Fellow Substacker and former co-blogger Bryan Caplan wrote a recent Substack post titled “The Demagoguery of Emperor Hirohito.” Bryan wrote:
The Emperor’s surrender speech is one of the most egregious examples of demagoguery that I’ve ever read. A pile of preposterous pretty political lies for peace. And while we should all embrace the peace, today we’re going to review the lies.
Bryan goes through Hirohito’s speech line by line, analyzing and commenting.
We could certainly claim it as an example of demagoguery. And we could reasonably say (although some of his commenters differed on this) that Hirohito’s own actions during the war were egregious. But was this speech egregious?
I think it was the opposite. It was a brilliant way of bringing proud Japanese people to the conclusion that they should move on.
One of the books that I learned the most from, outside of economics, which a friend gave me in the early 1980s, was The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know. I think more-recent editions have become more woke and so, after my 2007 fire destroyed my copy, I’ve never bought a new one.
The book gives good ideas, with little illustrative stories [Remember My One Iron Law of Pedagogy; tell stories].
I think Hirohito’s speech was an example of what the authors called “cooling the mark.” The term comes from an old con. Person A cons person B out of some money. Person B is the mark. But there’s a danger that person B will go to the cops and report the con. So Person A has colluded with person C. Person C is there when the con happens and it appears that he was conned also. He therefore has instant credibility with B. He uses that credibility to explain to B, the mark, why it’s a bad idea to go to the cops. Person C is there to “cool the mark.”
While that story is about a con, the point is more general and applies even to good deeds. Sometimes it’s important for someone to persuade someone else that what happened to him, which he processes as being bad, is good or at least neutral. And this can work even when what happened really is good.
I’ve used this myself in letters to the editor at the local level. A local tax initiative is defeated. Proponents of the tax feel defeated. I write a letter to the editor saying why it’s actually good because we save money and have options A, B, and C for solving the problem. I have cooled at least some marks.
From the little I know about Japanese attitudes during World War II, I think I can safely say that a lot of them were very proud and that accepting defeat was hard to swallow.
So what should an emperor do when he wants the Japanese people to accept defeat and move on? It probably isn’t a good idea to say, even though it’s true, that the dominant Japanese leaders and their military members did horrible deeds. An emperor who said that would then have two ideas to sell to his people: (1) that he and others, including many people he’s addressing, did horrible things, and (2) that they should accept defeat.
It’s much more effective, if the main goal is to get a lasting peace, to peddle the idea that he and they were noble people pursuing noble goals and that now it’s time to pursue other noble goals such as accepting peace and moving on.
And it worked.
Wow! Thanks! I'm subscribed to Bryan's substack but don't pay attention too closely and I'm glad your post here made me see his article. Atrocious. I found Hirohito's speech absolutely brilliant and reflective of the truth. That the Japanese did NOT want this war whatsoever and were forced into it by the Roosevelt admin who desperately wanted to get into the war to defeat the antisemitic Hitler. Some people have a cultural inheritance that overlooks the fact that we are all just fellow homo sapiens and that silly distinctions between good and "evil" should be left to religious sermons. It is astounding how so many allegedly secular thinkers, still fall for such a naive way of looking at the world. The Japanese were by far a civilizing force in Asia. If Bryan wants to say such awful things about Hirohito, what is he saying about Uncle Joe? Mao? Roosevelt? The Chinese warlords who ran much of China. About the fact that Manchukuo, was a relative prosperous place compared to the rest of China. I suggest Bryan reads John Toland's masterpiece 'The Rising Sun: The Decline and Fall of the Japanese Empire, 1936-1945' or better yet, his autobiography 'Captured by History: One Man’s Vision of Our Tumultuous Century' , which not only treats the Japanese with the respect they are due but does the same with the Germans and all fellow human beings. Sadly, some people, due to a certain cultural inheritance are predisposed for simplistic good vs evil , us vs. them, in-group vs. out-group tribalistic thinking.
If you want the first edition of "The Ropes to Skip and the Ropes to Know", they have it on Amazon.
https://www.amazon.com/Ropes-Skip-Know-Organizational-Behavior/dp/0471850934/ref=pd_ybh_a_d_sccl_2/144-0509543-8843865?pd_rd_w=7NxPQ&content-id=amzn1.sym.67f8cf21-ade4-4299-b433-69e404eeecf1&pf_rd_p=67f8cf21-ade4-4299-b433-69e404eeecf1&pf_rd_r=0YD3GAC97FY6TRN7GRQS&pd_rd_wg=pd5B0&pd_rd_r=5791d2c7-b35c-4454-9a5f-1e883080be85&pd_rd_i=0471850934&psc=1