Me too. Even if only by a few quotes, Sid Meier and co. have really brought the humanities to the masses. I just hope a few people will be impressed enough to tackle the sources from which they are extracted. Works like the Nichomachean Ethics, The Prince, the Art of War, etc. have transcendent value far beyond a few good one liners.
While gravity differences can be mitigated a little by clothing designed to exert pressure on the wearers (designs already exist), even without guided and deliberate genetic engineering life on Mars would be so significantly different even in an artificially controlled habitat that the colonists there would probably start to develop into a new human species in a several generations. Between the differences in gravity, radiation, atmosphere, etc. etc. even with terraforming the most likely occurrence is that permanent human settlers would meet the terraforming process somewhere in the middle. (Environmental pressures have done as much on earth, not creating separate species, but if you compare the average traits of Eskimos vs. Maasai, there's a reason why Eskimos tend to be short and fat and Maasai tall and thin (among many traits)... the environment has selected for those so that Eskimos' body shape keeps more heat and Maasai's allows them to stay cooler.)
Farming however is irrelevant and in a few centuries will be looked upon as quaint. Hydroponics is far more efficient in both space required and resources consumed/produced. Farming is just so cheap and the infrastructure for it is already in place that it will be a while before the population pressures finally force society to build hydroponic production facilities on a large scale.
There is an actual quote from the 19th century that fits as well or better:
"What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense."
Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton's steamboat.
Your figures are wrong. If any of it were true no astronaut would live through a mission. Your own source even notes "Actual radiation dose measurements of Apollo crews measured by onboard dosimetry were, on average, 12 mSv." That's 0.12 Sv... relatively high vs. average everyday life but far from 'tens of Sv/hr' which would kill people.
I've been saying this a long time now. The biosphere is supposed to be in flux, and for all the species that go extinct (and 99% over earth's history have, and that's not hyperbole) that everybody seems to wring their hands over, nobody seems to notice the species that develop (and that the number of species over time on an epochal scale has always been net positive).
Did you pay any attention to the second link? Track gauges vary more than three feet depending on location. Whatever link there is between draft animals and rail gauge is quite weak and certainly nothing approaching a standard.
I'll see your anecdotes and raise you my own. Verizon and Boost, among many, offer prepaid minutes that will not expire for 90+ days. I used Verizon myself back then. It's a very dangerous habit to think in terms of 'x is outside of my experience, therefore x doesn't exist.' At a minimum you could have done some research before grasping at that straw.
For one thing, when I was looking for a job straight out of college, I got the same result: "we went with another candidate" times several dozen.
But you *did* get a job eventually I'm sure. That's the whole point. Going through the experience in childhood when the thing itself doesn't really matter prepares children mentally for the reality of adulthood when it does matter.
For another, if all the kids in the neighborhood are doing services for a limited set of grown-ups, eventually the grown-ups will run out of work to do.
Yeah right, just like the economy runs out of jobs. Unemployment is a metric, not a permanent personal reality. If there's 10% unemployment, it doesn't mean that 10% of people will never be employed. It simply means that a) time must pass for market conditions to warrant the creation of new positions b) some people will fall short of expectations or leave voluntarily for other opportunities and need to be replaced c) some unemployed will start their own businesses instead of waiting for somebody to give them employment etc.
I swear it really is a poverty of imagination. Just because it's kids doesn't mean it's not a market. Undercut people, find some kind of value added, expand the scope of services etc. etc.
I hope you don't have kids. Your "I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas!" approach is not only uninspiring and unresourceful but would be completely corrosive to childhood development.
You seem to think you speak for every prepaid service in the universe. I assure you that some do not.
Further, your 'what if everybody turns them down?' scenario is unrealistic. If somebody seriously approached so many people and came up empty, I would question the approach far more than the real availability of work. (The same is true of adults for that matter.)
Just because my parents never paid for my phone doesn't mean they didn't give me many other things (which I could eventually resell if I chose). It's not an all or nothing proposition. A parent can choose to provide something as a gift or make the child earn it themselves as they see fit. Applying the same approach to all things forever on either side would have a very negative effect on the child.
