like a frozen lake in Antarctica where the life forms have evolved separately from millions of years. But then you get to similar conclusions. Like I expected South Asia to feel more weird and foreign and different, but to me the weirdest place in Asia was Tokyo because it was same, same but different, which created an uncanny valley like this. There was a lot of concrete, but the shape was different. Everything a lot like the assumptions going into everything was all different, but yet it was kind of the same.
- [04:56]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I know what you're saying because I've found when I deal, I'm a Pennsylvanian, when I deal with Californians, it's a comparable uncanny valley because they're still Americans, they use the same currency, same legal system, same language. But if I deal with an Iranian or a Chinese person, like I can know that their culture is different and I can just operate with them in their frame. I can know that the Muslim person is going to, I know the Iranian person is probably going to be Muslim, that the Chinese person's probably, probably going to care about filial piety. But when you're done with the Californian, it's close enough that you can't just shove them in a different bracket. And I think that's what you're experiencing with Japan versus Southeast Asia, where in almost every anthropological test, and I've spoken before about how I don't like the normal anthropological tests, which are it's always America and the Anglo Saxon countries on one side and there's Japan on the other side. But then those countries actually have a lot in common where the Anglo Saxons and the Japanese high trust societies industrialized. They're both very like, kind, I don't want to say neurotic, but they care about Details where both of them can get hysterical if you get details wrong. And then both of them also have like honor cultures and fanatical warrior cultures where something I'm an idea I have. And I'm going to talk about this after. The third axis is Germanic peoples have what Jung called the Wotan switch. I've invented the Amaterasu switch, which is the Japanese version. But when you have the normal anthropological axes, you have Anglo Saxons to Japanese. And I'm making the third the triangle. And you guys know I'm a trinitarian where the triangle is just dysfunction. So you have the Congo, America, Japan, and the average is Mexico in the middle. And then between. Between Britain and Japan would be like Turkey at the top, where Turkey is a high trust society, but it's somewhere in between individualism and collectivism. And do you have anything you want to say. Say about that before I get to the Amaterasu switch?
- [07:05]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. How did the. Because I was trying to find the differences. I was thinking, you said they're both honor cultures. I was thinking I don't know if the Japanese were herders, fish and rice. But the main difference is the collectivist. So you can have a collectivist honor culture.
- [07:23]
Rudyard Lynch
So yes you can. The Japanese are one of the very few. So the Japanese are one, the Afghans are another. The Mongols are another, The Somalians are another. And so when you're looking at the Afghans, Mongols, Somalis, those are all herder cultures, the Japanese. Some historians think they're relatives of the Mongols or some anthropologists think they're relatives of the Mongols. But it's a tenuous enough connection. I don't take it seriously. The only population the Japanese really share is the Koreans.
- [07:54]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it could be also that they were like coastal people more than the millet growers that pushed them out to the edge of Japan. So it could be a hunter gatherer rather than herder. Native American culture overlap. I know there was individualist culture in Native America, but also I knew two.
- [08:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Japanese archaeologist girls when I was in Peru and they talked to me about the anthropological 20. They talked to Japanese 23andMe and Japanese 23andMe is because Japan's an almost entirely homogenous society. They. They have their own version, which is what prehistoric population your ancestors came from from. And so they split it into three subgroups, the first being the Ainu, who are the indigenous population of Japan. They are practically extinct now. And the Ainu are weird where they're one of those populations which don't. It doesn't fit Any racial category, people have thought they're European. And when we've genetically sequenced the few Ainu that are left, because there's practically no full blood, I knew they're a completely different racial group that's as distinct from Europeans and Asians as those two are from anyone else. Where the. So when you look at the PCA charts of race, Africans are, like, five times as different as all of the rest of the world combined. So you look at the genetic PCA racial charts, Africans are off in their own dimension. Then you have the East Asian to European axis, which is large. And then you have the Ainu, who are like a dot, which is often a completely different dimension. And the Ainu were the indigenous inhabitants of most of East Asia during the last Ice Age, which is why the Native Americans have a vastly disproportionate amount of Ainu ancestry. The Native Americans might actually be more Ainu than any other population. The Native Americans have a lot of Mongol, a lot of Ainu, a surprising amount of European, a surprising amount of Polynesian, some Australian Aboriginal, which really speaks to how the demographics of the world in the last Ice Age were very different. But you have the Ainu, who are the indigenous population. And the Japanese have really tried to forget the Ainu were ever there. Because I've read, like, six books on Japanese history. I went through a big research project on this. In almost all of them, they try to paper over that the Yamato are not the natives because they say, Japan's the land of the rising sun. We belong here. The goddess Amaterasu gave us this land out of the sword, where I think they said, like, Amaterasu, or maybe a male God cut Japan out with a sword and then gave it to the Japanese people. But if the Ainu were the indigenous inhabitants, then the Japanese don't actually have the title to the land. So all of the histories go, this is the last Ice Age. Oh, wait, the Yamato people are here now. Like, no, you forgot something. You forgot. The Yamato only showed up, like, in 500 B.C. where the modern Japanese showed up around, let's say, 500 B.C. it's comparable to the Celts who came over. And the way ancient history works is you should always move dates back. So if it's 500 B.C. it's probably really, like, I don't know, 1500 B.C. i need to check. But always move dates in the ancient world further back because very little gets recorded, especially in humid climates like Japan. And so you have the Ainu in the north. And you had the Jamon in the south. And the Jamon are relatives of the Filipinos. And they were the inhabitants of Kyushu, the bottom island. Where you have Kyushu in the bottom, you have Honshu in the middle, and you have Hokkaido in the north. And until the 20th century, Hokkaido was plurality Ainu. The Japanese migrated in the 20th century, although they conquered Hokkaido, much like the England with Ireland in the early 17th century. And so you had the Jamon in the south. And there's this whole idea that the Jamon reach the New World because there are populations in Ecuador with Jamon genetic sequences who use jamon like pottery. We think it's probably an Ice Age connection, though, because there's the Jamona relatives of the Polynesians, and there's Polynesian genetics in America among Native Americans, because they were. They inhabited coastal China during the last Ice Age. The rise of the modern East Asians really pushed all of these distinct racial groups across Asia outwards. So in the modern Japanese, you have Ainu ancestry, Jamon ancestry, and Yamato ancestry. But the Yamato ancestry predominates where the Yamato genocide of the other populations, where modern Japanese are just basically pure blooded East Asian, they're close to Koreans and Chinese. You can't really distinguish. There's an app called Guess the Asian where you guess if someone's Chinese, Korean or Japanese. And the joke is they're identical. You should show just the Asian app.
- [13:13]
Austin Padgett
Really, really look it up. When it's like, maybe it's like snow and Eskimos. But any expat who spent more than, like, three years in Asia is, like, embarrassing if you can't tell the difference, because you can. You can tell the difference pretty granularly.
- [13:29]
Rudyard Lynch
I can distinguish between north and South Chinese more easily than I can Chinese, Korean, Japanese, where. Yeah. So I can guess if someone's north or South Chinese. I can't distinguish North Chinese from Korean or Japanese.
- [13:45]
Austin Padgett
To me, I can see north and South Chinese. That's a good one. But to me, Japanese, I can see Korean being more confusing. And depending on the Korean person, some are more recognizable than others. But Japan feels really distinct to me.
- [13:57]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. To compare it to Northwest Europe. Okay, so it's in Northwest Europe, you have, like, broader archetypes. I've asked people what ethnicity I look like, and they'll say sometimes English. They'll say French, they'll say German. They'll say I have, like, a facial structure that could be anywhere in Northwest Europe. But then you have people who like obnoxiously Irish Obnoxiously French, obnoxiously German. And it's true in East Asia where there's certain, like archetypes of that person's totally Japanese, that person's totally Korean, then you have this broader sort of like similarity across the entire region. And I would agree with that. Where there's certain people, because I used to say I could distinguish them, that I had an Asian friend that said, bet you have to play this app now. And I lost the app. And then I got. But if the app is purely sampling people who look similar across Asians to prove a point. Because one of the things that the left is, is like you'll make like a sort of risque remark to a person of an ethnicity and they're gonna think it's hilarious. Like, there are loads of Asians who are like, yeah, like we, we think. I have known like five Asians who have said white people look the same to us, and we know we look the same to white people. So it's like if you actually talk to the people, they think it's funny and they don't care. And then the left is here just like cock blocking you from having fun.
- [15:21]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. Because people actually like it when you're thinking about them and talking about them. It's funny. But there is the thing, right, where Asian faces do more look more similar to each other or they're better at telling faces apart because we have so many other cues like hair color, eye color, or other things that they don't have so that their only cues are more precise facial structure things so they can recognize faces better.
- [15:48]
Host
We'll get back to the conversation in a moment after a word from our sponsors.
- [15:51]
Austin Padgett
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- [15:53]
Rudyard Lynch
Never climb Mount Fuji on a port.
- [15:55]
Austin Padgett
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- [16:00]
Host
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- [16:02]
Rudyard Lynch
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Austin Padgett
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- [16:06]
Rudyard Lynch
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- [16:24]
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- [19:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, so we were talking about talking about collectivist versus individualist. Japan has an honor culture and they're almost purely rice farmers. Japan is one of the least meat dependent diets of any Eurasian society, and it's because they're the only Asian society that had feudalism. Where Japan's history parallels West Europe's in several weird ways, where in some ways they're the exact opposite. In some metrics, China is closer to West Europe culturally than Japan, but in a lot of ways Japan has these hollow similarities with West Europe and one of them is that they had a I like I'M gonna. We're gonna talk about this later. But Japan has. Japan's political history is most closely paralleled by Germany. And so we're gonna compare German history to Japanese history. But they had their equivalent of the Frankish Empire, which was the Nara and the Heian period, which occurred at the same time from, like, the 8th century until the 11th century, or they fell apart earlier, but from the 8th through the 9th centuries, they had the unified empire that actually enforced socialism on the population. What then happened is that destroyed social trust, which caused the rise of feudalism. So from the 11th century, the same time as the rise of feudalism in Europe until the 17th century, the same time as the decline of feudalism in Europe, Japan had their own feudal nobilities, where they were the only place in Eastern Asia that built castles. Where the Japanese nobility built castles, they had a warrior caste called the samurai, much like the European knights, who would fight in battle and provided leadership. And they also developed capitalism, because the end point of feudalism is always capitalism and property rights, as we'll explain later. And so the Japanese have this honor code from the samurai. And then when the Meiji Restoration happened in the 19th century, that caused Japan's advancement, that was championed by the samurai, actually. So the nobility made the decision, we're going to modernize, because if we don't, the Europeans are going to beat us. And the nobility did a really good job. And then they got shoved. The nobility also got shoved into the civil bureaucracy by the Tokugawa Shogunate, where, when Japan unified in the 17th century and they failed at launching a colonial empire under Hideyoshi, they had this entire subcast of samurai who were 10% of Japan's population, who had nothing to do. So what the government said is, you guys have exclusive government contracts to be civil servants. But because they were a warrior culture, they did bureaucracy in a warrior way, where, like your DMV employees had to carry out the protocol obsessively. Right. As a statement of his personal honor, because the samurai built the education system, they enforced this honor culture on the rest of the population as Japan built out its education and industrial system. So that's how they got an honor code. Unlike the rest of East Asia and.
- [22:13]
Austin Padgett
Unlike Europe, who already had an honor code going into feudalism.
- [22:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes. So I should probably explain different global concepts of honor, because I've teased that, like, four times in different videos, and I haven't explained it. So the first thing is you have what I call Mediterranean honor. And you see this in Mexico or Latin American countries, where in Mexican history, as an example you've had multiple political crises about. You have two politicians and they have their stage cases. They're stagecoaches facing each other and they're staring at each other. And the first man to get out of his stagecoach, stagecoach, first to sign the deal, insults his own honor. So they just stare there, stand there sitting at each other for hours for the first person to buckle. And this has been a huge issue over Mexican history, where when Texas declared independence from Mexico.
- [23:12]
Austin Padgett
They.
- [23:13]
Rudyard Lynch
When Texas declared independence from Mexico, they walked up to the Mexican government, said, hey, we'd like independence, please. And the way the Mexican government worked was Mexico was a failed state. Like most of the provinces of Mexico were de facto self governing, but they had their own protocols. But because the Texans did not follow the specific Latino protocol of honor, the Mexican government said no and attacked them. So this is a concept of honor you see in the Mediterranean world, like Latin America, Spain, you see little bits of it in France, but it's not out of control. And then you see it in the Arab world as well, where the Arabs have a comparable concept of honor. Where this concept of honor is based around social class. And you can sort of see it stem from the Greeks and the Romans. The Muslims took a lot more influences from the Greeks and the Romans than we think. Where the ideal is that we do not want to work. And it's a feminine concept of honor, of we don't work. And we also aren't expected to provide things for others beneath our station. And so most of the Latino concept of honor, and you go to a country like Argentina, where it's like, Argentina is more white than America or Italy, where, I mean, there are certain white countries that tell you that racism is not the full story. Like, you go to southern Italy and they'll have all these pathologies that American racists would blame other ethnicities on, but they're clearly white. And so you have the Mediterranean concept of honor. Then you have what I call the Celtic concept of honor, which is the tradition I belong to. And you see it most strongly in Appalachia, or it's very strong in America, where when I went to school, I went to public school, we had a yearly event where we would commemorate 9 11, and we'd often plant a tree to like signal rebirth. And the ceremony was always, the Taliban attacked America, insulted our honor, and we're gonna take revenge on them. And so that's where you can see, like, when you're in a society.
- [25:15]
Austin Padgett
I'm sorry, I was singing a country song. Taliban.
- [25:19]
Rudyard Lynch
My daddy served in the army, he lost his right eye. We sang that song in the Appalachian trailer on the campfire. So this is what I'm trying to show there is that, like, if the schools are doing that, it means it's entrenched to a degree where I grew up in Pennsylvania, which isn't even the south, to a point where it's just unconscious. You don't even think about it. Growing up, my father would say, I have two roles. To teach you honor and to teach you manhood. Everything else, everything else you can do from there. So it's strong in America, and America is actually one of the stronger honor cultures of anywhere on Earth. But this culture of honor, you see it with the Vikings, you see it with the Celts, you see it with the Germanic peoples, where Arminius, who fought the Romans, his big thing was it was widely known that the Germans would rather die free than live as slaves. So if the Mediterranean concept of honor is based around your position in the status hierarchy, the Celtic one is based on individuality. So I moved around a lot as a kid. I had issues with school, and one of the issues I consistently had was my parents told me that if someone condescended to me, that would be an insult to my honor. But then the teachers were talking in a certain way, which I took as condescension, so I talked back to them. And so the Celtic concept of honor is based on individuality, where what I was told is that if someone. The way honor was explained to me as a kid was I had my status as a man, which was based off individuality. If someone infringes on your individual boundaries, that's an insult to your honor. So in the south, if someone insult, like, insulted your sister, which was on who's under your protection, if someone insulted, like, you as an individual, they're insulting you as an individual. The way this ropes in with Japan is the Japanese concept of honor is the opposite. In the way East Asian cultures work, it is that your honor is your collective status. And so in East Asian cultures, individuality is seen as immature, where, if you're a teacher and a husband, those are your roles, and your job is to fulfill those roles as much as possible. And if you ask East Asians and anthropological studies to look at a painting, they're going to look at the context and the individual last. Westerners look at the individual first and then the context. And this is unconscious stuff with tracking, eye movements, or Asians put their last name first and then their first name. And so when you look at The Japanese concept of honor, it's insulting the Klan line. And so what they're doing is they're insulting your social standing, not your status as an individual.
