Mid-Term assignment, due 18th June. 10% of total final mark (we mark hard at Grappler Free U - the REAL U).

Read the following excerpt from -
Blossoms In the Wind - Human Legacies of the Kamikaze , M.G Sheftall.


a. Determine and explain  the underlying factors in generation of a group psyche as described in the excerpt.

b.  Seek similar group psyches occurring today, discover their root causes, expound on those in comparison with that shown by Sheftall as pertaining to pre-WW II Japanese society.

c.  Consider the effect of the same values ascribed to the West by such 'new' groups in the development and continuation of such group psyches - define the group(s) you are considering.

d.  Is the West, therefore, condemned to fight an endless series of wars, due to the group psyches developed as described.....and if so .. what is the level of preparedness, both physically and spiritually, of the West?

"Educated Japanese males of Onishi's generation who had spent their time living and studying in the West - especially America - tended to harbour extreme feelings at both ends of a love-hate continuum toward their former hosts and teachers, ranging from unabashed schoolboy hero worship to utter repulsion fueled by a desperate need to believe in their own racial and cultural superiority.  The emotional packages of most comprised a tortuous Freudian melange of admiration and inferiority complex: a healthy respect for the Westerner's technological prowess, material abundance and sheer physical size; disdain for their shameless materialism, their smug, easy pride, their maddeningly nonchalant tolerance of disorder, their racist immigrant legislation and the woeful history of the American Negro.  Not to mention the poisonous, half-buried memories of patronising cocktail party slights ("Oh, your English is excellent.  Were you taught by missionaries?"), sneering hotel clerks, withering locker room anxiety, and the impotent rage of coming home to see giggling Japanese girls on the arms of strapping white men in the streets of the larger port cities.  Just as everyone tapping pointers on maps in the war rooms of Tokyo and cutting orders for young men to die at the front carried his own personal portfolio of similar psychological baggage regarding Westerners, none of them ever really expected the nation to win its duel to the death with the West - win, that is, in the sense of Japanese troops marching down Pennsylvania Avenue and pitching their tents on the White House lawn.  Nor did they see the war as being pursued primarily for the practical strategic objectives of securing vital industrial resources and fuel.  Seeing it in such simple terms was to confuse means with ends.

The goal, really, had always been, first and foremost, to humble the West - to daub the teacher's face with mud - by kicking the white man out of Asia and bringing about an end, once and for all, win or lose, of what former Prime Minister Konoe had so aptly termed Anglo-Saxon global hegemony.  The Caucasian bogeyman - and the unspeakable fear that he might really be the superior being he seemed to think himself - had whispered in the ear and haunted the nightmares of the Japanese psyche for the last ninety years, since Commodore Matthew C Perry's Black Ships first fouled the waters of Uraga Bay, humiliating the nation by forcing it to accommodate to Americans and their insulting demands."