Re: Chinese New Year - Islamabad welcomes the Year of Goat
It is actually easier to control an army when you have centralized everything. Every officer and soldier knows what they are supposed to do and they do it without questioning. They do it not because of some supernatural love for their country, but they do it because this is what they are supposed to do.
Many Chinese provinces were like Japan before “the great leap forward” and “cultural revolution” destroyed cultural diversity and individual thought in China. The revolution aimed at ‘unifying’ everything and taking everything under central control including dialects, schooling, history and philosophy.
There is a very strong hate for ‘losing face’ in Japanese culture. If someone finds out that you did something wrong, you ‘lose face’ and traditionally the only way to salvage pride was to commit suicide. A lot of this philosophy comes from Chinese influence. Now that Chinese have changed, Japanese haven’t. Getting your soldiers to die for your country wasn’t difficult for such a society.
Now, Japanese were so ‘shamed’ by the way they acted during world war, that idea of violent war is still abhorrent. Even though Japanese civilians suffered a lot during the war, they are still reminded continuously of how shamefully the imperial Japan acted during the two world wars.