So when all those other people die that means what Mr. Spammer? Which universe ends then? Take your anti-materialist nonsense to some place that cares.
Contract? Ha ha! When I was a kid I had to prepay, and be thrifty with the amount of time that accorded me.
As for 'oh noes that one guy turned me down!' That's just another life lesson to be learned. Getting work isn't always easy. Kids need to learn that sometimes you have to work just to get work. Now in the interwebs age one could seek employment by Craigslist or similar. Yeah, yeah, I know, "but what about the evil child predator stalkers that lurk around every corner!?!?!!111!EINS!" Yet another place to learn some responsibility, for the parents as much as the children. In any scenario on or offline parents should vet or a bare minimum meet the people for whom their kids do work. If you haven't trained your kids how to handle potential predators beyond 'find an adult/call teh police lol!' Then that's just another failing. If they're old enough to work, they're old enough to learn self defense and carry a knife.
Fuckin' hell what kind of crop of lazy, witless pansies is being raised around here?
Oh and yard sales were always the big earners for me when I was growing up. You could net at least $30 or even more than $50 in a weekend selling things you'd grown out/tired of. It didn't hurt that we did it as a family at my maternal grandparents' place where their entire neighborhood had a massive sale every year that drew a lot of regular people.
Eleven years old would be solidly in middle school, exceptions excluded. Remember this is a US-centric site, so definitions should be assumed to be US ones. High school does not begin until 8th or 9th grade in most if not all US public education systems.
That aside, beginning high school is always preferable. As objectively as I can look at my own development I think I reached de facto independence around 10th grade. The end of high school is the minimum standard, as that is essentially the time when legal pseudo-adulthood is reached anyway. (The current multi-tiered age of majority is ridiculous anyway and should be, at a minimum, consolidated at one age for all laws making the distinction between adults and minors. Personally I would prefer a meritocratic model where behaviors are earned regardless of age.)
One of the only fond memories of have of my High School Latin class was translating a missive from the Roman senate to the people bemoaning how young people are not as respectful to their elders as they used to be, and that their society was becoming morally bankrupt.
Every generation looks at their children as being somehow increasingly disrespectful and making poor moral decisions. That perception is weirdly constant.
Except for an objective few with clear heads, like Cicero. His defense of Marcus Caelius Rufus contains a lot of wisdom about the nature of youth and reasonable expectations of those afflicted. If you haven't read it I recommend it.
Myself I hope the age will yet dawn when useless and paranoid reactionary moralism (of which Cicero too was ultimately guilty, most obviously in his commentaries De Legibus) will finally subside.
When I was growing up admittedly cell phones were much more optional, but nonetheless you seem to have missed where I mentioned 'allowance'. The other thing is that child labor laws regardless, kids usually work for neighbors when they need extra money, I know I did. I would help them clean their houses/yards/cars... take care of their pets when they went on vacation, things like that. Not to mention the occasional yard sale.
Seems a real poverty of imagination... that if money doesn't come from some licensed employer it's somehow impossible to obtain. Ugh. No initiative, no intelligence...
You mean the logic of economy that underlies all of human society? Yes, I can see how that is somehow exclusive to age. Bullshit.
Never mind the fact that I say it worked for me, and don't talk to me about backbone, I'm a goddamn bi atheist in a family where every generation is populated solely by Biblical literalists who thinks 'the gays' deserve to die. I have more backbone than you have brain cells.
Work ethics are fundamental to a person's development, and I've seen enough of it in every legitimately successful person's history I know to be confident without the signature of some abstract theorist who gets paid to find new bullshit methods they can market to rubes on the self-help aisles of Barnes and Noble.
So, fuck off troll, I'm glad at least to be reminded why you're on my foes list.