- [28:20]
Austin Padgett
And how is that different from the Latin version, which is based on status or nobility?
- [28:26]
Rudyard Lynch
That's a really good question. And.
- [28:32]
Austin Padgett
There is an individual status.
- [28:33]
Rudyard Lynch
No, there is a distinction. It's hard to say. I can see the distinction. It's just putting into words. So the Latin version is more so aimed at people. It's, it's. This is a really hard question because I can see it and I see there's a difference in application because you look at Mexican versus East Asian society and it's wildly different. The Mediterranean tradition stems from classical civilization and the Oriental tradition stems from Confucianism. And so with classical civilization, it's this aristocratic ideal that the higher you up, the higher you are up in social status, the less that should be expected of you because you need to be independent. Where the ideal of Mediterranean and subtropical civilizations in general is, it's fucking hot. I get it. And I move to Texas, where it's just you don't want to work. Where if you're higher in status, no one should be allowed to tell you to work. It's your. It's. It's like a weird combination of the Celtic and the Japanese version where it's your individuality in the social hierarchy, where, because if you're a Mexican, your sense of pride is you are part of a social hierarchy and the higher you are up, the less responsibility you have for the hierarchy. This is why Latin America is a mess. In classical civilization, they had these built in mechanisms which basically said, you have the responsibility to the group. And then those eroded over time. So the classics had this. The classical civilization, like the Greeks and the Romans were like, yes, we as individuals have this freedom from being told what to do, but at the same time we still have this duty to the society. What happened is they lost the duties of the society. In East Asia, your social status are your responsibilities to the society. And the Japanese are explicitly more so than other East Asians. Where in China the social structure is enforced by the state, in India by the religion, in Southeast Asia by the slave owners. In Japan, it's the village collective customs. So Japanese life is completely controlled by social custom onto a tiny level of things. Where my lengthy project on Japanese anthropology, which you should watch the video. That was so much work, it was hard. The books are. The books in Japan are really boring too. I can give you the interesting ones because most are Terrible. And in Japan, the social structure is enforced by group consensus. So the, the biggest lesson I learned from talking about Japan is Japanese culture is obsessed with rejection. And I can explain why later on, but. So you have the Japanese, you have the East Asian, I'll call it Japanese honor, Celtic honor, Latin honor, and then you all call it African honor, where you have just the tribal concept of honor, which you can see, it's funny, in the south you have. In the American south, you have the cavalier English nobleman concept of honor, which I put under the Celtic concept of honor, the Scots, Irish Celtic concept, and then the black honor, which comes from the Africans have their own distinct tradition of honor. And I don't really have that good a handle on the mechanics for the African concept of honor. That's why I'm not going to talk about it that much. But I can clearly see that it exists.
- [32:12]
Austin Padgett
Right. And that gets into, well, Thomas Sowell's famous book about the black people adopting the honor culture of the South. And it's probably actually a combination of, yeah, African and Southern culture.
- [32:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Soul talks a lot. When soul talks to black Americans, he basically says they're Englishmen, which is. It's partly true, but it's a half truth. Where when you. The video I've already finished, it just needs to get approved by the sponsors. Is the Anthropology of Black America. I'm going to release that on the main channel. And whenever you look at topics of black America, you can always see the authors squirm at certain questions. And one of the questions authors really squirm at is drawing connections between antisocial behavior in Africa and antisocial behavior in black Americans. Like rappers act like African chieftains, you have crime issues, you have impulse control issues, etc. And so SOL will say stuff like black American culture is just like, it's like a. It's a version of lower class English culture. And no, there's clearly a line from Africa to African Americans, which makes total sense.
- [33:28]
Austin Padgett
Only when it comes to music. Only when it comes to music. Yeah, yeah, that came from Africa, but nothing else.
- [33:34]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And so Japanese honor, collectivism, individualism. There's an example, I tell people who I work with and I give this example for what not to do culturally. We're in Japanese culture. And I was talking to him, a friend of mine runs his, runs a company and I was talking to one of his employees who is Japanese and I was talking to him about my study of Japanese anthropology and he was just really impressed. He's like, rudyard, you absolutely nailed it. Which is, I love to hear it. I love when I talk about an ethnicity. And then someone from that ethnicity hits me up and they're like, thank you. Because oftentimes the left judges people like me for trying to understand distinct cultures. You actually talk to someone from that culture like you nailed it. And they really respect when you talk about the issues because those are very often things that they themselves are annoyed with. Because once you get to a certain level of cognizance where when you travel around the world, you'll run into an educated Turkish person who's totally aware of Turkey's issues and they're annoyed by it, or certain levels of cognizance, like I can talk to an educated Chinese person who's not an ideologue and they're going to be aware of China's issues. And what, what, what the, the modernist leftist narrative really does is it shuts off genuine cross cultural communication, which is racist.
- [34:58]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. I've never met someone on my travels that I talk to a lot where I couldn't relate my frame to theirs in a way that they understood eventually.
- [35:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, so we've talked about. So the example I give for people who work for me, what to avoid is that in Japanese culture, Japan has the same family structure as Germany, which is in a lot of ways why they parallel their cultural development. They have the patrilineal family structure where the first son, and this is what the Celts have too. It's what parts of Spain have, parts of Italy, Quebec. And these tend to be honor cultures where one son inherits everything, the other sons basically get nothing and they have to figure it out. And that older son lives with his parents and then the daughter moves in. So you get into these social friction situations where these cultures often become fascist because the one son who inherits everything, it creates these strong middle class businesses cross generationally, it creates huge amounts of dissatisfied young men who need to go into the priesthood or war to just get something to live. And it also normalizes inequality. And you have the social friction between the parent generation and the children's generation. And so in England and France, for example, the idea that your parents had to approve of your mate, that ended significantly earlier than in Germany, because in England and France your parents wouldn't freaking have to live with, with the girl. In Germany or Japan, the parents have to approve of the daughter because they have to live with her. And it's crazy that Japan ended arranged marriages in the 1990s. Even into the late 20th century, arranged marriages were normal. And that is exactly when the Japanese stopped fucking where half of Japanese under 40 are virgins. It's utterly ridiculous. They have one of the lowest birth rates on earth. Because when I deal with the Japanese they're just like so rigid and autistic because their entire social structure is so controlled. And I keep on not talking at the example but what happens with this is that this, the mom is allowed to bully the new wife and this is just understood. These freaking AI bots keep coming after me. It's ridiculous. I haven't replied in days and they keep on coming after me. But, but. And then in return the daughter gets to bully the next wife when she becomes the mom. And so it's this cycle of abuse and what the Abrahamic tradition built out is avoiding that the entire friggin purpose of Christianity is that this never happens. And when you look at Japan and a lot of the Orient in general where Japan has more shamanistic influences left than any other Eurasian society because they've been stuck on the edge of the map. They have the Confucian element which dates back to 500 BC. They have the Buddhist element so they're very syncretic. But at the same time you don't have the events which occur across the rest of Eurasia where like psych. The Roman Empire conquers everything and enforces its culture on people. The Arab supernova shows up where the eastern half of Asia just doesn't operate with the same level of pressure as the western half of Eurasia. And Japan is probably the most harmony based culture in the world. And the reasoning for that is Japan had, it's a rice farming culture. And rice farming cultures, you work every single day of the year because that's, it's rice is a continuous crop like that. And so it's why the Japanese, the East Asians have legitimate genetic switches towards hard work that Europeans don't because they've been rice farming for thousands of years. And when you read enough Japanese anthropology you'll see things like it was a crisis in Japan when. So they go to, they went to class for six days a week, they finally stopped going to class on Saturday and then they had like non school programs on Sunday. Don't even get to friggin talk to their family on Sunday because in Japanese corporate culture they'll work six days a week and then they'll have like after work programs too. They're mandatory. Because in Japanese culture they had this identity crisis at the schools because the group always has to be entertaining you and the Japanese are really bad at stuff like innovation or cultural creativity, because they have no space for the individual. And this is diametrically opposed to the culture I grew up in where they'd say, if you can see your neighbor's smokestack, it's too crowded. Or my dad. My parents would say, the goal of your life is to have enough money that you should be independent from others. And so you can see the enormous cultural gap here, although there are similarities. And Japan has also had one of the least regional mobility of any society in the world world. And it's funny where until the Industrial Revolution, people were stuck in the exact same villages for 2000 years. And rice farming is irrigation based. You're dependent on your neighbors. And so Japanese culture has all of these mechanisms of how to give like slight nos or silence is really big in Japanese communication because silence is not saying something bad. And Japanese culture is petrified of rejection because you're totally dependent on your neighbors to help you for rice and you're going to be stuck with your neighbors for thousands of years. And then the Industrial Revolution hit and Japan experienced one of the highest rates of regional mobility of any country. The Japanese were going all over. So you have this like generational disconnect, which you can kind of see in a lot of anime, where Miyazaki, practically all of Miyazaki's movies are about the social destabilization of the Industrial Revolution because you have these thousands of year old communities that got disrupted. And then you look at Japanese culture where Japanese has the salaryman culture where you go to a job after college and then you start your job. They give you multi decade employment. It's practically not allowed to quit your job in Japan. And they have enormous restrictions on quitting your job. Your company takes care of you, they provide your socializing. They'll even like give you prostitutes. Prostitution's really normalized in Japan. They also. Japan's had a culture that's normalized porn for thousands of years. It's just part of what they do. They've like when you look at the weird octopus stuff that has parallels in the 17th century and going back even further, porn was a huge thing in 17th century Japan going back into the Middle Ages.
- [41:56]
Austin Padgett
Well, right, because they had all that paper. Yeah, they always had a paper surplus because they could make it out of different materials than us. Where paper was really, really expensive and rare in the West.
- [42:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. Up until the Middle Ages where they figured out how they figured out from the Crusades. And so with the Japanese you have the salaryman culture. If you're just going to stick with the same employer for decades. It's their attempt to psychologically adjust to them having these multi thousand year highly static rice village cultures with the enormous shifts of the Industrial revolution. And Japan's probably the country in the world that gave the managerial class the most power. Where Japan is technically capitalist, but in reality the corporations all work with the government. They're all friends. They'll literally mark out the prices. The government stops competition. And it works because the Japanese have incredibly high social cohesion where they'll shut up and do their job. But you see it with the post war boom. And the best book on this read the first 2/3 of this book. The final third is boring. Is Taggart Murphy's Japan and the Shackles of the Past. And the thesis of the book is that the main core of Japan's issues is fear of uncertainty. The Japanese do very poorly with uncertainty. And so they build their entire social structure to avoid it. Between having the managerial class control everything, having highly structured corporations. And they had a huge debt boom where there was a time when the Imperial palace in Tokyo it was worth more than all the real estate in California combined. Where because the Japanese have these cooperative effects where they could pull it off for two generations after World War II because they had the shared social cohesion of World War II's trauma which. But then when that the World War the generation that remembered World War II die lost power in the 90s, they lost all that. So they really had their enormous period of growth ended in 1990. And they've been in horrifying stagnation ever since. Ever since 1990, Japan has stagnated more than any country in the world. When you look at the countries that have done well or failed Since World War II, the US has actually stayed constantly and Asia has caught up. Latin America stayed constant too. But the countries that really lost are Europe, Russia and especially Japan. Because the Japanese are capable of this sort of hive mind culture. Where World War II they went really hard, but they have the issue of virtue signaling due to fear of rejection. So the Japanese elite declared war on a coalition of over 20 times their population combined and at once. And they lost. Although they fought really hard post World War II, once they could maintain the cohesion they could out compete others because they, they worked really hard. Their entire private and public sectors cooperated. And then what happened was they made terrible decisions like too much debt or not having enough flexibility. And then they blew up. And then more flexible countries like America or China were able to out compete.
- [45:08]
Austin Padgett
Japan Yeah, and that's a really good example because when Japan was buying Rockefeller Square in the 80s and had all the tech gadgets, everybody thought they were ascendant and going to become the world power. And I think modernity confuses people because all the technology is kind of out there and you can have these periods of expansion, but unless you're able to control the outgrowth of your bureaucracy, then, like, these miracles keep dissipating or stalling out and the same thing's happening to China.
- [45:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I was talking to a friend yesterday where I said the biggest issue of the last century is the absence of wisdom. Where there's lots of periods where, like In World War II, if Hitler wanted to win the war, if he was 20% less racist, he would have been able to cooperate with the Slavs who hated Stalin. He could have gotten the Jewish scientists on his side. But no, because he lacked wisdom, he lost wokeness is the utter absence of wisdom because the left, which runs society is destroying society, which they themselves have to maintain. Like they're going to live with the results of this. And so when you look at Japan, the guy who got me into geopolitics was George Friedman. He was this Hungarian Jewish guy who moved to Texas and he ran Stratfor. And I read his book when I was 12, and it flicked a switch in my brain where I'm like, this is what I was born to do. And he predicted in the 90s the coming war with Japan, where he saw Japan's trajectory. He wrote this in, like, 1990, which was the exact worst year to write it. And then he said, japan's going to keep rising. They're going to fight America. And no, they'd stayed as stagnated. And they thought, you idiot, like, they're not militarized. They're completely dependent on the American trade system to feed them, to get oil. And they're next to China. So Japan can't rival America because the second they do, we're going to pull the plug. And part of what happened, I mean, the Japanese made their own bet in the 90s is we just called their shit test and we just said, you're not allowed to cheat with your currency like you do because they were hyperinflating their currency. They were operating out of all this debt. And then America just said no. And it all fell apart because there and because I think we offered to. I think we threatened them with, like, pulling out, doing something relating to military support. We didn't militarily threaten them. We just said, if you Guys are going to buy up our stuff and cheat on us. We're not going to give you the same sort of external protection we had. And then you saw the entire house of cards fall. But same thing with China, like.
