Before Stanford and UCLA, Cornell was America’s Asia-facing university. I’ve mentioned that the Japanese-language program I took was designed to State Department standards, a stretched-out version of the FALCON one-year concentrated program for spies and diplomats and area studies grad students and other deep state apparatus

I minored in East Asian (Japanese) studies. I think I have some paperwork outstanding so someone might try to gotcha me on a resume if I get famous and influential, but fuck it, I did the courses, I graduated with the minor

Anyway I’m only now realizing that a consequence of going through a program designed for power actors, with staff that could engage in the academic literature in Japanese without relying on intermediaries or foreign funding with its own agenda, I was taught as uncontroversial commonplace all these things that I can’t find common online sources to cite in English like

• the Japanese are not at all native to the islands or to samurai swordfighting; the “Yamato” ethnic group migrated from Korea, established an army that earlier was very Chinese-style (heavy armor, crossbows, large imperial formations) around the threat of western invasion, the samurai were basically styled to fight the last real foreign war, against northern native horse archers that drowned the heavy formations in a river

• there was a Second Bakufu land reform that firmly established primogeniture but also provided for clearance of new lands. In response, abortion kept the population down, new production provided a surplus, and extra sons became city workers; this encouraged the early capitalism and proto-keiretsu that put Japan in a position to later industrialize competitive w/Europe

• after Perry’s Opening of Japan, leaders realized their best bet was affiliating with the land-bound but advanced latecomer nation of Prussia. The first German-Japanese dictionary came out of a German medical textbook and the Japanese translation scholars started with known organs

• 95 promising students or so were sent to study abroad in German universities and they returned to remodel most of Japanese society after it; several were key to the Meiji Restoration

• the interwar military takeover of the government is kind of continuous with an earlier communist general strike of civil servants

• post-WWII the United States bribed the Liberal and Democratic parties into merging as the dominant LDP as part of a campaign to make sure the single most powerful faction, the Communists, never took power