Parents reap what they sow. I think the problem is that helicopter parents coddle their precious snowflakes too much and that encourages the kids to become both brats and ineptly fragile in many dimensions. As counterintuitive as it seems to be for most in society, you shouldn't treat children like babies forever, you need to let them do things on their own, get hurt, make mistakes, learn consequences, etc. Instead I see parents always swooping in and doing things for their kids, leading to the kids never learning anything and feeling entitled to boot, or bailing kids out of even minor difficulties so they don't develop any respect for consequences.
Any parent whose children are not, for most purposes, de facto independent by high school is a failure.
I couldn't have a cell phone until I could pay for it and every minute of use, and I don't see why it should be any different for kids now. The other thing is that any sort of 'allowance' should be tied to grades as well as chores, so if they start failing their money dries up. Put these things together and any problems should self-correct. I know it's how I will approach my daughter when she starts school.
You reading comprehension must be quite low. 33% is the figure of those willing to take pay cuts. I wager that those wishing to telecommute without pay cuts is at least double that.
Many tribal organizations also have monopolies on the legitimate use of force, thus your distinction fails. That such a definition of a state were even valid, it does not equate to compatibility with democracy. There is nothing about that which logically follows.
1. Monopoly on the legitimate use of force
2. ???
3. Democracy!
Pathetic. You deny the things you've said, even when repeatedly quoted (and I'm not talking about where I paraphrase you to try to understand your carelessly written unsourced nonsense), and ignore direct challenges to your quoted assertions. I am done spinning in these circles. Any further post from you that does not address my repeated specific challenges to your quoted statements will be ignored.
We're going to have to break this down into syllogism, as I don't think you're grasping your own chauvinism, you assert, so far as I can tell:
Western states are strong and stable. The Japanese state was strong and stable.
Therefore the Japanese state is similar to a Western state.
Granted, it depends on your definition of 'similar', but if strength is the *only* similarity, what is the point of calling out Western-ness? Hence the chauvinism. It basically equates strength with Western-ness, so anything else that is strong must be 'Western' even it is nothing like it.
It's hard to really address anything you say because you mostly make negative statements. I'm not quixotic enough to try to start arguing negatives. Since you're trying to use them to wriggle away, let's return to the statement that started this:
The socio-political structures of both these countries were very similar to those we have in the west so it really wasn't terribly difficult to make it a western liberal democracy.
I challenge you, again, to name the specific 'Western' socio-political structures here referenced. Just being 'a state' does not mean that state is automatically similar to the West because the West has 'states'. That remains ludicrous. Further there is nothing indicative in the entire span of recorded Japanese history that Japanese society would be conducive to liberal Western democracy except under the terms of duress imposed by the US occupation, and I would challenge you to demonstrate otherwise.
Holy cultural chauvanism Batman! You do think that because the Japanese had a strong and stable state that made them similar to the West! You think that the 'opposite' of the 'Western' state is tribalism, completely discounting and ignoring the difference between Western and Eastern social paradigms as applied to politics and underlying cultural values and motivations. Such heinous folly I have not seen in months.
Giving you the benefit of the doubt, you are dangerously equating "strong states" with "socio-political structures [...] similar to those we have in the west". Please tell me this isn't based on something as simplistic as empire = empire? I would very much like to know these 'Western' structures. Perhaps you think that the House of Peers was 'Western' because they wore suits and top hats and followed parliamentary procedure? I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
The occupational government in Japan was focused on governance - not on creating a state and the necessary infrastructure and fighting an insurgency.
This is the exact opposite of historical facts. The new Japanese constitution was drafted primarily by US Army lawyers Milo Rowell and Courtney Whitney. The Japanese constitution as passed during the occupation has never been amended.
Further while there might not have been an insurgency analogous to that in Afghanistan or Iraq, if you think the transition was some simple void to be filled, I have to go so far as to say you must be stupid as well as ignorant. Many, many forces were at work against the interests of the US occupation, including but not limited to the zaibatsu, the military and police infrastructure (see The Police In Occupation Japan: Control, Corruption and Resistance to Reform by Christopher Aldous), the yakuza, the Soviets and Japanese communists, etc. Just because the insurgency wasn't blowing shit up did not mean there wasn't one.