- [47:49]
Austin Padgett
And tariffs. Yeah, yeah, that kind of negotiation.
- [47:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Same thing with China, where modern people are really bad at spotting long term versus short term trends. And what I'd say is, just as the best example is that in the globalized world, the Asians have done a vastly better job of catching up than the Africans or the Latin Americans. And historically that makes sense because if you want to understand the future, look to the past. The Asians have this multi thousand year trajectory of advanced societies. So of course it makes sense that they're going to be the ones who can industrialize fastest. While for the Africans or the Latins they have to build out the cultural technologies to do that. And modernity really struggles with that. Where if the west has had this market advantage for the last 800 years, where around the time of the Black Death is when Europe surpassed the rest of the world, you can't just think that that 800 year trajectory is going to change over the course of 20 years. Where I remember Fareed Zakaria, who was a CNN guy, he was talking about the rise of the rest and the decline of the West. And it's partly crazy that our regime journalists were glorifying the collapse of the decline of our own society, but it's just this really gullible stuff. But this is not Japan. I'm going to talk about the Amaterasu switch. Then we're going to go through, we're going to go through the trajectory of Japanese history. I will go to the bathroom first.
- [49:23]
Austin Padgett
Excellent.
- [49:27]
Rudyard Lynch
I developed the Amaterasu switch as an Asian version of the Wodan switch, where the Wodan switch was something Carl Jung developed when he was living in World War I because he saw that the Germans in World War I were carrying out all of these cultural traits which their ancestors had done so thousands of years beforehand. Where the Germanic peoples, and I'm going to throw the Celts in here as well because the Celts had their own, their chief God was the same God as Woldon, where Waldon is the English version, Odin is the Germanic is the Scandinavian version. So I'm going to say Waldon because we're an English speaking people. But the Celts, their version of Wodan was Lug. And I'm curious, I've always wondered if my last name, lynch, is related to the Celtic God Lug. I've looked it up. But the way of pagan names, people don't know if anyone knows in the comments if lynch and Lug are related, I'd be curious. So the Celts, because Odin is the God Mercury, who's the God of consciousness, evolution and mysticism. And then he became the head God. So he's a God of war strategy, kingmanship, that stuff, masculinity. And what Carl Jung saw was that the German peoples could flick a switch and go from hyper civilized where the reason that people say getting to Denmark is that the Germanic peoples had gone through this whole process of just constant iteration. Because Odin's goal is to create the perfect men. He wants to create the manliest, most intelligent, most charismatic, most high quality men. And so when you're a society and he does it through suffering and through overcoming weakness and doing cool stuff because it's a combination of again Mercury hermetica with war. And so you see this witch in the Germanic peoples where they're capable of being very like orderly and clean and then that stuff and the switch goes off and then it's the Holocaust and World War I and mass colonialization. So this is a trait seen in the German peoples. And you see it when they're in periods of radical danger of basically facing extinction. I noticed this in the Japanese too, where the Japanese have the ability to constantly flip on the spot and other Asians don't. Where I don't see this in China or India, where one example is the meiji Restoration where 19th century Japan had cut itself off from the world for 300 years and then flick the switch immediately modernized again, the most advanced country in Asia. You see it in the 17th century when Japan briefly incorporated Western technologies and launched a colonial empire against Korea and China. Then that failed, then they turned inwards. Then you have the 20th century. They flipped from incredibly imperialist and warlike with World War II to very pacifist. 20 years earlier there was the switch from we're going to be a parliamentary democracy who's aping Britain and America to we're going to be hyper militaristic fascists to model the Germans. That was over the twenties and then the ninth century they went through this phase of we're going to imitate the, it was either ninth or eighth, we're going to imitate Confucian Chinese culture. We're going to incorporate all this stuff where the Japanese have this built in switch of we're going to change like that. And so I call it the Amaterasu switch because Amaterasu is the Lead Japanese goddess. And the core myth she has is Amaterasu. I think she felt like angry or sad. And she goes, she goes into a cave and then she dwells upon herself in the cave and she feels terrified and then she just feels. And then everyone around her is like the sun goddess is left. We're all going to die. And then Amaterasu leaves the cave, lights up the world and saves. So the Japanese have the ability to pull into their deep subconscious, figure something out and then come out shining again. And it's a very consistent pattern of behavior.
- [53:39]
Austin Padgett
Like a butterfly.
- [53:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Exactly. And it's interesting where if you study the mystic paths, Wodan is peak masculine psychologically. Amaterasu is peak feminine, where Odin is the tree, the upward spirit. He sits at the top of the tree of life and he's. It's. It's masculine overcoming. Amaterasu is the exact opposite. She comes from the cave, which is feminine symbolism. She's peak katonic, subjective and like mystical, like a butterfly. So it's interesting to see it's again the same pattern of opposites, but circling back.
- [54:13]
Austin Padgett
I wonder if that has any connection with their difficulty to dealing with uncertainty.
- [54:19]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [54:19]
Austin Padgett
Because they, they have to change their entire frame to be able to do anything differently at all.
- [54:28]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, that's been a. You're right. And that's really smart because they're so collectivist and they've. They're. Japan is better at collectivism than any other society. The Chinese are also collectivist. But China's got a lot of issues of corruption and free riding, which are way better in Japan because the Chinese don't. Because in China, social authorities are enforced by the government. And the government will never do as good a job as like internal social norms. You always want to route social control through a society and a culture in a religion rather than the government. And so because the Japanese have this hyper collectivist spirit, they can flip on the spot, but they have to flip on the spot to do any change. The good thing is they can do that because lots of collectivist societies can't. And it's interesting, under some anthropological metrics, the Japanese are peak psychologically feminine because they're subjectivist, they're dependent on relationships, they view the world through status. They're very big on aesthetic and vibes where it was very philosophically difficult to teach the Japanese the concept of rationality because they didn't have it, because Zen Buddhism was so powerful that they had trained their elite on strategic irrationality. So when the west came in, they had to be like in our worldview, we subdivide the world up and then we split it into different categories, then we add them back in together. And the Japanese were just like. That seems cruel because their worldview is. It's very autistic, but it's also holistic and. Yeah, I just think you made a really good point.
- [56:10]
Austin Padgett
What was the, the last part? But did you say the west splits them up so into probabilities or.
- [56:17]
Rudyard Lynch
The west developed a logical system to use the left hemisphere. The left hemisphere is the part of our neurology which allows us to process things as dead phenomena and to process things as machines. So the Greeks, their great contribution to civilization was to allow a rationalistic moral code which you can apply across religions and cultures. The west has developed this and we've over replied. We've overused rationality incorrectly to a point where we've just become completely irrational. Everything to its ultimate culmination because it becomes its opposite. If you're totally rational, you are totally irrational. And the Japanese did the same thing through the opposite, where through Zen, they became profoundly practical. Because if you force yourself to be irrational all on very specific times, you're going to concentrate your irrationality so you're actually capable of rationality. It's complex.
- [57:13]
Austin Padgett
Well, right, because it's idiocentric. Behavior is rational. So I mean everyone, regardless of what you think about rationality, everyone's going to follow a pattern of.
- [57:22]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [57:23]
Austin Padgett
What someone. How we would describe it generally. Yes, I was going to say observing how the Japanese figured out how to integrate rationalism with mysticism might give us some clues for how to do the opposite.
- [57:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, yes. So I wanted to finish this point where the. By some metrics the Japanese are peak feminine, by others they're peak masculine. The big guy who makes anthropological metrics is Geert Hofstadter. And the most feminine society in his book is Sweden, which is Walden. The most masculine is Japan. So you're seeing the same anthropological trend from the opposite side and because in his book, the Japanese Prize Achievement, material things, status, hierarchies, aggression, they give men lots of status. Where when Westerners go to Japan, they're shocked by the Japanese. The men will always walk first, the women will always show deference to men, just socially. But Japan gives women significantly better social status than the rest of Asia. It's another commonality with Europe. And so the Zen ideas are. I see a lot of interest in Zen in the west and I think it's because it's so different from us, people find it appealing and Modernity is so neurologically autistic that just getting the opposite is really useful. But you have to integrate Zen into the Western tradition. Which I think, yeah, it's. I think, I think the Hermetica does that well. Because what the Hermetica does well is it has, is it has the West's constant improvement mindset and it has the constant like overcoming and change, but it also has the centralizing force. So you want to have the irrationality of Zen as like a mental core. And then from that you basically incorporate it into the west, constant achieving. Because the end point of Buddhism, which is Buddhism's had a bigger effect on Japan than anywhere else in East Asia due to when Japan was growing. Buddhism's up, rejecting life completely. It like, I have a friend who's using Buddhist meditation now and he says, I don't like that. It says like, you should dislike even your attachment to your lack of attachment to life. Or like, even if you feel positive emotions, don't write to the positive emotions. Where that's just something where I don't think Westerners can actually do that.
- [60:03]
Austin Padgett
Right.
- [60:03]
Rudyard Lynch
So you.
- [60:03]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, go ahead. Well, you tied Hermetica to achievement.
- [60:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [60:08]
Austin Padgett
And it's funny because my concept of how to integrate Zen with the west is the British phrase of keep calm, carry on.
- [60:16]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [60:16]
Austin Padgett
And keep calm is just the Zen and the carry on is the actually achieving and continuing to moving. Instead of using Zen to remove every feeling to do nothing, you're using Zen to like have chill vibes.
- [60:31]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. As I say, I stand by the law of chill vibes. It's one of my better philosophic ideas. Right. So the way to incorporate Zen into the Western tradition is the law of chill vibes.
- [60:44]
Austin Padgett
And I think keep calm, carry on is like a good established one. I mean, the British are reading about India in the 1800s, maybe they got it.
- [60:51]
Rudyard Lynch
I mean like the core principle of the Hermetica is courage. So it's keep calm. But I had to write friggin notes for this. I never write notes. This is how dedicated I am. It's funny, when I was in school, teachers like Rudyard, you have to write notes. Um, and like, because if you don't write notes, you're going to go crazy. Here I am, I have multiple businesses. I make these videos at the top of my head. I never maintain notes. I just store all this shit in my head.
- [61:18]
Austin Padgett
But you're also crazy too. So they.
- [61:19]
Rudyard Lynch
I am. I am crazy.
- [61:20]
Austin Padgett
Yeah.
- [61:21]
Rudyard Lynch
I accept that.
- [61:21]
Austin Padgett
It's okay. CeeLo Green. Everyone's crazy.
- [61:23]
Host
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- [62:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Whether your company is earning millions or.
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Host
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- [63:14]
Rudyard Lynch
A pile of money.
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- [63:43]
Rudyard Lynch
I had to write out all the different sub periods of Japanese history. We already covered the colonization of of the island and a really interesting fact I got from Lincoln Payne's book the Sea and Civilization which is I feel bad because that book is always good, but I Always make it like in my top 10 list of history books, it's always number 12. It never makes the cutoff for me, like openly glorify it, but it's still really good. But the thing that got the current Japanese imperial trajectory is two things. And it relates to the rise of China with Qishi Huang Di, where our next episode is going to be Imperial China. And the first unifying principle of the modern trajectory of China. It's funny to say modern and this is 200 BC but the Qin state unified all of China around 200 BC after the warring States period. And this had downstream effects where they fought this people around like Liao. Liaoning Province, which is Liaoning Province sticks out, out by Manchuria and Korea. The Chinese fought them, they pushed down the Koreans, then Koreans pushed down the peninsula, fleeing to Japan. That's the trajectory for the rise of the modern Japanese ruling class because I think the Yamato people migrated out earlier, but the current trajectory came from that. And it's this downstream effect of the Qin dynasty which I think is dope. And there's also another myth where the Qin Dynasty with Qi Shi Huangdi, who was a madman, he was obsessed with attaining immortality and he thought that if he consumed enough mercury, who could he could attain immortality. And my father had mercury poisoning and it's an absolutely horrible illness. My dad's been in excruciating. Was in excruciating pain for a lot of the first years of my life. And so he was giving himself mercury poisoning on purpose and.
- [65:41]
Austin Padgett
Or with tuna fish. Right? Or by accident. Yeah.
- [65:43]
Rudyard Lynch
For my dad, it's because he ate tuna fish for over a decade.
- [65:46]
Austin Padgett
Oh, this guy's on purpose.
- [65:47]
Rudyard Lynch
My family's missing a gene that lets us process like the tuna fish. But then for Chishi Huang Di it was. He just wanted to attain immortality and he put mercury around his tomb. We can't enter his tomb because there's so much mercury that anyone who tries to will die.
- [66:05]
Austin Padgett
It's one of the coolest known undiscovered archaeological sites. Oh, it is under the Terracotta Army, It's. We already know there's good stuff there.
- [66:13]
Rudyard Lynch
I would not recommend this, but China already sees human life with so much contempt that like for the science, if they're already killing people for organ training, like if they're already taking their organs, man, and they're already genociding the Uyghurs. Like we got friggin hypothermia research from the Holocaust.
- [66:32]
Austin Padgett
Don't tell us, just get it done. Just get it done.
- [66:33]
Rudyard Lynch
I did not say that. That was not said by me. But so the other thing is that he sent these guys out to the Eastern ocean to find the gift to immortality. And because he was mad, his men are like, there is no gift to immortality. And so, and so they just sailed to Japan. And then that's right when the modern Japanese monarchy formed. So there's a theory that these Chinese sailors just went to Japan and we have some Chinese records of this too, where they sailed out west and said, we can't go back to China because the Emperor is going to kill us.
- [67:12]
Austin Padgett
And establish the ruling class like the Normans would or something.
- [67:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, exactly.
- [67:18]
Austin Padgett
Because they could sail better than the locals, which is all you need to control.
- [67:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And they also had a pre established monarchy and government structure, which because China by this point they were already over a millennium old and Japan had no major pre established governments. And it sort of speaks to a relationship between the Japanese and the Chinese where it reminds me of there's a. There's. It would be as if in one of the previous the Volker wandering episode we talked about if the Gauls maintained their own distinct Celtic civilization, which existed in parallel to classical civilization. So the Japanese, all the foundations of their culture stem from Chinese origins. So their Alphabet, they have a distinct Alphabet, but it's from Chinese origin. They have their own religion, Shinto, which is heavily influenced by Daoism. They have their own government system, heavily influenced by Confucianism. And there have been periods where the Japanese paid homage to the Chinese emperor, which everyone in China's vicinity did. Then there were other periods where the Japanese told them to go to hell. So I think the early medieval period, the Japanese sent a delegation to the Chinese emperor saying, we are the land of the rising sun, you are the land of the setting sun. Basically saying, we're on the rise, you're on the decline. And Asian cultures like to talk like this with all these like veiled terminologies.
