History just ate abit of my game Interest.

[Torplexed]

Originally Posted by Oberon

The Japanese attitude to war through the Bushido code is so alien to the western world that almost every person has a great deal of difficulty understanding it, even myself.

Bushido originally prescribed correct and honorable behavior towards one's enemies as a manifestation of one's own honor. Under the Japan military regime that developed in the 1920s and 1930s it was warped and twisted into something that the samurai wouldn't even have recognized. Surrender had not been considered shameful in Japan's previous wars, nor in the civil wars that shaped the Empire's earlier history. Slowly after World War One it was presented as an unthinkable social and military disgrace. Japan's position as the lone major Asian power outnumbered in a world of white colonial nations perceived as trying to keep Japan down as the low man on the totem pole probably contributed to it. Being outnumbered in the fight in China by an endless supply of Chinese peasant troops probably did as well.