If you seriously are denying the day in and day out atrocities committed by the Japanese against the Chinese during every phase of their occupation and government you are delusional. If you think those atrocities are a fluke occurrence limited to just that generation of Japanese, you are fucking ignorant. I suspect it's both.
Posting=Working has already rightly criticized parts of your fantasy history, so I will work on another.
We [...] made a horrific mess out of their society by forcing Western merchant culture into it.
Now, let's pull back the curtain of white guilt and knee-jerk anticorporatism and introduce ourselves to reality. Do you know what the Zaibatsu are? The Zaibatsu are Japanese vertically integrated monopolies. Companies like Mitsubishi and Nissan; however, the oldest Zaibatsu like Mitsui and Sumitomo were founded in Japan's Edo period. These were wholly Japanese companies founded by Japanese men born in a feudal society and run in a thoroughly Japanese way. Rather than introduce "merchant culture" the US occupational administration actively tried to dismantle it because it was perceived to be a threat to US economic and military interests. So, sorry to break it to you, but *real* history is the exact opposite of your sentimental fantasy.
The simple fact is that East Asia was never populated exclusively by Buddhist mendicant monks, and that "merchant culture" has been integral to the entire continent for millennia. No period in Japanese or its neighbors' history has been immune to the fundamental human desires for wealth and power and the attendant trappings thereof. Albeit Chinese, Tang dynasty Chang'an had the largest market in the history of the pre-modern world in a city several times larger than Rome at its high water mark. The Japanese were trying as fervently as any nation from Europe to colonize the rest of East Asia and if not for WW2 would have succeeded.
Holy hell are you ignorant of history. The US ran an occupational government in Japan for seven years. And basically helped them draft their constitution at gunpoint. Democracy in Japan was most assuredly not a natural occurrence.
Slashdot Mirror
Me too. Even if only by a few quotes, Sid Meier and co. have really brought the humanities to the masses. I just hope a few people will be impressed enough to tackle the sources from which they are extracted. Works like the Nichomachean Ethics, The Prince, the Art of War, etc. have transcendent value far beyond a few good one liners.
While gravity differences can be mitigated a little by clothing designed to exert pressure on the wearers (designs already exist), even without guided and deliberate genetic engineering life on Mars would be so significantly different even in an artificially controlled habitat that the colonists there would probably start to develop into a new human species in a several generations. Between the differences in gravity, radiation, atmosphere, etc. etc. even with terraforming the most likely occurrence is that permanent human settlers would meet the terraforming process somewhere in the middle. (Environmental pressures have done as much on earth, not creating separate species, but if you compare the average traits of Eskimos vs. Maasai, there's a reason why Eskimos tend to be short and fat and Maasai tall and thin (among many traits)... the environment has selected for those so that Eskimos' body shape keeps more heat and Maasai's allows them to stay cooler.)
Farming however is irrelevant and in a few centuries will be looked upon as quaint. Hydroponics is far more efficient in both space required and resources consumed/produced. Farming is just so cheap and the infrastructure for it is already in place that it will be a while before the population pressures finally force society to build hydroponic production facilities on a large scale.
There is an actual quote from the 19th century that fits as well or better:
"What, sir, would you make a ship sail against the wind and currents by lighting a bonfire under her deck? I pray you, excuse me, I have not the time to listen to such nonsense."
Napoleon Bonaparte, when told of Robert Fulton's steamboat.
Your figures are wrong. If any of it were true no astronaut would live through a mission. Your own source even notes "Actual radiation dose measurements of Apollo crews measured by onboard dosimetry were, on average, 12 mSv." That's 0.12 Sv... relatively high vs. average everyday life but far from 'tens of Sv/hr' which would kill people.
I've been saying this a long time now. The biosphere is supposed to be in flux, and for all the species that go extinct (and 99% over earth's history have, and that's not hyperbole) that everybody seems to wring their hands over, nobody seems to notice the species that develop (and that the number of species over time on an epochal scale has always been net positive).
