Leaders who were interested solely in Western methods, not Western values

From Carnage and Culture by Victor Davis Hanson. Page 364.

Japanese mobility and ruse were reflected not just in Admiral Yamamoto’s famous dictum about the relative industrial capacity of the two belligerents—that he could raise hell in the Pacific for six months but could promise nothing after that. Rather, almost all serious strategists in the Japanese military also acknowledged their discomfort with a quite novel situation of all-out warfare with the Americans and British that would require continual head-on confrontations with the Anglo-American fleet. In 1941 no one in the Japanese high command seemed aware that a surprise attack on the Americans would in Western eyes lead to total war, in which the United States would either destroy its adversary or face annihilation in the attempt. But, then, it was a historic error of non-Westerners, beginning with Xerxes’ invasion of Greece, to assume that democracies were somehow weak and timid. Although slow to anger, Western constitutional governments usually preferred wars of annihilation—wiping the Melians off the map of the Aegean, sowing the ground of Carthage with salt, turning Ireland into a near wasteland, wasting Jerusalem before reoccupying it, driving an entire culture of Native Americans onto reservations, atomizing Japanese cities—and were far more deadly adversaries than military dynasts and autocrats. Despite occasional brilliant adaptation of trickery and surprise, and the clear record of success in “the indirect approach” to war—Epaminondas’s great raid into Messenia (369 B.C.) and Sherman’s March to the Sea (1864) are notable examples—Western militaries continued to believe that the most economic way of waging war was to find the enemy, collect sufficient forces to overwhelm him, and then advance directly and openly to annihilate him on the battlefield—all part of a cultural tradition to end hostilities quickly, decisively, and utterly. To read of American naval operations in World War II is to catalog a series of continual efforts to advance westward toward Japan, discover and devastate the Japanese fleet, and physically wrest away all territory belonging to the Japanese government until reaching the homeland itself. The American sailors at Midway were also the first wave of an enormous draft that would mobilize more than 12 million citizens into the armed forces. In the manner of the Romans after Cannae or the democracies in World War I, American political representatives had voted for war with Japan. Polls revealed near unanimous public approval for a ghastly conflict of annihilation against the perpetrators of Pearl Harbor. The United States would also continue to hold elections throughout the conflict as the elected government crafted one of the most radical industrial and cultural revolutions in the history of the Republic in turning the country into a huge arms-producing camp.

The Japanese, in contrast, had only sporadically adopted nineteenth-century European ideas of constitutional government and civic militarism—and both had been discredited by military regimes of the 1930s. Japanese military thinkers believed that a far superior method of fielding large and spirited armies—and one more in line with their own cultural traditions—lay in inculcating the entire population with a fanatical devotion to the emperor and a shared belief in the inevitable rule of the Japanese people. A few wise and all-knowing military officers alone could appreciate the Japanese warrior spirit, and most of them saw little need for the public to debate the wisdom of attacking the largest industrial power in the world:

What Westerners did not realize was that underneath the veneer of modernity and westernization, Japan was still Oriental and that her plunge from feudalism to imperialism had come so precipitously that her leaders, who were interested solely in Western methods, not Western values, had neither the time nor inclination to develop liberalism and humanitarianism. (J. Toland, The Rising Sun, vol. 1, 74)