The War a new TV series

[Sgt Barker]

As Webster from Band of Brothers said: "Say hello to Ford, and General Motors. Look at you. You have horses. What were you thinking?"

Too right.

A professor of Japanese history told a revealing story to our class a couple of years ago. He's written a couple (at least) books on Japanese history, one of them on the immediate post war period. Doing interviews in Japan a woman told him of her anger when told of the atomic bomb. Not anger at the Americans, anger at her government. She was a member of the 'militia' (for lack of a better term), and had been training with a bamboo spear in order to fight the Americans when they landed. When told that a single bomb had wiped out a city her sense of betrayal was complete - all the years of mystical propaganda about the superiority of the Japanese "way" and culture, how spirit could defeat anything, culminated with her using a bamboo spear against technology that could kill tens of thousands in an instant.

My professor is convinced that this feeling was widespread, if not universal, and explains the Japanese fascination with and explotation of technology post war.