The Japanese are a remarkable people, but it does seem they are choosing slow demographic suicide. I wish they weren’t, though I certainly don’t have any answers.

These days I’m not overly sanguine about the future of Americans and Europeans either.

From it’s most primitive beginnings in 4,000 B.C., Japan slowly developed a unique culture and way of life, a large part of it (including the Japanese written language) based on Chinese models. Things accelerated with the introduction of Buddhism in 552 A.D., and Japan’s civilization developed into one that was quite unlike anything we had here in the West.

Prior to Admiral Perry’s forcible “opening up” of Japan in 1854, Japan had been deliberately isolated from the rest of the world for some 250 years.

Generally, no one was allowed to travel outside the Japanese islands, and those who tried to leave, or mariners who, say, were shipwrecked and finally made it back to Japan were, by decree of the Shogun, routinely killed.

The several centuries prior to Perry were ones of relative peace under a military government, the Shogunate, which united the country after decades of turmoil and civil war.

After Perry, the Samurai class, believing that they needed to develop the wealth and power that Western nations had so clearly demonstrated, and being more flexible than other classes, started to adopt various Western inventions and ways of doing things.

Then, came the Meiji Restoration of 1867-68, which essentially overthrew the Shogunate and restored the power of the Emperor, with the aim of making major changes aimed at gaining the “agency,” the power and wealth that the Western powers had.

Large landowners, the Daimyo, who had been the major power center in Japan, were removed from power and their lands confiscated by the Emperor, and the economic bonds between the Daimyo, whose payments and grants of productive rice growing land gave the Samurai their livelihood in exchange for their service, were severed, the Samurai class was quickly disestablished and then disbanded, and a semblance of Western democratic government was put into place.

Japan made many fundamental changes in it’s society and culture, took many steps aimed at becoming a modern, Western power–they fought a successful war with Russia demonstrating their new power, and ended up fighting WWII against us, but something essential was lost in that hundred years of massive and fundamental transformation.

Thorough all this change the Imperial Family and Household still exists, but it apparently has diminishing power.

Would the Japanese, could the Japanese, recreate some semblance of the old ways of life and the culture and philosophies that undergirded it?

Would that reignite Japan’s will to live?

But would that also, almost of necessity, result in a newly aggressive Japan?

Who knows?

Traditional Japanese society pre-Admiral Perry was apparently a very robust society. Now, not so much, and I think the abrupt political, cultural, and social transition from that traditional pre-Admiral Perry society I mentioned above has a lot to do with it.

Thus, we have bizarre trends like young Japanese who tell interviewers they do not want to have sex, and young Japanese women who do not want to marry having small dogs they wheel around in what are essentially baby carriages, spending enormous amounts of money on dressing them up and on pampering them.

The vital spark has just gone out of Japan, and I don’t know that anybody knows just how to restore it; how do you reanimate a society that has lost it’s will to live?

It is virtually impossible for a non-Japanese to be truly accepted in Japanese society. Some Japanese academics even theorize that no non-Japanese has the genetic endowment sufficient to allow them to really learn the Japanese language.

Then, you have the tremendous social and cultural pressure/tensions created by Japan’s abrupt transformation from a very insular, medieval, deeply traditional, hierarchical society in which Bushido was a major element, into a much more ostensibly democratic Western society, at least on the surface.

I believe that these and many other factors have resulted in a tremendous amount of tension, and what we might call social and cultural “deformation” in Japanese culture and society and, thus, the bizarre trends we see.

P.S. Some Unit 731 points:

At the end of WWII Unit 731 did a very good job of obliterating evidence of their crimes, so a lot is not known.

Unit 731 also experimented on POWS, perhaps some of them Americans. According to Congressional testimony their researchers had access to a POW camp containing Americans near their main Unit 731 facility in Harbin, and gave some of those American POWs various injections, and then returned to observe them.

The number of those experimented on may have been as many as 10,000 or more, none of whom survived. Unit 731’s horrific experiments far eclipsed those of the Nazis in both barbarity and the number experimented on and then killed.

Unit 731 is today the most well known of Japanese Chemical and Biological warfare research units, but there were several more shadowy units as well, scattered around Asia, we just don’t know that much about them yet, and perhaps never will.

Virtually a Who’s Who of Japan’s medical community transited through and worked in Unit 731 during the 1930s-40s, and then emerged after the end of the war to occupy major positions in Japan’s society and medical community.

So successful were the Unit 731 scientists in spreading diseases in China that many of the diseases they spread in China that weren’t native to the area have taken root there, and are now endemic in several areas.

Toward the very end of the War Gen. Dr. Ishii, the head of Unit 731, wanted to take the bacteria whose weaponization they had perfected and load them on the high altitude incendiary balloon bombs that the Japanese were then sending across the ocean to land on our shores, balloon bombs whose landings on our west coast were little reported.

Luckily, his idea was never acted on.

It is true that the U.S. made a deal to give Ishii and his people immunity from prosecution in return for their slides and research results. After the end of WWII Dr.Ishii returned to Japan to take up his “medical research,” he was given a government pension, and after he died the Japanese raised a memorial to him.

As of a dozen years ago, there was an annual Unit 731 reunion, held in Tokyo, where Unit 731 personnel gathered to talk about the” good old days.”

It was not immediately clear how close the U.S. military recon jet was flying near Kaliningrad, a Russian enclave between NATO allies Poland and Lithuania. This fall, Russia moved nuclear-capable ballistic missiles to Kaliningrad, putting some European capitals in strike range.

but dont worry, they have a new one.
Russia develops hypersonic 4,600 mph Zircon missileRussia develops hypersonic 4,600 mph Zircon missile
Russian hypersonic missile reaches mach 8
Britain Admits that Russian Missiles Can Blow Its New Aircraft Carriers
Russia’s Hypersonic Missile System May Represent a ‘Quantum Leap
Russia: Hypersonic Cruise & Satellite-Destroying Missiles

can you imagine what would happen wiht one EMP?
not to mention that they can shut out military Aegic system down with a simple swtich leaving the ships blind and defenseless

and
China finishing South China Sea buildings that could house missiles

why am i putting this here? ‘
BECAUSE THESE ISLANDS BELONG TO JAPAN WHO NOW WANTS NUCLEAR ARMS AND NEW MILITARY

why do we not see wars coming?
the people who have the attention of others draw us away… how many more people could have escaped the european theater if it was not for that kind of person?

japan is veddy interesting..

but baltics more so..

The Russian Su-27 jet had air-to-air missiles under its wings and approached the U.S. Air Force RC-135 recon jet “rapidly,” coming within 5 feet of the American aircraft, the officials said.

Once alongside, the Russian jet was “provocative” in its flight maneuvers and flying “erratically,” according to another official.

Since June 2 there have been more than 35 interactions in the Baltic Sea region between U.S. and Russian jets and warships, but the incident Monday morning is notable because the U.S. military considered it “unsafe,” according to one official.