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“Okay, next time you see your king, prime minister, president, or high up officials living high on the hog making comments that suggest to the people to just suck it up and tighten the belts one more notch, remember, why not eat meat?”

“So the, so the concept of Gekokujo is a Japanese term that roughly means something along the lines of the lower overcoming the higher. It has its roots, I think, in kind of pre Tokugawa Japan and it's a concept that is kind of not that well known about outside of kind of World War II Kwantung Army specialists the Kwantung Army was the kind of foremost practitioner or was the foremost incubator for Gekokujo and basically in the twentieth century what Gekokujo was was these kind of middle ranking field officers majors and colonels taking the initiative on their own to conduct in offensive operations without the permission of their superiors in the army or in the government.”

“But one could certainly argue and I think I myself am more of the persuasion that the Mukden incident is the beginning of World War II in the Asia Pacific region because it leads to a series of events that eventually leads to the second Sino Japanese war and World War two in the Asia Pacific region as a whole. But in a broader sense, the Mukden incident directly leads to the kind of Kwantung army's annexation of or not annexation, the absorption of Manchuria, the establishment of a puppet state in Manchukuo. It's called the the fourteen year war. Right? That's how it's referred to.”

“The Kwantung Army has its roots in the aftermath of the Russell Japanese War. According to the Treaty of Portsmouth, which ended the Russell Japanese War, Japan inherited a lease on the Liaodong Peninsula, of which the Kwantung or Guangdong Peninsula is a part. The Kwantung Garrison was founded in nineteen o six to protect these Japanese assets, especially, which was especially salient because of fears among the Japanese army general staff that the Russians would want to fight a war of revenge over Manchuria.”

“And the title Shogun. So Shogun is an ancient title, isn't it? Or at least in its full version, it's an ancient title. And it's basically a great general or warlord who subdues barbarians, isn't that right?”

“Throughout this period of peace, the samurai are effectively functioning as bureaucrats, as civilians, but they never give up their military status. The shogunate is always casting itself as a military regime. And the grander you are as a samurai, the better your birth, the more you are expected to kind of cosplay as a lord from the era of the warring states.”

“And all this rancor led to what became known as the Bawang Zhe Luan, the War of the Eight Princes. It was a decade and a half of protracted wars among a gaggle of Sima princes, all vying for the top leadership spot. And as you can imagine, this did nothing to ameliorate the sorry state of the peasantry. So with this civil war going on in the background, things in the countryside went from bad to worse.”

“And I think that this in turn underlies a further paradox about the standing of the Samurai in the imagination, which is that on the one hand, they are indelibly Japanese. They are up there with geisha and with tea ceremonies and sumo and all that kind of thing as absolutely kind of A-list markers of Japanese culture. A samurai is Japan.”

“I would say that to some extent Japan has not sufficiently apologized for the atrocities that it committed during the Second World War in East Asia. For example, you have the Rising Sun enzyme of the Imperial Japanese Navy which is still in use, right? A lot of people compare it to the swastika and for good reason, because this kind of the rising sun with the rays, that flag is, was the standard of the Imperial Japanese Army and the Imperial Japanese Navy when they were rampaging throughout the Asia Pacific region and committing a wide variety of heinous atrocities that led to the depths of tens of millions of people.”

“In a way, the story behind this Chinese Saying conveys a lesson. When rulers forget the basic needs of the people, catastrophe follows. And when the dam broke in the early 4th century and the Jin Dynasty royal family and all their aristocratic hangers on got chased out of the capital, it marked the end of the Western Jin and the start of the Eastern Jin.”

“For instance, Ishii Shiro, the head of unit seven thirty one, which was the Kwantung Army's bacteriological and biological warfare outfit in Manchuria that performed very heinous experiments on living, subjects, most notably, live vivisections, for example, was let go in exchange for the data he got being he gave it to the Americans and General MacArthur and, he was not prosecuted for his criminal activities.”

“He bu, why not? And the character shi as a verb means to eat. And the last two characters, rou mi, that's a kind of a minced meat porridge. That's quite a delicacy compared to, you know, the normal rice porridge or xi fan that would be consumed by the masses. And we paste it all together and we get Why not eat meat porridge? He bu shi rou mi.”

“I mean, he had gone and done the same careless thing that the Zhou dynasty kings had done, distributing princely titles and handing out large fiefdoms to his numerous relatives. He thought this, in theory at least, would shore up the dynasty and that he'd be able to better maintain control out in the provinces. But despite his best intentions, all he did was plant a few seeds that would bear fruit later on in the form of internal division.”

“And his manipulator-in-chief was one of China's great villainesses, his wife, Empress Jia Nanfang. She was the daughter of the powerful official Jia Chong, who some of you may remember from an old, old CSP episode, Muren Shi Xin. Well, Empress Jia, using her husband's authority and all the perks and power that came from the emperor ship, strong-armed other members of the Sima imperial clan. And for every slot in the government that she was able to open up, she filled it with relatives from her Jia clan.”

“The regime that Tokugawa establishes, and which is run by his descendants, endures for two and a half centuries. So right the way up until the middle of the 19th century. And throughout that entire period, Japan remains at peace. So you've had 200 years of kind of savage war, warlords tearing chunks out of each other, and then you have two and a half centuries of stability and order.”

“Silk was quite significant for many ordinary Japanese. Two in five rural households were involved in the silk trade and the collapse of export markets during the Great Depression led to a kind of evisceration of the peasantry and many of the kind of Imperial Japanese Army officers had were either descended from peasants themselves or knew men in the Imperial Japanese Army under their command that were of peasant origin. And this kind of familiarity with the peasantry led to many radical ideas proliferating most notably those of Kitaiki that advocated for a kind of national socialism that would redistribute much of the wealth from the corrupt oligarchs that were running the country and restore power to the emperor in the spirit of the Meiji restoration.”

“Seriously? You know, when Marie Antoinette allegedly said, Qu'il mange de la brioche. She never lived that one down, even though she never said it. Let them eat cake. Well, Emperor Hui, who preceded Marie Antoinette by some fourteen and a half centuries, he couldn't have possibly been more insensitive to what was going on.”

“He finally believed that the West and the East were inevitably going to clash because these in his view were kind of shall we say diametrically opposite civilizations that had to essentially fight to establish custody over the world. And in Ishiwara's opinion, The US was the kind of leader of Western civilization. Japan was the leader of Eastern civilization and these countries would eventually go to war with one another. Now for Japan to triumph in its final conflict with The United States, in Ishiwadas opinion, it needed control of a massive hinterland in East Asia.”

“Then you have guys like, Kishi Nobusuke, who during the Second World War was in Manchukuo as one of the directors of, I think, the General Affairs Board of the Machuquo government and his job was to oversee the kind of industrialization of Machuquo. But more importantly from the perspective of many Chinese, this industrialization entailed the enslavement and early deaths of billions of people. This was a essentially slave labor driven industrialization of Manchukuo and Kishi Nobusuke oversaw this and was not indicted and actually his grandson Abe Shinzo eventually became the prime minister of Japan in 2021 after Kishinobusuke was prime minister in Japan in the late fifties. The CIA, I think, helped install him as the prime minister in the late fifties as a kind of bulwark against the Soviet Union.”

“The thing about the samurai, and this is what makes them different, say, from other very mythologized classes of warrior, like Vikings, say, or the Knights of Medieval Christendom. These are medieval warriors who actually outlast the Middle Ages. And I think that this is why in the West, as well as I would guess in Japan, they're aesthetic, the sense of them as having kind of moral codes, their vibe, can actually seem much more attuned to contemporary culture.”