Japan in 1600 wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world. Her population was bigger than Europe's combined; she had rich silver, gold, and copper deposits. Japanese universities taught ancient wisdom. Her social class system was rigid, but everyone knew their place and stayed there from birth to death. And the samurai kept order, unless they were killing each other. She had no navy; no ships larger than 100 tons. Her sailors rarely went beyond the sight of land. Japan had no national army, and had never fought a war away from her shores, though she repelled savage invaders twice. On the Chrysanthemum Throne sat monarchs with the world's longest unbroken bloodline.
Then the Europeans came, bringing better firearms, books about wonders like geometry, algebra, and faraway exotic lands like Portugal, the Netherlands, and England. They also brought new ideas, such as worshipping a single God who did not need to pass through the Emperor. This religion was unacceptable, so Japan simply proscribed it and hunted down its practitioners.
This gave the samurai someone to kill other than each other.
Again, Japan wanted nothing to do with the rest of the world, but some of what it offered was useful. European firearms made some strongmen stronger.
Then the Russians came and started killing Japanese because they, too, hunted seals, which was why the Russians came to the Pacific.
When the 19th Century dawned, no Japanese had ever voted in an election; "democracy" was unheard of; "rights" as opposed to "privileges" had no basis in the law anywhere on the archipelago; and there were less than a hundred miles of hard-surface roads in all of Japan. While they could grow enough rice to keep their elites from starving, frequent peasant revolts centered on rice.
Then the Americans came, and everything was different because Japan had become a different place. Some of those useful things from faraway had become so useful that Japan's population exploded while China tottered on the edge of collapse. Restless warriors looking for relevance in a peaceful world saw the world changing; saw Japanese society changing, and they did not like it.
Change in Japan often only came through violence.
The old ways of governing couldn't keep up with the changes because the outsiders breaking the samurai's ancient rules did not like samurai merely killing them without question or hesitation. Then the Emperor, and a few supporters, said he took personal charge of Japan, which no Emperor had done in five hundred years.
A war followed, changing Japan forever. Samurai traditions abolished; once-proscribed foreign religions built churches; factories rose where forests once stood; Japan's population skyrocketed; the economy that once ran on rice now ran on bits of metal.
In the next seventy years, Japan would fight five overseas wars, each changing Japan, each costing her more, each forcing more social and economic changes, and each moving farther away from the samurai ideals of courage, devotion, and sacrifice on the field of battle in single combat. Political parties made decisions that affected the entire country.
Japan annexed first Okinawa, then Korea, then Manchuria, and the wars kept consuming not just men but fuel and food and metals Japan could not afford.
Japan in 1941 needed resources but couldn't afford to buy them, so she started a war with the United States, Great Britain and the Netherlands-a war she knew she could not win if the Americans, British and Dutch did not give up soon.
The Roots of Samurai Rage and Fear: Japan's Road To Armageddon is the story of this long march from peaceful isolation to starting a desperate war with a powerful alliance because Japan's samurai-far from abolished-could not imagine a world without them in it, and were fearful that such a world could exist.