- [68:45]
Austin Padgett
And like Shanghai Noon.
- [68:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, yeah. And so the Japanese did spite the Chinese and they fought several wars against each other, but they were always in China's orbit, but never fully suckered in. I think that was good for the Japanese because both them in Southeast Asia were better able to adapt to the west because they never got India or China's massive egos from being completely dominant in their ecosystem.
- [69:12]
Austin Padgett
Even though, well, the Japanese were dominant in their ecosystem. It just wasn't an ecosystem that was violently competitive. It was more like meditate on the island.
- [69:23]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. And the only so the Japanese said they were chosen by Amaterasu and all that stuff. So they have that. But they keep their egos more under control than a lot of other people's because they couldn't bully anyone in their ecosystem. China is so huge, you can't try it. And the thing with Korea is the Japanese hate the Koreans, but the Koreans are tough fucks. Like, it's like, you don't mess with the Koreans. They're really tough people. And so the Japanese tried to fight Korea multiple times. And it's kind of adorable the Japanese and the Koreans hate each other where they're the two closest peoples to each other in the world. But I guess it's like the English and the Irish. And so the Japanese tried to invade Korea multiple times, but every time they tried, due to the mountains and the climate and how tough Koreans are in the Chinese helping them out, they could never really bully Korea around, except, like, once or twice. So the Japanese are stuck with this sense of superiority, which they can't enforce in anyone else.
- [70:24]
Austin Padgett
I wonder, is that why they had such an ego trip around their Imperial period, where it was, like, unthinkable to think of themselves as losing to the point where they took on 20 to 1 odds, because it's like they're not used to flexing that muscle?
- [70:40]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. Yeah, that's definitely what happened. I was reading H.G. wells, who spoke about this, where he said that, like the English, for example, they had enough experience fighting other peoples that they kind of had grown out their muscle for colonialism better. And for the Japanese, they had done it a few times, but they hadn't really grown the muscle out. And I'm going to talk about.
- [71:03]
Austin Padgett
The.
- [71:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Influences of religions on Japan, where there's four big religions on Japan, and they're quite comparable to China, but in their own ways. So I'm gonna start with Shinto. And Shinto is the acreation of the Japanese folk customs. So Amaterasu is Shinto, like the. The Multi Tailed Fox is Shinto. There's a hero who slays a dragon who has multiple mountains. Shinto mythology is pretty cool. And if you want to, like, Princess Mononoke might be my favorite movie ever, is in competition with Lord of the Rings. And it's set in medieval Japan about the Amishi, who is a. They're the Ainu from the top of Hokkaido, not from the top of Honshu, not Hokkaido. And it shows that. And it shows this young prince where Ashitaka is my favorite. Ashitaka is my favorite literary character. I try to live my life in the manner of Ashitaka. It's a good cultural representation for ptsd. And so he wanders across Japan and it shows this, all these. This town which is modernizing, it's set in the 16th century and they're fighting with the nature spirits. And it shows that the Japanese maintain these animist codes, customs that the rest of Eurasia got rid of, where they talk about the forest spirit and the gods and that stuff where Buddhism, which showed up later is a radically anti religion religion. But you can see it where the Buddha just said, I don't care if the gods exist. Like the caste system, social structure, you should just ignore reality. By the time it gets to Japan, Buddhism's totally changed what you're going to talk about. But Buddhism got folded into Shinto. And so you have the Shinto beliefs. And Shinto is comparable to Taoism in China, where Daoism is the growth of their own shamanistic, animistic Chinese folk traditions where they have the temple of heaven and they talk of the temple of nature and you go through nature. And so in both cultures you see this sort of congregation of the folk traditions and which isn't a religion in the manner of like Buddhism or Christianity or those where a single prophet shows up and sets it out. But modern Shinto is a very much a creation of the 19th and 20th centuries where as Japan became nationalistic, they saw Buddhism as this foreign influence on Japan, which is crazy because that would. Buddhism entered Japan at the same time as Christianity entered England. So it's comparable to there this alternate history book about. It's one of the authors of a great sci fi novel called the Moat and God's Eye. And it's about an alternate history where a prophet emerges in the Netherlands who takes Christianity and Axial Age structures and then puts it on top of Norse mythology. So you see a Norse mythology become an Axial Age religion that's competitive with. With Christianity. And so people in England are stuck. Do we follow the Christian God or like the Axial Age version of Thor? Because in this new religion, Thor becomes the dominant God, not Odin. And so Shinto's like that where they were able to build out their own customs in a way that was competitive against the new religions. And so a lot of modern Shinto is this sort of recreation of these older customs for nationalist purposes. Do you have Shinto? You have Confucianism, which isn't really. You have a question there?
- [74:48]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, I was gonna say Shinto. How did they. What you said like with the Thor example, they Were combining that with some other structure or what, what structure did the Japanese mimic or scaffold Shinto onto?
- [75:04]
Rudyard Lynch
They're mimicking Buddhism and Taoism, where Daoism, Zen Buddhism, which was huge in Japan, took enormous amounts of Taoist influence. And Daoism is the Chinese version of alchemy. So Daoism prizes irrationality and using magical rituals and just going with the flow and vibing. And so the Japanese were taken, taking Chinese religious structures to convert their native pagan traditions into something that was comprehensible to like a more advanced society. And you see this where like for example, Julian the Apostate was a Roman emperor and he shoved the pagan Greek tradition into the Christian religious framework where you can go to heaven and there's a moral code. And I think that could have worked in a different timeline. And this is something that has parallels where it also worked for Hinduism where India is a really incestuous thing, where you had the old pagan traditions, Buddhism existed as a rejection of them. Then Hinduism developed as the old pagan traditions, figured out what worked with Buddhism, incorporated it into the pagan traditions, they beat Buddhism, incorporated it. Then Buddhism didn't survive in India, but it did survive in the rest of in East Asia.
- [76:26]
Austin Padgett
That's why Hinduism has a lot of gods just like the pagan.
- [76:30]
Rudyard Lynch
So Buddha is a God in Hinduism. So Buddhists, Hindus say that Buddhists are Hindus but Buddhists don't agree. So inside the Hindu pantheon, Buddha is one of the gods you can worship.
- [76:43]
Austin Padgett
Did Islam kind of do that by like throwing Jesus in as a part of it but doing something else? I guess, yeah.
- [76:49]
Rudyard Lynch
The Muslim, the Muslims did. The Muslims did something comparable where you can't be both a Christian and a Muslim. But the Muslims think that. Chris, the Muslims say that Christians are people of the book and that Christ was a prophet. And so they're inside the Quran itself. It tells you to respect Christians as similar peoples. So a lot of the Muslims who are hyper anti Christian, they're disobeying their own religion.
- [77:15]
Austin Padgett
And that would make it easy for them to grow because like in India Hinduism is competing against Buddhism so they want to give some kernel for the Buddhist to not be totally offended. Just like Islam spreading through the Christian Middle east, you know, thousands of years ago or whatever, 600 then they're going to want to not totally offend the population. Yeah, they're spread, trying to spread it through.
- [77:42]
Rudyard Lynch
The other thing is when you're in a highly harmony based culture, syncretism is normalized. And so in Japan you could be Shinto Buddhist and Confucian at the exact same time. And society would give you no crap for it. It's very polar to the west, where the Calvinists and the Lutherans and the Anglicans, just as Protestants murdered each other. And what happens when you have these highly syncretic, tolerant religions is the actual society becomes oppressive and constrictive because the religion doesn't hold the tyranny of family, state, and culture accountable. Because when you have the dogmatic religion, what it does is it stops individuals from, like, tyrannizing their own families or employers from tyrannizing their employees. And so it's a balanced thing.
- [78:39]
Austin Padgett
The balance of.
- [78:42]
Rudyard Lynch
So when you have a highly dogmatic religion, you're basically. You have to have tyranny somewhere in the society and looseness somewhere. When you're having the dogmatic religion, what it does is it creates cultural looseness in other areas because you have the shared moral code so that you can socially regulate your society. So New England Yankees, as an example, probably the most successful ethnic. One of the most successful ethnic groups ever. They had the highly dogmatic religion, which meant they had the closest thing to total democracy ever in human history. Enormous wealth, complete freedom of speech, capitalism. Because the religion was so dogmatic, it provided this social structure for the society. When you look at Japan with the highly syncretic religions is that the customs and the family and the state take this extra role because the religion's not enforcing standards on people.
- [79:41]
Austin Padgett
Got it? Yeah.
- [79:42]
Rudyard Lynch
Okay, that point, you have Shinto, you have Confucianism, which has gone through periods of popularity and then faded out of popularity in Japan, where there were. So the country with the most Confucian influence ever is Korea. They really took to it. And then in Japan, for example, in the 8th century, when you saw the centralized monarchy unify Japan, they were Neo Confucian, where they went through a huge phase of imitating China. Then again in the 17th century under Tokugawa, when the state wanted to unify Japan, they went through another Confucian Renaissance. And Confucianism is that respecting authority, respecting your social networks, deference. And so the Japanese go through Confucian phases where. But it's not their total thing. Where in China, Confucianism is easily the dominant civilizational force. Confucianism is to China what Christianity is to the West. In Japan, it goes in and out where there's the undercurrent. But filial piety. Filial piety is big in Japan, but it's not like the dominant religion like it is in China.
- [80:51]
Austin Padgett
It Just grows when they need it to justify something in the context. Like, at that point, they were expanding and had a big system to manage.
- [80:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Like, the clan is completely dominant in China. In China, the clan is the economic unit. It's your entire social life. It's where you live. Japan has clans, but they're more abstract. It's like the Celts, where, like, I have the lynch clan tie. I know where the. I know the exact village my family's from. But, like, I'm not only associating with other lynches. Like, my social life and my business life is not dependent on dealing with other lynches. That's how it is in Japan. And so you have Confucianism. Buddhism had a bigger effect on Japan than probably any other country in that region because it was developed. Japan developed as a society in the high Middle Ages, like Europe. Europe did, where 600 AD until 1600 was when the Japanese nation formed. Buddhism was really popular in East Asia in the medieval period because the nomadic tribes brought it into East Asia and the state was also weaker. And Buddhism flourishes in the absence of a strong state in general. When Japan is. It is national. When powers decentralized in Japan, they're Buddhist. When it's centralized, they're Confucian. And so Zen, especially where East Asia has a highly distinct form of Buddhism called Mahayana Buddhism. Where Mahayana Buddhism, the idea is we are all in a community together to help you reach enlightenment. Where Theravada, which is the Southeast Asian Buddhism, is only singular individuals can reach enlightenment, and we have to further the individual search for enlightenment. Mahayana Buddhism is like, let's form a monastery together in a group, and from that let's reach enlightenment as a demographic and we can help other people reach enlightenment, even if we don't. So what they do is they create this system, and that's highly cultural. And it's funny, it's very much distinct from what the Buddha taught. I mean, the idea is the Buddha taught, they died out in India, and then Mahayana became one of the biggest religions ever. So I'm not going to trash them too much, where they have the gods and they have temples and they have distinct religious rituals. But then the other element besides it is Zen, which is a specific subsection of Mahayana Buddhism. And Zen is attaining pure irrationality. So Zen is like, I'm going to rattle your brain too much till your brain shatters and you choose to jump out of the simulation where Zen will say completely irrational things. So they'll say, for example, if you meet The Buddha on the road to enlightenment, you must kill him. So the Zen are saying the nature of Zen is so strong that you must even discard the Zen beliefs to reach Zen. So you look at the Japanese art system, where their gardens with the rocks and the sand and like the certain types of plants, it's all about building mental tranquility. And this is the core concept the Japanese built around, where they have an aesthetic I love called wabi sabi. And wabi sabi is that by attaining imperfection, something becomes perfect. So it's this very humble, rustic imperfection which has become. We use a lot of like degenerated versions of wabi sabi and our aesthetic. Steve Jobs was obsessed with wabi sabi, so he built the minimalist iPhone structure off it. Same thing as a lot of like modernist minimalist art those people study in Japan. And one of the strange details here is Buddhism in Japan became hyper militaristic. A lot of the leadership of Japan's imperialist period or in the Middle Ages were Buddhist sages, where by attaining Zen calmness, you become a warrior. So the samurai were people who had been trained in Zen religious rituals, which they then used for violence.
- [85:05]
Austin Padgett
That makes a ton of sense. I wonder why that connection is not more common.
- [85:09]
Rudyard Lynch
Because. So we, we valorize Buddhism in our culture. We really don't like saying bad things about Buddhism. But it's fairly common that Buddhist monks in Buddhist religious countries cause genocide in Burma. The Burma right now, which is committing genocide right now against the Muslims, actually the Buddhists in Burma, the Buddhist monks in Burma are the biggest proponents of the genocide against the Muslim Rohingya minority.
- [85:34]
Austin Padgett
Right.
- [85:34]
Rudyard Lynch
Japan, the Buddhists are hyper militaristic yet again. Even in, I believe in, in China, they had a war that killed like a million people in the 12th century that was caused by Buddhist religious radicals. Same thing as the war in the 14th century against the Mongols. That was Buddhist religious radicals. Buddhists are not like hyper peaceful. And they're not. And they're not like detached from the world. The Buddhist monasteries were the biggest financial engines and growths of capitalism in both medieval Japan, China and Southeast Asia. Where the way Buddhism's actually worked is that once you've attained mental detachment from the world, it actually makes you much better at dealing with the world.
- [86:16]
Austin Padgett
Right. It frees you up to do stuff without anxiety. And anxiety is one of their culture, psychological motivating factors. Right. It's the main one or one of the common ones. So maybe it makes sense as a solution to that. They also genocided wood planks and cinder blocks.
