Hacker News Reader

Comment by krapp | Hacker News Reader

I doubt Japan felt threatened by the US because of manifest destiny or the American revolutionary war. I think you're going a bit too far trying to paint the US as appearing unusually hegemonic or aggressive for the time.

View on HN

Considering the US was way undermilitarized after wwi compared to European nations, it's hard to think Japan would consider the US as an immediate adversary. Specially considering a growing USSR.

Mostly they hoped to take out the US naval fleet and have their way in the pacific while Germany kept the allies busy, and then eventually win in Europe creating a world wide axis.

The US was maybe more active in Japan's neighborhood than you might be thinking: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yangtze_Patrol https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USS_Panay_incident

The US was under-militarized at the beginning of the WW2 years, but its industrial capacity was unrivaled and undeniable. Even before its entry into the war, for instance, it was almost singlehandedly supplying the British and Soviet war efforts. The US was supplying nearly 40% of all the USSR's food, clothing, munitions, and military hardware during Hitler's Barbarossa campaign, in the months prior to Pearl Harbor. It was doing all of this while its economy was roaring back up from the Depression, and its output was just getting started. (The US produced about 2,500 warplanes in 1940; by 1944, it was producing just under 100,000 per year.)

Germany and Japan correctly feared the United States long before its entry into the conflict. They feared it not necessarily as a war machine, but as a relentless and massive industrial machine. They knew that, if war with the US were to drag on for a few years, the US would eventually get its shit together and outproduce and outgun either of them by an order of magnitude.

I don't know what the Japanese felt, but I think the US maybe was about as hegemonic as Japan, Britain, Russia, Germany, France. It wouldn't hurt for US citizens to know these bullet points in their history that relate to Japan's neighborhood: Perry's expedition to Japan, the Spanish American war, but especially the Phillipine Insurrection, the Anti-Imperialist League, the Boxer Rebellion, the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii, and the Yangtze Patrol, and its context.

Japanese culture perceives time differently than western culture. For example, a train in London is considered "on time" as long as it's within 14 minutes. In Japan, a train is considered late if it's not within 1 minute of schedule. Those perceptions of "lateness" permeate throughout the culture.

I don't claim any authority, but it's important not to project our own views of cultural permanence onto other cultures. Japan has businesses that have spanned over a 1000 years contiguously. I would not be surprised if Japan had a view that spanned much further into the past (particularly during the days of the Emperor).

Oh, just another side. Those are only a couple of examples of Western aggression in the previous century. Europe and the U.S. had been quite active in South East Asia. There likely would have been Japanese alive at the time who had a living memory of events like the colonization of Vietnam.

I think that's less about perception of time as it is cultural expectations. Plenty of people in Europe would consider a train that's 15 minutes late "late," it just happens often enough that society has to take the slop of inefficiency into account.

But, my point is that even conceding such a long view of history, the US probably didn't look more menacing than Europe. The US was a minor political and economic power, whereas Europe was much more powerful and had its own much longer history of imperialism and territorial expansion by divine right.

The implication seems like a bit of historical revisionism in hindsight, based on how threatening the US seems to a lot of people now.

>The US was a minor political and economic power

I agree with you that the US was under-powered militarily at the time, but by the 40s the US had been the world's largest economy and industrial power for decades.

How long have they held that perception of time? I'm under the impression that in the Anglosphere it is only as old as railroads.

The paper on cultural time perceptions I found, which I'll have to dig up again, attributed the difference to a deep cultural value placed on timeliness in Japanese society. e.g. the value predated the specific train result.

edit

Though I've read papers that also trace a shortening of the window of timeliness to the appearance of public clocks. Like Big Ben.

> For example, a train in London is considered "on time" as long as it's within 14 minutes.

That may be true in London, for all I know, but it's definitely not true in western culture as a whole.

It's not true in London. Trains delayed by 4 minutes count as late.

There are different times for when you can actually do anything about it - mostly if a train is delayed by an hour you can get a refund (if you chose not to travel) or compensation (if you were already travelling before the delay happened), but it's a bit complicated.

For London tube trains you can get some refunds if the train is 15 minutes late.

http://www.theguardian.com/money/2012/dec/18/how-claim-train...

> Transport for London (TFL) offers refunds if a passenger's journey is delayed by more than 15 minutes. For tube passengers, this amounts to the fare for the single journey you were making, whether you have a season ticket, or have purchased a single fare. London Overground users get the same, but only when their train is delayed by more than 30 minutes

Reply on news.ycombinator.com