Studying Things

The study of individual topics or things often comes with a name. One of my favorites is “anemology,” which is the study of winds. It was a new one on me; I found it in a recent book on the Pacific part of World War II. It seems that anemologists were in great demand after Pearl Harbor, and, unsurprisingly, there was a short supply of them. The reason for their popularity was that there was suddenly an intense search going on for Pacific islands that were suitable for the building of airstrips. With all of those thousands of islands, it was only a very small number of them that could be useful. Planes take off and land into the wind, so the island would need a long stretch of relatively dry, flat, solid land that faced into the prevailing winds. The planes needed to be taking off into the north-east, where the winds came from. Things got dramatic pretty quickly. (See: Guadalcanal.)

One “study of” word that should interest us today is “psephology,” the statistical study of elections and trends in voting. This one comes from the Greek word, psephos, meaning pebble. Later on, Greeks voted by putting pebbles in a jar or something, and psephos came to mean vote as well.

Americans have always been interested in how people vote and why they vote the way that they do. That interest was enhanced by the appearance of computers, and the trend has only accelerated as computers have taken over our lives. By now we all have an Internet footprint that can be studied by various entities whose interest in our dirty laundry may vary from the merely venal to the truly sinister. (From advertising data to the influencing of our minds through targeted memes.) This kind of thing is getting pretty dramatic as well.

A company called Cambridge Analytica did a lot of work for the Donald Trump campaign last year. Depending on what you read, they either single-handedly won the election for Trump by creating psychological profiles of huge numbers of people in key states and then targeting them with focused ads through their Facebook feeds, or just did some run of the mill data mining that may or may not have been helpful at all. If it was the later, they were wildly overpaid.

John Bannon is a big fan, which cannot be a good thing. Look up “sinister” in the dictionary; they have his picture next to the definition. Robert Mercer funded the work that Cambridge Analytica did for Trump, and it cost a bundle. Mercer is a hedge-fund mega-billionaire who looks like a college professor and succeeds in appearing to be an easy-going, aw-shucks kind of guy. He doesn’t talk much, but he’s got his strong ideas. His daughter Rebekah is part of his political (mischief) team. She’s more hands on, and, if I may mix my metaphors, she doesn’t seem as reticent as her dad to get her hands dirty.

People and technologies like these have jumped into the deep end of the psephology pool with both feet. They are studying our elections and how to win them, and they are studying you and me. I’m not sure that I’m comfortable with the whole thing. But then, I’m not comfortable with many things, so maybe it’s nothing. Time will tell! 

The Insubordinate Imperial Japanese Military

That’s “Imperial” as in the Japanese military forces during World War II. The officer corps of the Imperial Japanese Army was completely out of control, and the naval officers weren’t much better. It’s always amazing to me, because “insubordinate” and “disrespectful” and “disobedient” are not words that one would usually use in connection with Japanese individuals who were lower in status than the other person in the interaction.

Considering the Army? Forget about it! One need only recall that low level officers in the Manchurian garrison started the entire disastrous invasion of China on their own motion. The brass in Tokyo, and the Emperor, went along after the fact.

The further down the Army chain-of-command you went, the worse the behavior became. The more that I read about that war, the worse the insubordination of the Japanese officer corps seems to get.

The navy was not immune. I recently read of an incident involving Captain Yonosuke Murakami.* I took particular note of it because our own Haruki Murakami is a favorite author of mine (and not in the least insubordinate, to my knowledge). This event took place during the six month contest for Guadalcanal, running from August, 1942 to February, 1943.

Captain Murakami was in charge of a division of four destroyers under the command of Admiral Raizo Tanaka, an extremely talented and justifiably famous destroyer admiral. The admiral was a brilliant tactician with nerves of steel. (See “Battle of Tassafaronga.”) The admiral ordered Murakami to take his destroyers and make a night attack on an American resupply convoy to Guadalcanal. Murakami gave the admiral the old “hell, no.” He flat refused.

“Full moon,” said Captain Murakami, “we’ll get dive bombed.”  They knocked it back and forth for a couple of minutes, and finally Admiral Tanaka backed off and rescinded the command. No disciplinary action was taken, nor any report made.  

There have been several new books about the Pacific war in the last few years, and it’s amazing how much new information the historians can access as time goes on. Every year there are new documents; new personal records and diaries; new translations. More documentation has only led to more examples of these kind of disciplinary, ah, problems.

Please note, for the record, that I am not criticizing the Japanese military at the time. History is history, and the events of a particular time and place must always be judged by the prevailing mores and realities of that time and place. They were who they were; they did what they did. And speaking of the record, the record still shows that the average Japanese soldier or sailor or airman was an incredible font of courage and dedication, while acknowledging the perhaps too frequent moral lapses. It’s that “particular time and place” thing again. Not everything can be judged by the same yardstick.

But really, the discipline in the Imperial Japanese forces in WWII was spongy, and that’s putting it mildly, at least in the officer corps.

(Photographs show two classes of Japanese IJN destroyers that were active early in the war. These ships were very capably employed by talented officers and crews and they were very effective.) 

*Episode with Captain Yonosuke Murakami and Admiral Raizo Tanaka from “Neptune’s Inferno,” by James Hornfischer.