- [86:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Japan's predominantly shame driven. They, they have a lot of anxiety though, which you can see from just their culture. I mean, like anime is not. Anime does not demonstrate a culture obsessed with filial piety and tradition. The Japanese do have that element. But all modernist societies become anxiety driven. So we've covered Buddhism, we've covered Confucianism, we've covered Shinto. And let's go through actual the trajectory of Japanese history. So in the period after the first introduction of technology and civilization from China, we have the Kofun period, which was a mound building. And there's this beautiful mound you should check out where it's a lake. It's built around the 3rd, it's the 5th century lake. Inside the lake was a mound the shape of a key. And it's still there. It's gorgeous. And you saw Japan unified pretty early under the Yamato and then the Asuka period, where this was when the Shinto myths were written down. And it's also where the state formed, or the Yamato unified most of Japan south of the Amishi area in North Honshu, where Hokkaido, as I said before, was ethnically Ainu until the, until the 17th century. It was independent till the 17th century and it was ethnically Ainu till the 20th. But south of the ethnic Ainu area it was under the Yamado. And the Yamada were really interesting because they were pulling from China's Tang Dynasty that was socialist. And so they destroyed private property like the tong, where the tong would destroy private property. And then they subdivided the entire country among freeholder farmers who couldn't sell their land. Passed down generationally. And so Japan was a socialist country in the same period as the Frankish Empire in like the seventh and eighth centuries. And it's funny, when I went to school, we would read, we didn't talk a lot about medieval history. But the school glorified China's Tang Dynasty socialist system where the government subdivides among freeholder farmers and then they can't compete with each other to pass it on generationally. But you have this centralized state around the period of like 7th, 8th, 9th centuries. You go through periods of the Nara period, the Heian period, and these have become bywords for sort of nothing happening. Where in the Heian period they made the government as inefficient as possible, where they said, we're going to make this four step process with all these different, like this group of nobility, this group of kings. Because what they said is we Want to change things as little as possible. So we're going to make government as inefficient as possible on purpose so that nothing changes.
- [89:48]
Austin Padgett
Smart that we, I can tell them some experience on that. It's a little bit tricky.
- [89:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, it's the level of honesty about socialism is so refreshing. Like they're like we have attained pure socialism which is nothing will change and the government's going to be inefficient. And so then you had. The Hegan period is widely known for the story of Genji because it ended in degeneracy where Japan had no external threats. It was genuinely pretty safe. They had a period, I believe in the 8th century when they lost half of their population due to smallpox. So the smallpox cut down their number. So there was very little internal tension. And the tale of Genji is about this, I believe, young woman in the Heian court towards I think the 10th or 9th centuries. And she was just running with the fashions they have and like the various love affairs where adultery was super normalized among the nobility and they had like the highly distinct artistic styles. And that backfired as I'm sure you can imagine, where there's this like 4chan post which sounds plausible, I don't know if it's true, which, where it talks about how the government bureaucracy ran the Heian period where they, they, they were Confucian and socialist and that stuff. And then what happened, the 4chan post says is the, the samurai nobility just realized, wait, this is stupid, we have the actual influence and they took over and that's basically what happened. I, I don't know if it was that exact causality, but it was basically what happened.
- [91:45]
Austin Padgett
It sounds like they sped run the process because they immediately figured out that the game is okay thousand year tyranny by not changing anything, which we talked about with China is the most successful example you can have. And then the honesty of that made the military guys who actually had the power be like, wait, yeah, I gotta wait around for that.
- [92:07]
Rudyard Lynch
Another interesting element is Japan experienced population decline over the 9th century, which is another element of socialism. Because what socialism does is when there's no competition, women can't find men attractive so people don't have babies. It's what happens always with socialism. Russia, China, the ancient Greeks, the ancient Romans and a consistent pattern in Japanese history. If they try to mobilize the military, then once they do so the military snaps. Where in the 9th century the Japanese invaded Korea and they were beaten by the Chinese. And then what happened is that the Military loss in the mobilization of the men is what ultimately destroyed the Heian period. And so Japan went through its own feudal period, which is very comparable to Germany, where Germany had the Frankish empire, which was unified then that fell apart into a feudal period. And so Japan experienced a feudal period due to the collapse of the Heian and their decadence, where there was the rise of a feudal nobility. And again, much like Germany, they pulled themselves back together under the Fujiwara family. And then in the 13th and 14th centuries, they became completely decentralized. So to follow the Germany parallel countries were formed in the 6002 by influence from a larger neighboring country, that being the Roman Romans for the Germans, China for the Japanese. Centralized empire under the Franks with the Germans and then. And then the. The. The Heian with the Japanese. That falls apart. And then there's a feudal period that's pulled together in like the 10th. In the 10th century in Germany, 11th century in Japan into the Fujiwara and then the Hohenstaufens and the Saxons. That again falls apart in the 13th, 14th. Germany's earlier was the 10th century, unified fall apart in the 13th. Japan was unified in the 11th, splitting apart in the 14th. Then it was a warring states period where it was just every single hamlet in Germany or Japan was practically independent. The big difference is here, where the Habsburgs in the 17th century tried to unify all of Germany. But because Germany is in the middle of the map, the French and the Swedish and all those people stopped Germany from unifying. In Japan, that worked where it would be as if the Habsburgs unified all of the Holy Roman Empire as they tried to, and then enforced the Spanish Inquisition and social conservatism and baroque economic controls onto Germany, turning Germany into an authoritarian state state. What happened instead was that that didn't work and Germany remained divided into the 19th century. And so you have this period where Germany had all this cultural and economic and technological dynamism that the Germans had shut down. So it'd be like if all of Germany was Austria, but Austria wasn't. It's like the Spanish Empire where Austria had to innovate because it was in the middle of the map, but. But the Spanish Empire, that didn't work. But still, at the same time, Japan had enough development where in the 19th century, even at the same time, where the Meiji Restoration and the Meiji restoration was the 1870s, Germany unified in the 1870s. So both of them had a rapid social shift, where they had a new cadre of leadership who were highly competent, pulled the country together against external threats. Then they industrialized at the same time, and then they tried to introduce sort of like Western cultural technologies, like liberalism or the parliament or capitalism. By the time of World War I, they realized they didn't want that. They then became hyper nationalistic, attacking all their neighbors, delusionally, blowing themselves up by World War II, entering into American colonization, becoming pacified by the Americans, having several of their major cities wiped out. And now they're facing like a demographic and social crisis as one of the two worst countries in the world. Germany is one of the countries in Europe with the lowest birth rate and then Japan's one of the lowest in Asia. So there's a very strong. There's a. Please.
- [96:39]
Austin Padgett
No, no, I was just commenting that you're making that connection. Yeah, elaborate on that.
- [96:43]
Rudyard Lynch
So there's a very strong sympathetic connection between Japan and Germany. And it's widely said the Japanese are the Germans of Asia. The Japanese get some comparisons to the English and they get more to the Germans.
- [96:57]
Austin Padgett
Is there anything similar there on a. Like the collectivist honor thing where they're honor and collectivist and maybe the Germans are overall honor and individualist, but a little more honor and collectivist than the English?
- [97:14]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, the Germans are one of the most individualist populations in the world, so I wouldn't want to call them collectivist. You're correct that they're more collectivist than the English or the French. The big similarities I see are that they had the same family structure and they have a comparable warrior honor culture. And they also have. They've both got either the Wodan switch or the Amaterasu switch. And they also have this like, no chill culture. They have not mastered the law of chill vibes where they, like, can't calm down. Where in England, the English are very good at calming down. They'll have political crises. They'll sort everything out. They'll build a negotiation. Where in America, we could build a constitution to unify all of the 13 colonies which had wildly distinct cultures. In Japan and Germany, they wouldn't be able to do that because the way their cultures don't have enough chill.
- [98:14]
Austin Padgett
And what is that chill connected to again? Just to like.
- [98:18]
Rudyard Lynch
I don't know, man.
- [98:19]
Austin Padgett
Solidify the connections. We probably mentioned something, maybe tea time. They don't have tea time.
- [98:25]
Rudyard Lynch
It's just a passive trait. It's like some people have chill and others don't. I think given a few years, I can figure out the origin.
- [98:31]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, well, we talked about rice related to it a little bit, but that's different than Germany.
- [98:36]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, the Germany German is not a rice culture. It's one of those things where I'm sure I can figure out the anthropological origins of chill. If you want me to make like an anthropology of chill video on the main channel, like I, I probably figured that out in the next year.
- [98:49]
Austin Padgett
Who's chill, who's not, and why? I want to know.
- [98:52]
Rudyard Lynch
This is the video on how to obtain chill vibes. Because like, if you're not chilling, what are you doing? But, so you have the struggle between the Taira and the Minamoto in the 11th and 12th centuries because the samurai showed up in Japan and they subdivided Japan and then the Fujiwara the emperor. So you had the, the Fujiwara clan which seized power. Then you had the Minamoto clan who also tried, because you had the Bafuku, which sounds dirty, but the Bafuku were the warrior camps where it's military rule and Japan had Bufuku rule from the 11th through the 19th centuries, where the emperor became a pope like figure, where he was not consulted for any political decisions. He was just a spiritual head of the Japanese nation. And so you had the shogun, who is this parallel military leader. So families would fight over who gets to be the shogun. And the Fujiwara helped the emperor fight back against the military control. But then there was some other military stuff. And then the Minamoto were the military dictators from the 11th, the 12th centuries. And Japan experienced a conflict comparable to the wars of the Roses, where it's just constant noble infighting over the course of a century. I don't really find conflicts like that worthwhile to talk about because it's all this, like very particular details of infighting that relate just to that context. But then by the end of it, where it started the 11th century and the final stage of the Taira and Minamoto clans ended in the 1180s at the same time as the Third Crusade with Richard Lionheart. The Taira finally won and then they became the ruling family of Japan until the 14th century.
- [100:59]
Austin Padgett
And so I guess there's multiple warring Shogun periods because that's the repeated pattern of Japan. Right? You have all the governors and then they fight for the shogunate and then.
- [101:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, and Japan was basically a military dictatorship and they went through a process comparable to the European High Middle Ages. Whereas a general pattern, because one of my favorite historians, William McNeill, he's really good about, he writes in one of his history books, he puts Japan and Europe as parallels because they were operating at the same time. And his thesis is that the locusts of Eurasian Civilization started in the Middle east and then settled outwards. So he was comparing the Far west and the Far east of Eurasia at the same time, where the Japanese tended to reach goals faster than the West Europeans. So in the year 800, Japan was more advanced than Europe. But once you get to the high Middle Ages Europe, their steam engine just went off. They just went way faster. So by the time you get to the year 1200, Europe is vastly more advanced than Japan. And then the Europeans have kept going faster. Where McNeill also talks about how Japan and England both faced issues where because their population size wasn't large enough. Where by the time of the 15th century, Japan had 10 million people, comparable to Spain's population. And when you're. When there were like 2 million people, that's not enough people to build out your own gene pool, your own disease pool. So both England and Japan would have this issue that diseases would come into Japan from outside or from England from outside. They'd kill the population. There wasn't critical mass people to sort of gain immunity to the disease in its own specific gene pool distinct from the population. So diseases would just come in and periodically kill people without being able to maintain internal immunity. And the Japanese passed that threshold faster than the English did. But once the English did pass it, they were able to basically radically surpass Japan in ability to influence the world. That's just a symbol, but it's interesting, right?
- [103:15]
Austin Padgett
That's an interesting framework for tracking that. I wonder which other ones you could find, because that's a more common dynamic than people think, where the slower growth curve sets you up for a faster.
- [103:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [103:28]
Austin Padgett
Result versus another one which may flatline or because to accelerate.
- [103:33]
Rudyard Lynch
You saw lots of very similar trends between Japan and Western Europe, between the rise of feudalism, the decentralization of the government. The monasteries were the first engines of capitalism. And banking, whether that be the Catholics in Europe or the Buddhists in Japan. You saw agricultural innovations, the rise of a money economy, where in both Japan and Europe there was a very common archetype of the nobleman who was indebted to the merchant classes. Where one of the outgrowths of feudalism is because you have this highly specific and autistic government system where in feudalism, everyone's dependent to someone else. Because that legal system is so well structured, it always creates capitalism, because the exact same thing as well, on top of the decentralization of power, gives the market enormous power. So the market ended up getting more power in Japan than the rest of Asia, which is what helped the Japanese deal to shift over to Western systems faster because your ability to maintain a stable property rights government system is dependent on how pluralistic your society is. If you have an independent market, if you have an independent church, if you have freedom of association, and those stemmed from feudalism. In both Japan and Western Europe, you can modernize faster because you've already built in the social trust. If you're a society like China, where the state has power, in India, where the priest class has power, it's harder. But Japan, due to these sort of hollow similarities with Western Europe, had a more pluralist society. But in Western Europe, their sort of economic revolution occurred around the 13th and the 14th centuries. And in Japan, they were playing catch up, where they were only really able to reach the level Europe had after the period of unification in the edo period, where 15th century Japan was still pretty lightly populated. They had a market economy. It wasn't the scale where Japan had to play catch up to what Europe did in the high Middle Ages, in the early modern period.
- [105:39]
Austin Padgett
Right. So there's similarities, but differences, like you said, in scale. Compared to China, Japan was really decentralized, but maybe compared to parts of England, a little bit less. So.
- [105:52]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes, you had the monarchy, which survived until the 13th and 14th centuries, where the Mongols invaded Japan multiple times, and multiple times as well. The typhoon, or the divine wind, which is the Japanese end of the monsoon, wiped out the Mongol fleets. And the Japanese took that as a sign from God. And when the Mongols did briefly land on Japan, the samurai were able to defeat them, but the monarchy had already been decaying. And so. And so when they tried to muster the military forces to fight the Mongol beachheads, they weren't able to pay the guys who did it. They also got this huge dissatisfied group of men together who then destroyed the Japanese monarchy. And so Japan fell into this period of chaos, which lasted until the 17th century. And this is actually like the mythic period for Japan. It actually annoys me that whenever the Japanese have like a fantasy novel or a video game, they're gonna set it in the period from the 14th through the 17th centuries. And that's when Seven Samurai is set. It's when Shogun Total War is set. It's when Princess Mononoke is set, it's when Ron is set. Because that's the period when the modern Japanese identity formed, because through all of the chaos of these warlords who again controlled areas of the county, it created chaos that the modern Japanese identity and their obsession with order and with structure formed out of. And it's Very similar to the Germans, where the modern German paranoia about external opponents and order and that stuff stems from then being a chessboard of other European powers and losing a third of their population in the Thirty Years War. And so Japan, for example, they had 10 million people in the year 1450, and they had 30 million by the 17th century. So their population, Japan, didn't go through a crisis of the 17th century in the same way the rest of Eurasia did, because the constant civil wars kept their population vastly, artificially lower than what it should have been.
- [108:15]
Austin Padgett
Right. Which delayed their Malthusian trap.
- [108:17]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [108:18]
Austin Padgett
And maybe part of the other reason they developed faster earlier. I mean, not reason or whatever, but a lot of those technologies we talk about, like the plow and different types of farming equipment, they originated out of China.
- [108:32]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [108:33]
Austin Padgett
And Japan was a lot closer to China in the 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th century when that stuff was popping out.
- [108:40]
Rudyard Lynch
You also didn't have external invaders like you did in Europe, like the Vikings or Magyars or Arabs, which is why the Japanese probably did better in the Dark Ages and then weren't able to catch up in the high medieval period. But so in the 14th century, which is a terrible century for everyone, you saw the northern and the southern emperors, this was the only period the emperors were divided in Japan where the imperial title was disputed in the same way that you had the Pope in Avignon and the Pope in Rome at the same time. And this was a period of just social turmoil inside Japan.
- [109:26]
Austin Padgett
That's another interesting parallel.
- [109:28]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [109:30]
Austin Padgett
And I wonder if. Did they have. This was the 14th to 17th century. Was mysticism and the spiritual element big? Was this when they were incorporating their.
- [109:39]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [109:40]
Austin Padgett
And I wonder if, like, having the Mongols get wiped out by the force of nature three times helped, like, boost their idea of nature spirits.
- [109:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh, definitely. Yeah, it very much did. That's still remembered in Japan as one of their core historic moments today. If you were to ask a Japanese person, what are the top five moments of their history? One of them will be when God killed the Mongols multiple times.
- [110:05]
Austin Padgett
I mean, it's huge. They could have been wiped out very conceivably, at least on Main island.
- [110:11]
Rudyard Lynch
I also don't think it's a coincidence that two of the societies which did not get ravaged by the Mongols or their descendants are Japan and Western Europe. Those are the two that attained modernity, where even India, the. The mu. The Mongols attack pretty far into India. And then other nomads who were similar, like the Mughals, who were their descendants, or the Selju or The Giznaves or the Mamelukes, etc in West Europe and Japan were the only two where that wasn't the case.
- [110:42]
Austin Padgett
It's like Lord of the Rings. The Mongols are like a plague of orcs.
- [110:47]
Rudyard Lynch
So refrain from anti Mongol racism, please.
- [110:50]
Austin Padgett
Oh, sorry.
- [110:51]
Rudyard Lynch
We should not call any ethnicities orcs.
- [110:54]
Austin Padgett
Mongols are okay, they're barbarians.
- [110:57]
Rudyard Lynch
We can, we can call them barbarians. But in the. So this is the period in the 16th and 70th centuries where two very important trends occurred in Japan, one of which was the introduction of Europeans to the region, which happened actually mid 16th century. It's pretty remarkable that within a lifetime of going around the bottom of South Africa, the Europeans reached Japan. And for the longest time, originally it was just the Portuguese. And the Portuguese showed up at Nagasaki, where I believe Nagasaki was actually built by the Portuguese. It started out much like Hong Kong or Calcutta or Shanghai as a coastal European trading fort. And the local nobleman was surprisingly amenable to the Europeans because he wanted support, because he was this tiny hamlet that required European aid. And the Portuguese were, I only use the word evangelical because that has Protestant connotations. And the Portuguese were hardcore Catholics. But the Portuguese's big thing was spreading Christianity. And Christianity actually became wildly popular in Japan. And there are several timelines where Japan converted to Christianity. In the 17th century century, it was the area in Asia most amenable to Christianity because in the period of chaos where the nobility just treated the public like cattle and Japan had no protections against the oppressions of hierarchy, where it was totally legal even into the Tokugawa period with a centralized government where if a peasant looked at a nobleman poorly, the nobleman had the right to cut off his head on the spot with no trial. That's the kind of society this is. And the peasants weren't expected to make eye contact with nobility. So Christianity shows up, everyone's equal, God loves you. If you follow the code book, you get to heaven. That became very popular with lower class Japanese and even some nobility. And over time, the Japanese weren't so scared about it. But then as the Tokugawa seized power, they literally called Christianity a plague and then radically tried to crush it, where they would destroy any Christian documents in Japan, they would kill Christians on the spot, that stuff. So the Portuguese introduced Christianity and they also introduced modern guns, which the Japanese figured out very quickly because the Chinese invented guns. They hopped over across Eurasia. The Europeans radically improved them, and then they went over to Japan. And the Japanese were the people in Asia who figured out European tactics and weapons that best where they. They Actually figured out staggered musket fire before the Europeans. They had multiple ranks, some people kneeling, others to have them standing. And then they do volleys of musket fire. And they mastered pike warfare like the Europeans did, although they didn't have drill. And then you have the samurai cavalry. So you could make the argument, in the early 17th century, Japan had the best military on earth, but these are combining European muskets, elite, elite samurai cavalry, and then the ashiga. I believe it's the. It's. It's the aki garu or ashi. It's aki ashigaru in pike infantry.
- [114:21]
Austin Padgett
Right. They might be a little behind on artillery or something, but they've basically got all the pieces.
- [114:27]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [114:28]
Austin Padgett
And what would Japan.
- [114:30]
Rudyard Lynch
I've got to point out artillery. So they're going to invade Korea soon. And I read a book on this from Osprey, who are the big military history publishers. And one of the weird variables here is that the Chinese were upset. I think the Chinese were obsessed with European artillery at that moment, in a way, the Japanese weren't. So the. The. When the China. When the Japanese invaded Korea at the turn of the 70th century. Century, end of the 16th century, they mostly had taken in European technology better, but the Chinese had incorporated European artillery better. So they were able to wipe out Japanese armies with their artillery advantage. But then the Chinese lost said artillery advantage. In the next 40 years, the Manchu barbarians from the north picked out European artillery and then used it against the Chinese. And then that was a big variable in the Manchu conquest of China, where The Manchus had 100th China's population, and.
- [115:31]
Austin Padgett
That'S the Manchus in the north. And that's when, like, the Han dominated or that specific group of them, the.
- [115:38]
Rudyard Lynch
Ming, the Han, it was run by an ethnic Han dynasty. You're correct.
- [115:43]
Austin Padgett
Right. And then I'm wondering if, like, they're. They realized. Obviously they started to realize Christianity would have really big, big impact on the Japanese social structure.
- [115:54]
Rudyard Lynch
Structure.
- [115:55]
Austin Padgett
Even if it. And the fact that it was so amenable to it accelerated that. So it sounds like they had some sort of autoimmune response. But what would. Like Japan. What would. How could, Jeff. Japan, like, adopt Christianity without sacrificing some of its order and other things that they.
- [116:20]
Rudyard Lynch
One of the last alternate histories I made were the first seven years of the main channel were alternate history. And I made an alternate history. What if the Shimabara revolt worked and this was on part of my gap year. And that was a mental switch being like, wait, Rudyard, if you're making alternate histories at what if a Christian revolt in 17th century Japan worked, You've probably beaten this horse too much. You should probably move out of alternate history. I made that alternate history. And what if the cotton gin worked back to back and I'm like, wait, I might have done all the good timelines and because if the cotton gin works, you abolish slavery 40 years earlier peacefully, which nearly happened in the American south. But so Asians can be Christian. The Philippines is majority Christian. You have Christians in like East Timor, in Indonesia, like the Karen peoples in Burma. And so the, the Taipings are interesting where they were. The Taipings were not like, considered real Christians by Christians at the time. Hong Shu Kuan had visions he was the second son of Christ after talking to a preacher from Kentucky. And he launched a revolt that conquered most of southern China, killing 20 million people. Where people, if the Japanese became Christian, they would have remade Christianity in a way comparable to how when the Norse pagans converted to Christianity, they remade Christianity where Christ on the cross, it's a symbol from Odin hanging from the tree of life.
- [117:53]
Austin Padgett
Or did that have any impacts on modern Scandinavian Christianity? Is it a little different because of that connection?
- [118:02]
Rudyard Lynch
It influences European culture in a lot of ways where the word God is word got from Odin. So when or when they first converted the Germanic peoples to Christianity, they wrote up the Bible in a certain way where they made. They emphasized Yahweh being a warrior God because that's what they respected. They said like they talked about Yahweh smiting the tribe of Moab. And they emphasized or they talked it. They didn't have a word for like a lot of Christian concepts. They talked it like the honor of Christ. And they talk about this honor culture prism. And one of the points Spengler makes is he said Christianity is not innately Faustian. North Europeans are Faustian. And they made Christianity Faustian because the North European tradition was constant improvement and constant just overcoming where original Christianity would appear much more similar to Islam or Buddhism than Christianity. Of course, there is a religious through line and a very strong one. People are still reading the Bible in the same way that Mahayana Buddhism has a strong through line to the Buddha. But when North European populations adopted it, it took on their cultural attributes in the same way that Christianity, if it won in Japan would have. So they put more emphasis on stuff like I read this book by a Christian missionary on how to communicate Christianity to different, different cultures. So he said, in guilt based cultures, we understand that we're guilt based cultures. He said in Asian cultures, you convert them to Christianity by talking about theology through the concept of God as the Father, because they're such family oriented cultures that you explain Christianity through the lens of family structure and the love of mutual interdependence. And then we talked to tribal based fear cultures. You articulate it through the lens of the power of Christ's magic.
- [119:57]
Austin Padgett
And this is one of the reasons you can communicate single things to so many different people, because you can have a central principle that overwhelms all of the preference filters. And so you just have to make sure to let them know that this central principle results in the outcome that you want and also that you want it fulfills these various differences in expression to the best of their ability, with a central concept. And so, yeah, that's interesting. I would have been worried at first if they had like a Roman reaction because they had a big slave population, right? That had they did it, they had.
- [120:34]
Rudyard Lynch
Abolished slavery in the 14th century.
- [120:36]
Austin Padgett
Not slavery, but like a very controlled social structure where people couldn't say anything, blah, blah. And so they might have had like an overreaction into the. Because you said it was more popular among the lower classes. So it might have caused some fires. This leads interesting.
- [120:55]
Rudyard Lynch
This leads to the next point where the European influence actually caused Japan's unification, or at least it was a big causal variable. Because I was researching Japan again today and I was shocked at how much influence Oda Nobunaga had, because I remember Hideyoshi in Tokugawa doing a lot of stuff. But Nobunaga was the chieftain of this tiny hamlet. And then he unified the vast majority of Japan himself. And he did it through. He was the guy who popularized gun warfare by bringing in the European firearms. And he could wipe out these samurai armies with firearms. This was a huge turning point in Japanese history. But the samurai who spent years studying the blade just got wiped out by these peasants who had guns. And this was a huge tipping point in Japanese history where his two successors, Hideyoshi and Tokugawa Ieyasu, were both peasants. And then they rose up where Hideyoshi was a buddy of Nobunaga's, who he saw just immense promise in as a peasant. He got promoted through his military in Japan with this brutal period where they conquered this entire, ultimately all of Japan through using firearms. And there were several battles where they were able to beat much larger number armies outnumbered through firearms. And there was ultimately the deciding battle. There was this huge battle at. I think it's Sekigahara in the late 16th or early 17th centuries where this noble cavalry army charged down firearms and just got slaughtered. And so the guns were really a Pandora's box. But it's an interesting thing where it's very much Caesarism, where Caesarism is often when enterprising populists, often of lower class backgrounds, take control of an aristocratic society and then grow the state through doing so. It occurred in the fall of the Roman Republic, it occurred at the French Revolution. In 17th century Japan we see Tokugawa's state as hyperaristocratic, but it wasn't where after Nobunaga, Hideyoshi got power. And Hideyoshi and Tokugawa were both friends and they had a power sharing agreement and it was complicated where they had certain clans because Japan was a clan based feudal structure where clans would hold power that were kind of under their control. They. But they also weren't and it created complications where they, let's say technically unify Japan. Then there was one of the clans that like they tried to unify power. The clan rebelled because the clan had never agreed for a totally centralized Japan. But Hideyoshi was an imperialist where his idea was that because we realized the Europeans are out there, where the Japanese got the full map of the world from the Europeans and I can't imagine the psychological state of their older maps just had East Asia where the Japanese had mercenaries, samurai mercenaries or the ronin. Who were you? This huge class of landless samurai and poor samurai were in Japan, much like medieval Europe, the poorest range of nobility. And Japan had a big nobility, around 10% of the population. In England it was 2%. They were just poor. And so the top range of peasants were very frequently wealthier than the bottom range of the samurai. So samurai mercenaries would fight in Java or Cambodia where you had this battle between Spanish conquistadors and Aztecs who invaded Cambodia fighting against the Cambodians who were using samurai mercenaries. So the furthest the Japanese thought about was like Java and Indonesia and Mongolia. The Jesuits who were the big intellectuals of the first European push into the Orient, they showed them, look, it's the New World, look, it's Europe. And so you have, you have Japanese explorers who actually went to see Mexico and the Pope and that stuff. And there were Japanese people in Mexico and the Mexican nobility in the 17th century, they would buy artisanal Japanese print. They were the first Weebs, which is their big. It was the du jour thing of Mexican noble art. So the Japanese had this realization in the early modern period. We're part of a vastly greater world in which we are not the most technologically advanced. And Hideyoshi and Tokugawa symbolize two impulses. Where Hideyoshi's dream was to use the European technology to conquer all of East East Asia. Tokugawa's impulse, which ultimately won, was to utterly shut off Japan from the world.
- [125:46]
Austin Padgett
But, oh, so they were good friends and they had that really big divide. That must have been interesting, especially since Tokagawa picked hero Hiroshi out of the crowd. Right?
- [125:59]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah. So Nobunaga, who was a nobleman but a minor one, he picked Hideyoshi as his buddy. When Nobunaga was gone, Hideyoshi took power and Tokugawa as part of their clique. And what happened was they had a power sharing agreement. But then Hideyoshi's big thing is he invaded Korea. And this is a really interesting war. The Japanese should have won. They had a marked military advantage over the Koreans. And this is in 1597. And Ming China was in decline, but they were still functioning. And the Koreans were subsidiaries of the Chinese. So when the Japanese invaded, the Chinese were out. They were in West China putting out Muslim revolts. So it took them a few years to move their armies from being Muslim revolts to other side of China to defend Korea. But the Japanese took most of Korea. And the only reason the Koreans won is they had one of the best naval commanders in history called Yi Sun Sin, who did one of those badass moves ever of shepherding the Japanese fleet, which was like five times his size, into a tidal whirlpool stuck between two islands where the entire Japanese fleet got shoved into the tidal whirlpool. Wiped out this one commander, wiped out the entire Japanese fleet, where the Koreans even had their own version of ironclads called turtle boats, which were these, like, sort of submarine boats that were mostly underwater, covered in iron and steel, so you couldn't light them on fire or attack them with these turtle heads. So he used the turtle boats, these elite ironclads, to shepherd the Japanese into a whirlpool. Wipe out their entire navy. As they wiped out their entire navy, the Japanese could no longer supply their invasion of Korea and pulled back.
- [127:47]
Austin Padgett
It's a pretty amazing move to bring them into the whirlpool.
- [127:51]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [127:52]
Austin Padgett
And the weird kind of steampunk elements of the early Asian industrial age are fascinating.
- [127:58]
Rudyard Lynch
It is.
- [127:59]
Austin Padgett
I love how the first two boats like that are the Confederates and the Koreans, like, both outnumbered people at the, like, beginning of industrial periods.
- [128:11]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [128:11]
Austin Padgett
And when you're forced to get creative, it's just right on the cusp of being able to do some armored boat.
- [128:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Yes.
- [128:19]
Austin Padgett
Thing.
- [128:19]
Rudyard Lynch
And so hideyoshi died in the Korean War, and his ultimate goal was to conquer all of East Asia. He was going to start with Korea, but then he ran into Yiun Sen and he was going to invade China. And then he also. The Japanese were sending fleets and men out to the Philippines because they were going to drive the Spanish out of the Philippines and create an Asian empire that stretched down to Southeast Asia. And I've always been conflicted if that would have worked because 40 years later, the Manchus, who had vastly fewer people than Japan, who had a less advanced military, they conquered all of China. But 40 years is a fairly long period of time when it comes to social degeneration, where by 1644, China had so degenerated under the Ming, the Manchus could conquer them. But I don't know in 15. And if people in the audience want to say, I don't know in 1597, if the Japanese could have been able to take down China or if China was strong enough, they would have been able to fight back.
- [129:22]
Austin Padgett
Probably impossible to fully take down China because even if you can control the rivers, it's just like an infinite number of people.
- [129:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Oh, if the Manchus and the Mongols did it, though, why couldn't the Japanese?
- [129:36]
Austin Padgett
The Mongols could have done it. They just decided not to kill everybody. The Japanese were using bullets, so maybe it would have been too expensive where the Mongols could use a sword for multiple people.
- [129:48]
Rudyard Lynch
That sounds like Cope. The Japanese nearly conquered China in the 40s. But it's one of those questions where, I mean, in 2020, America is in a position of cultural collapse, I think comparable to China in the 1640s. But like you look at 1980, if you start a war with America in 1980, America is going to crush you. And so it's interesting that 40 years is historically short, but in a person's lived experience, it could be a completely different thing.
- [130:18]
Austin Padgett
Right.
- [130:19]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm pointing this out how subtle history is. I have this book on famines in China in the 1590s. I just kind of buy books like this just to, like, I don't even know, just like throw darts at history. Just like, is my dart on 16th century China accurate? It I pick hyper autistic topics to periodically study to see if, like, my big picture analysis is correct. But with Hideyoshi's loss, Tokugawa finally crushed all of the rebels, finally unified Japan, conquered Hokkaido, and his call was to turn Japan into an authoritarian state. So he created a secret police. He enforced the social structure where there were laws against politeness. It was illegal to not address Your social superior in the exactly correct terminology again. As I said, before the nobility could cut off peasants heads, they crushed the Shimabara Christian revolt, murdering all the Christians. They controlled all the books entering Japan. He forced the samurai, first the peasants to give up all their weapons, then he forced all the samurai to give up their weapons, shoved the samurai, much like a Louis XIV move into partying with the parliament, partying with the king, spending all their money in luxuries and then putting them in the bureaucracy. And so what he did is he made this highly stratified social structure where beforehand the samurai were permeable. If you were a smart merchant and if you were a wealthy merchant and you bought land, you would join the samurai. He made the list. If you're not samurai family now, you will never be a samurai. You must breed with the other samurai in order to basically keep your status. So he created a caste system in Japan and radically destroyed freedom of thought. So all of the books that were published were checked by the Tokugawa administration. And so, and then Japan turned inward where there was one port where they could trade the rest of the world. And any other Japanese who was caught leaving Japan would die immediately. So from the early 17th until the mid 19th century, Japan was utterly disconnected from the rest of the world. It's like they had two fleets to China a year, that was it. And they even turned out the Portuguese for the Dutch because the Portuguese actually wanted to spread Christianity and the Dutch were just in it for money. And so Nagasaki went from being a Portuguese fort to a Dutch fort. So the one contact with the rest of the world the Japanese had was Dutch. But then they wouldn't even share this information with the rest of the world because only the shogun or the military dictator who had the real power rather than the emperor could be trusted with that. And, and, and so they even legalized guns. By the time of the mid 19th century, the Japanese were the best people with guns in the 16th century in Asia. But they had to reintroduce guns in the 19th century and teach their people how to use them again because you were not allowed to have guns for centuries.
- [133:31]
Austin Padgett
That is so funny. And there is a weird disconnect in the narrative of, of the, the Japanese learning to replicate the guns from the Portuguese leading into, you know, their rabid industrialization in World War II. But that's actually not a consistent narrative. There's like 200 year gap like you're pointing out. And I think, if, I think I was being technical on China, I think they would have messed up China and and been very successful. And if they had done their imperial stage 200 years earlier, they probably would have gotten away with it a lot more than doing it in the late 1800s, early 1900s when, yeah, America was looking at the Pacific.
- [134:11]
Rudyard Lynch
If they had imperialized and conquered east asia in the 17th century, they would just be England, they'd be hyper technologically advanced, hyper wealthy, controlling a continental sized empire. Yeah, it's a real turning point in Japan. You can kind of, you can really see the Amaterasu switch because they had one of two options. And both of these options are diametrically opposed. Either you don't even know that the outside world exists or where this huge empire stretching from Jakarta to Kamchatka. Because keep in mind, if they have the eastern colonial empire, they could colonize America. The exact. If they're having a naval fleet where they're colonizing Southeast Asia and Japan and China, they already trading with Mexico, nothing stopping them from colonizing the American Pacific Northwest.
- [135:04]
Austin Padgett
Oh, right. Literally with population, not even a war, because there's hardly anybody out there at that point. Yes, it's so much earlier.
- [135:11]
Rudyard Lynch
And so the ironic thing is this is called the Edo period because the capital of Japan moved from Kyoto in the southwest to modern Tokyo. And Tokyo rapidly became one of the most prosperous and one of those prosperous and largest cities in the world. And that's been a consistent trend in Japan, where Tokyo is the largest city in the world. Even today, Japan centralized like that, much like France did. And it's comparable to the period of Louis XIV in the French LC regime, where there was a period called the floating period, where all of these nobility who had wealth were hanging out in Tokyo with nothing to do and they would just engage in degeneracy and fashion and various sexual depravity, where Japan's geisha or their like ritual prostitutes, high class prostitutes, their porn culture, their kabuki masks, the tea ceremonies, all stem from this early modern period when you had this huge nobility who were just doing government bureaucracy jobs with nothing else to do. And it's really strange. This horrifying authoritarian society was actually Japan's golden age where their population tripled, they had economic growth, they built out a capitalist economy because even though they were split off from the rest of the world, they still had free markets inside Japan. And then somehow their caste system was still relatively permeable because you had this merchant class that would integrate with the nobility in some ways, where on the outside there were this horrifying authoritarian society. But actually they had Built up enough tension from their pre existing feudal capitalist culture that they could maintain internal dynamism. So on the outside, and it's funny the way history works is it has a negativity bias and it has an interesting bias where from like 1630 till 1860. I don't know what to tell you. Singular monarchy, no relation to the outside world is like some friggin sci fi novel where they stop time. Because once, once you get to Admirable, not admirable, once you get to Admiral perry in the 1850s where the people who opened up Japan were the Americans and the Admiral Perry, much like Matthew Perry, the Friends actor. I've never seen an episode of Friends, by the way. Wrong Generation.
- [137:40]
Austin Padgett
It was my first DVD before Internet.
- [137:44]
Rudyard Lynch
And so he showed up in America. This was peak free trade. They said America said, you're going to open up to our trade now or we're going to shell you. And the Japanese saw these American basically proto ironclads. This is 1850s, the time of the US Civil War. And see these huge ships with shells that are enormous, that shoot out steam. And the Japanese were so disconnected from the rest of the world, they didn't even realize that the west had progressed so much since they last spoke to them. So they had this panic button moment like, oh my God, 300 years ago the Europeans were better than us, now it's so much worse. And do you have any questions before I get to the Meiji Restoration?
- [138:31]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, I just think it was funny that. Because it makes sense that the Japanese would not have seen the European trajectory. Yeah, they just saw Europe where they were when they saw them and just assumed like from their framework that that would stay the same when obviously, yeah, it was a rapid change.
- [138:47]
Rudyard Lynch
Part of what was going on there, there had been a crisis because American fishermen, especially Yankees from New England. This is so cool. They sailed the long way down South America. Then they would trade furs from Canada's Pacific Northwest to China and then they would hunt for whales in Kamchatka. So American ships would sail around Japan because they were in the Pacific. And also they would. They nearly. They basically owned Hawaii as a puppet state with sugar plantations. Hawaii was their big base. So American ships would sail around Japan, but they could never actually enter Japan because due to the cultural blockade, which was total. So the Americans saw the edges of Japan, but they couldn't enter it. Handfuls of Americans got stuck in Japan and then the Japanese wanted to kill them off because no foreigners. And the Americans said, no, you can't kill off our guys for accidentally landing on your country. And so that was part of the motivation for America entering into Japan. And so the Meiji.
- [139:54]
Austin Padgett
It's like a giant sentinel island.
- [139:56]
Rudyard Lynch
It is. Exactly. And so the Meiji Restoration is. You had the Tokugawa's who had kind of grown sclerotic from centuries in control. And the Meiji Restoration was mostly an alliance of the lesser nobility and the Emperor, because the Emperor was the Japanese pope and he had been sidelined forever, but he had been revered as a God by the Japanese people. And so the Emperor pulled the plug where he's like, wait, we need to fix this now. The Tokugawa people aren't ready for this. So the Emperor allied with a group called the Lords of the west, which is one of those based historic names. Like if you hear me and my buddies are the Lords of the West. It was the provincial nobility of Western Japan. They had built up an alliance and they were pulling on the sort of lesser nobility who didn't have a lot of social status. Where, as I said before, Japan's modernization was spurred by the nobility, but they did a really good job. Where once they seized power, the nobility created a social structure which actually allowed the peasants and the merchant classes to grow. The Lords of the west did an absolutely incredible job. And. And once that generation died out is when Japan started to make bad choices. Because the Lords of the west lost power in the 1920s. They were young when they seized power, and they held power for an entire lifetime till they were old. And in the Meiji Restoration, they installed the Emperor as ruler of Japan with the Lords of the west as puppet masters. And they started very quickly introducing Western technologies. Japan was industrializing in the the late 19th century. For a frame of reference, Japan industrialized before Russia did. And at the same time as like Germany, like a decade after France, Japan industrialized where the American south did. That's insanely impressive. And the Japanese went to great effort to incorporate Western technologies. So they would incorporate. They built their political structures off the Germans and the Russians who also had imperial systems, where the Japanese had a sort of weak parliament that died out in the 20s due to political pressure. They incorporated their naval structure from Britain, their industrial structure from America, and then their military structure first from France and then from Germany. So the Japanese went through this period, period we are going to find the best elements of, of, of each Western society and then incorporate it asap.
- [142:37]
Austin Padgett
It's kind of parallel to their history of being able to quickly adapt and flip to something and copy something. But this time they were opened up to so many different things. It was like a buffet instead of a singular threat.
- [142:48]
Rudyard Lynch
Very much, very much. And it's funny, the way I work as a historian is lots of historians would hyper focus in the 19th century, but because my speciality is in the Middle Ages, it's just a century for me.
- [143:02]
Austin Padgett
And most people know that one a little bit more.
- [143:04]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, most historians, they write histories where half of it is after 1800 and half it's before 1800. And that's not how I roll.
- [143:13]
Austin Padgett
If you understand before 1800, you kind of understand the last 200 periods better than you could by just focusing on it.
- [143:21]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, very much. Because you understand the culture and the context. And so Japan modernized and they had this huge chip on their shoulder from the unequal treaties of the Europeans where much like China, the Europeans came in and they treated the Japanese with contempt, as Orientals. And Europe was sort of unforgivably racist. If you read a lot of 19th century histories, they'll say like the yellow man is incapable of creativity or something. Civilization. The only things they had they learned from whites, which is clearly not fair. China has been one of the, possibly the most advanced society in the world for most of human history. And the Japanese had this enormous collective spirit. And so they had the pre existing capitalism to industrialize. And the military was the biggest vector for social mobility. John Gunter talks about this where he wandered around early 20th century Japan interviewing people. And he.
- [144:22]
Austin Padgett
He.
- [144:25]
Rudyard Lynch
He says that the military, it was a lot of like dirt poor peasant boys who could rise up in the military structure. So it was the center of Japanese patriotism. And the Japanese built their school system and educational system to be high, hyper militaristic. And it teach these noble values like Bushido, which was initially a noble thing that trickled down to the rest of the public, or hyper patriotism or hyper conformity. And you see these things that ultimately caused World War II in the east, which were kind of not insidious beforehand. Where up Until World War I in the 20s, Japan had levels of patriotism and imperialism comparable to European powers. Where the Japanese, they wanted to build out empires to the Europeans. Where empires were colonial empires were really popular in Europe. So America had multiple colonies to prove to the Europeans that we were cool. The Japanese did it too, where they took Taiwan from China, they took Korea, made it into a puppet state, which was pretty easy because they modernized faster than Korea. And then they fought a war with China, which was a real upset because everyone assumed China would beat Japan, but because the Chinese had also been modernizing, but they had been Modernizing in different ways. The Chinese just incorporated the Western military. They had no social structure changes. The Japanese did the social structure changes and the military changes. And then the Japanese absolutely crushed the Chinese fleet in like two days. They had a secret attack on the Chinese fleet around Liaoning and like the area around Beijing, wipe out the Chinese fleet, humiliated China. And then this became a wake up call for China where an entire generation of Chinese modernist thinkers actually studied in Japan because they grew to admire Japan for beating them.
- [146:17]
Austin Padgett
Wow. Which takes a lot to switch ego to admiration, especially when it's like the little island.
- [146:25]
Rudyard Lynch
One of the things going into World War II was that when the Japanese were trying to conquer all of East Asia and they saw themselves as racially superior and it was their right is they called it the Co Asian Prosperity Sphere, but you had lots of Chinese and Japanese intellectual types who genuinely believed it. So a lot of the Japanese were talking about the Co Prosperity Sphere. They had been psyoped. And because Japan was a hierarchical society, they had good intentions, but their leaders did not. And a huge turning point here was the Russo Japanese War where the Russians and the Japanese were trying to divide up China and Manchuria is this area of Northeast China that operates as a hinge between it's the size of Texas or France, and it's a hinge between Russia, Mongolia, China, Korea and Japan. And the Russians were had turned Manchuria into a de facto colony. It was technically part of China and it was the origin place of the Chinese ruling class. But the Russians had this railroad that stretched from Siberia downwards. They had already taken parts of modern Siberia from China next to it. So it was widely assumed the Russians would just take Mongolia and Manchuria, where they had this place called Port Arthur on the Liaoning Peninsula. What the Japanese did was launch a surprise attack on the Russians, then completely wipe them out. And this was a surprise victory. It was right before World War I because it was assumed that a yellow nation could never defeat a white nation. And the Russo Japanese War is just. It's one of the hardest wars to read about because the Russians screwed up so hard. I mean, I don't want to play into those sort of like attitudes, but at the same time, the Russians really, really failed that war. And the Japanese really got it right. They had an incredible military, they were hyper modern. And it was one of the presage wars for World War I, where it had trench warfare, machine guns, huge casualties. It either killed hundreds of thousands or millions of people. And the Japanese utterly wiped out the Russians where a few different Battles. You had the attack on Port. Port Arthur. The Japanese surrounded Manchuria. And you'll hear stories of, for example, the Japanese had a really good spy network in Manchuria. And the. The janitors in Manchuria, who were Japanese spies, had total understanding of the fort structures. And Russia was so incompetent, even their own officers did not have clearance to know how their forts worked. But the Japanese janitors did, and the Russians. It actually caused revolutions inside Russia, which they crushed because they would just send men out with no training, couldn't fire guns. They just got slaughtered by the Japanese, who were incredibly good at stuff like training or organization or drill or motivation.
- [149:22]
Austin Padgett
Right? Yeah. It's funny attitude. It's like you can see those attitudes being born out of insecurity because it's a situation that you can't fathom, but you can. You should never get cocky because these factors and momentum can override whatever you think you got with.
- [149:45]
Rudyard Lynch
With the Russo Japanese War, a big battle was the battle of Tsushima, which is between Korea and Japan. It's one of the tiny islands in the straits between them where the. The Japanese wiped out the Russian fleet in a surprise attack. Then the Japanese sailed their Baltic fleet the long way around South Africa to fight the Japanese, where the British blocked the Japanese. I believe the British blocked the Russians from using Suez, and they had to fight in the Far East. And Russia's got two coasts, one in Europe, one in Asia. So this fleet sailed the long way around. And the Russian fleet was better, it was larger. The Japanese still wiped them out. And just think of the poor Russian guy who sailed the long way around only to be utterly crushed.
- [150:29]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, that's brutal. Because it's not really an easy spot to get rescued. Wouldn't want to end up in that POW camp or in the water.
- [150:38]
Rudyard Lynch
So I want to end this video relatively quickly. I don't like it when the videos are over two hours. But we talked about World War II. I'm going to talk about a little. But the Japanese got progressively more resentful that the Europeans didn't take them seriously, even though they won at Tsushima and they had their own empire. And Also World War I killed the moral superiority of Europe. The Japanese were part of the Allies. They took tiny little German possessions in places like the South Pacific or Shandong province and Japan over the 20s, they had a gradual slide into totalitarianism. And it was more so like the rise of wokeness, where it was this hive mind they couldn't turn off. Where there was no singular leader. There was no singular mechanism. It's just Japan became more patriotic. Patriotic. And then politicians who stood against it or stood for freedom and liberalism were just assassinated. Where it was this hive mind thing where as an example, Japan had a culture where if someone showed patriotism and manliness, you couldn't tell them no. So multiple times Japan got stuck in these wars where low level officers attacked a neighboring country, then their superiors wouldn't tell them no for fear of being assassinated or looking bad. So that happened with China and Mongolia, where they built up this culture where due to the fear of rejection, they couldn't say no. And then they became progressively more totalitarian. But it was a totalitarianism of the group. When America fought Japan in World War II, we couldn't find a singular Hitler like figure to really point at to say that this is the guy who caused this, because the Emperor was against this. Even a lot of the top leaders like Yamamoto, he studied in America. One of the top, the Admiral of Japan. Yamamoto said, we're going to friggin lose against America. You don't know how big they are and how tough they are. I think he studied at UCLA and he also, I think he went to Harvard. I don't think he attended Harvard, but he like some experience there. But even as Admiral he could not tell the other Japanese no, because the way the Japanese hive mind worked. And so Japan in the 30s fought against China with the Marco Polo bridge incident. And the Japanese were really smart where they would shove their troops in their tiny consulates in Shanghai or Beijing, then launch surprise attacks, which is the Japanese thing, to take out the cities instantly. So in 1936, World War II started. First in China. The Japanese took out the coastline of China and they got stuck in this long intractable war where China had not industrialized. A lot of their men just fought with sticks with no supplies. China was also pulling out of a warlord's phase. At the same time, China was so huge the Japanese couldn't take it. This is why I'm wondering if they could have taken China in the 17th century because they tried to in the 20th. And watch the World War II video for more details. But the Japanese really got bogged down in China. And you should see everything else in China, everything else in the Pacific War besides China, on a pure manpower basis as a side theater where The Japanese killed 20 million people in World War II, the vast majority of which in China. The Rape of Nanjing, for example, where I went to nanjing. Actually my 18th birthday was spent in Nanjing throwing up. And I did go I didn't go to the War Memorial Museum, which I'm happy about, because I was sick. I'm sure it would have had, like, depressing vibes. I'm sorry for the Chinese people who lived through it, but it's. It's like going. I've never been to a Holocaust. One of the Holocaust. Yeah.
- [154:24]
Austin Padgett
I've been to Japanese war memorials on railroads, Australian, Thai kids. It's a pretty. Yeah, dark vibe.
- [154:30]
Rudyard Lynch
Like, I've been to Poland, but I never went to Auschwitz or Dachau because I just don't want those vibes. Like, I'm sorry for the people who lived through it. It's just. Yeah. And. And so the Japanese fought against China. And towards the end of the war, the Japanese were actually winning in China. When they were losing to the Americans, they. They launched this huge military campaign that killed millions of people. And they were absolutely brutal. They raped hundreds of thousands of Chinese women. They kept Chinese women as sex slaves called comfort girls. And then said military campaign, they punched from the ranks the middle levels of the Yangtze. China's a frigging huge country. This would be like if someone invaded America. And they fought their way out to Arkansas from the east coast. They punched down to Guangzhou. Either took the coastline, but no, because they fought the Americans, their victories in China didn't work, where the Japanese were stuck in this double bind. And they took Vietnam because they were sort of allies with the Germans. They didn't really coordinate. And because they took Vietnam, the Americans cut off their oil supply. Japan was totally dependent on foreign oil, and they had earlier fought against the Russians in a battle everyone forgets called Kholkh in Gol, which Khalkhin Gol is the intersection of Mongolia, Manchuria and China, where they had a secret battle that killed 30,000 men, which no one heard about for years in the outside world because Japan and the Soviet Union were both closed societies where they lost to the Soviets. And this was under the commander Zhukov, who later was the hero of the war against the Russians, the Germans. And it makes you wonder, if the Japanese won at Kalkin Gol, they attacked Siberia instead. They would carve up Russia with the Germans because there was this divide in the Japanese military between the army, which wanted a war against China, and Russia, and the navy, which wanted a war against the Pacific. Japan had the most division between different branches of the military out of any country. In World War II. The Navy won, which meant they attacked Vietnam. Then the Americans cut off their oil, and the Japanese leader, at least one of them, didn't have a singular one. Said this is either decline or glory. And they launched the largest, the longest military operation in history from Hokkaido to Hawaii to attack Pearl Harbor.
- [157:01]
Austin Padgett
Yeah, it's almost like that. They flirted around with their liberal stage, but they clearly got no respect from the West. And that's probably part of what enabled the faction that just wanted to like attack out.
- [157:18]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [157:18]
Austin Padgett
When in every direction. And if people are doing that, it makes sense that the branches would fight because the Navy wants to fight where they can fight. And a good example of being spited by the US was the English actually did give the Japanese this respect. Like after really hard fought in the 1890s, they signed a treaty with them for the Japanese to be in charge of trade in the Pacific, which is that co Asian Prosperity Sphere thing. Right. And the Americans never ratified or respected that treaty. And so it's like they worked so hard to get that with the British and then it was like ignored by the Americans who didn't trust Japan that to not, you know, mess with their interest and our interest in the Pacific. And then the war kind of blew up over that conflict over the control of trade in the Pacific.
- [158:13]
Rudyard Lynch
This is one of those eras of history in which you can genuinely ascribe things to racism, where the left loves to do it. But there are certain periods that are just genuinely just racism. Where, for example, the Japanese were to wipe out the entire British military force in Malaysia. Where the Japanese landed top of Malaysia Peninsula, walked through the jungle, which the British did not think was possible, did night attacks, attacked Singapore from behind where the British guns were pointed towards the ocean, and wiped out the British army immediately because they didn't even mentally process it was physically possible for the Japanese to fight through the jungle.
- [158:53]
Austin Padgett
Wow. Yeah, totally.
- [158:55]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah.
- [158:55]
Austin Padgett
Different terrain balances.
- [158:58]
Rudyard Lynch
I'm not going to talk too much with the details of World War II, because I already have a World War II in the Pacific video. And also it's not that pertinent to Japanese history itself. The Japanese just lose past a certain point where they built an enormous empire, went down to New guinea, they bombed Australia. They had soldiers fighting in like, there were literally tens of thousands of Japanese soldiers fighting in Alaska. They had Japanese armies in the edge of India with the Brahmaputra river up into deep into China. The Japanese fought incredibly well, especially for a country that had like less industrial power than Britain, vastly less than Germany or America. But once they were fighting America, they sealed their fate where the Americans wiped the Japanese Navy out at Midway. The Japanese navy got Stuck off the coast of Sri Lanka, not doing anything for months because they wanted to attack India and launch like a revolution in India that didn't work because Gandhi didn't approve. And the Americans went on. At Midway, the biggest Japanese defeat is a battle no one remembers, which is the Battle of Leyte Gulf where the Japanese got at this huge army of poorly trained guys, the Americans slaughtered them. The Battle of Leyte Gulf is considered potentially the greatest slaughter in history because the Japanese lost all of their. The biggest naval slaughter in history where the Japanese had spent all of their high quality naval troops at Midway. So by the time of Leyte Gulf, it was all these conscripts. America was in the opposite trajectory. Early in the war we had a tiny navy. By the end of World War II, we had the biggest navy in history. So by the end of the war, the Japanese had most of their land possessions, but America had knocked them back to the Philippines. We, we took the Philippines back, which was older, our colony earlier. And then there was this point where we were going to invade the Japanese home islands. And there's this whole school of thought, did we have to nuke Hiroshima and Nagasaki? But if you look at the details, people talk about the Japanese being ready to surrender. That was true of the Emperor who did not have power, and parts of the civilian government who also did not have power. The military who actually, actually had power. They were handing women guns, they were handing children guns, and they were issuing public statements saying, we are fighting till our last dying breath. So the Japanese were going to fight to the end and they were going to kill everyone who didn't. Where after we nuked Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And the Emperor said, no, this is madness because they didn't know we only had two nukes at the time. Have taken us like six months to produce more nukes. The Emperor said, no, we're not going to drive the Japanese nation extinct under uranium. We're going to have peace. The Japanese military made up these rationalizations that like, although the Emperor is a God, he is representative of the will of the Japanese nation. So the Emperor is betraying his own will. But then they didn't kill him. They're like, we don't want to kill the Emperor. The Emperor signed peace. Japan became under American governance for a few years into the 50s. Then we gave them independence. We talked about the post World War II boom already with electronics. And the Japanese were really good at stuff like manufacturing with, they had their own manufacturing systems. And then that Japanese boom, one of the greatest in history, lasted until the 90s blew up due to reasons we describe now Japan has been in state stagnation and now they produce anime Japanese.
- [162:33]
Austin Padgett
History that and then I guess I'll, I'll comment on the World War II Hiroshima one because it's like I know there was a split in the leadership, the decision making leadership and their negotia, their negotiation condition was that the Emperor maintained his position and the US was kind of arguing about that. And then I know after the nuke there was an attempt by the military, part of the military faction to overthrow the Emperor because they really didn't want to surrender which is. But yeah, it's hard to say that if they would have definitely fought to the last man because I know that there were internal squabbles and as things go along etc you can cause damage with different ways with different targets. But it is, you can see the clear utility of it in a historical perspective.
- [163:33]
Rudyard Lynch
I used to believe that the Japanese would basically get extinct genocide and replaced by the Chinese in high school. Now I don't think that. I think like if all of their cities were burned down they would have eventually given up. It's just would have taken millions of Japanese deaths. And the American statistical projections said the conquest of Japan would take more American casualties than the entire rest of the war combined.
- [164:00]
Austin Padgett
MacArthur also recommended that they don't invade and don't do the bomb and that they negotiate, they give the Japanese their condition on the status of the Emperor because it'll be easier to control Japan through the Emperor than if we force them to. So yeah, there's all those elements too.
- [164:18]
Rudyard Lynch
And I'm also going to be really kind of rude here. But like I was born in 2001. I'm tired of being made guilty for things that occurred 80 years before I was born.
- [164:31]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. And that's a big factor in how it's framed. And then I guess from the other position, do you think it was like because you talk about death and stuff. Do you think it was like the sci fi nature of the atomic bomb? Yeah, that was a different mental effect.
- [164:49]
Rudyard Lynch
Yeah, I think it's very much that we look at 9 11, 911 killed 3,000 people. The Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed like half a million which is a significant number. It's a human tragedy. It's comparable to the American Civil War.
- [165:03]
Austin Padgett
Lower than Tokyo.
- [165:05]
Rudyard Lynch
The Japanese killed 20 million though. I had a Chinese friend where he in Chinese school. They were talking Hiroshima and Nagasaki. One of the Chinese guys stood up and said why did the Americans only drop two nukes? They should have dropped way more no.
- [165:18]
Austin Padgett
The Japanese guy said, and then said.
- [165:20]
Rudyard Lynch
That in the Chinese school system, the Chinese still hate Japan because the Chinese Communist Party propagandizes them on it. They were talking about it and the Chinese guy stood up and said, wait, wait. Why did the Americans only drop two nukes?
- [165:33]
Austin Padgett
Yeah. From their perspective, that was getting away completely stop, basically, easy. And then speaking of China, we think about what did we have to do to stop Japan, et cetera, how important it was. But then you think about removing Japan out of China, no matter how horrible they were, created a perfect vacuum for communism. So it's just like disaster all over the place.
- [166:00]
Rudyard Lynch
That is good. Wait, bad. I'm sorry. That's bad. I'm going to get going. Next week is Imperial China.
- [166:08]
Austin Padgett
Sounds good. That's a good one.
- [166:10]
Host
History 102 by Rudyard lynch and Austin Padgett is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen live players and econ102. If you like the episode, subscribe, follow on YouTube. Forward to a friend and let us know what else you want us to cover. Thank you for listening.