Did you pay any attention to the second link? Track gauges vary more than three feet depending on location. Whatever link there is between draft animals and rail gauge is quite weak and certainly nothing approaching a standard.
Please stop propagating debunked myths, thanks. Railroad track gauges vary widely around the world.
For one thing, when I was looking for a job straight out of college, I got the same result: "we went with another candidate" times several dozen.
But you *did* get a job eventually I'm sure. That's the whole point. Going through the experience in childhood when the thing itself doesn't really matter prepares children mentally for the reality of adulthood when it does matter.
For another, if all the kids in the neighborhood are doing services for a limited set of grown-ups, eventually the grown-ups will run out of work to do.
Yeah right, just like the economy runs out of jobs. Unemployment is a metric, not a permanent personal reality. If there's 10% unemployment, it doesn't mean that 10% of people will never be employed. It simply means that a) time must pass for market conditions to warrant the creation of new positions b) some people will fall short of expectations or leave voluntarily for other opportunities and need to be replaced c) some unemployed will start their own businesses instead of waiting for somebody to give them employment etc.
I swear it really is a poverty of imagination. Just because it's kids doesn't mean it's not a market. Undercut people, find some kind of value added, expand the scope of services etc. etc.
I hope you don't have kids. Your "I've tried nothing and I'm all out of ideas!" approach is not only uninspiring and unresourceful but would be completely corrosive to childhood development.
You seem to think you speak for every prepaid service in the universe. I assure you that some do not.
Further, your 'what if everybody turns them down?' scenario is unrealistic. If somebody seriously approached so many people and came up empty, I would question the approach far more than the real availability of work. (The same is true of adults for that matter.)
Just because my parents never paid for my phone doesn't mean they didn't give me many other things (which I could eventually resell if I chose). It's not an all or nothing proposition. A parent can choose to provide something as a gift or make the child earn it themselves as they see fit. Applying the same approach to all things forever on either side would have a very negative effect on the child.
So when all those other people die that means what Mr. Spammer? Which universe ends then? Take your anti-materialist nonsense to some place that cares.
Contract? Ha ha! When I was a kid I had to prepay, and be thrifty with the amount of time that accorded me.
As for 'oh noes that one guy turned me down!' That's just another life lesson to be learned. Getting work isn't always easy. Kids need to learn that sometimes you have to work just to get work. Now in the interwebs age one could seek employment by Craigslist or similar. Yeah, yeah, I know, "but what about the evil child predator stalkers that lurk around every corner!?!?!!111!EINS!" Yet another place to learn some responsibility, for the parents as much as the children. In any scenario on or offline parents should vet or a bare minimum meet the people for whom their kids do work. If you haven't trained your kids how to handle potential predators beyond 'find an adult/call teh police lol!' Then that's just another failing. If they're old enough to work, they're old enough to learn self defense and carry a knife.
Fuckin' hell what kind of crop of lazy, witless pansies is being raised around here?
Oh and yard sales were always the big earners for me when I was growing up. You could net at least $30 or even more than $50 in a weekend selling things you'd grown out/tired of. It didn't hurt that we did it as a family at my maternal grandparents' place where their entire neighborhood had a massive sale every year that drew a lot of regular people.
Eleven years old would be solidly in middle school, exceptions excluded. Remember this is a US-centric site, so definitions should be assumed to be US ones. High school does not begin until 8th or 9th grade in most if not all US public education systems.
That aside, beginning high school is always preferable. As objectively as I can look at my own development I think I reached de facto independence around 10th grade. The end of high school is the minimum standard, as that is essentially the time when legal pseudo-adulthood is reached anyway. (The current multi-tiered age of majority is ridiculous anyway and should be, at a minimum, consolidated at one age for all laws making the distinction between adults and minors. Personally I would prefer a meritocratic model where behaviors are earned regardless of age.)
One of the only fond memories of have of my High School Latin class was translating a missive from the Roman senate to the people bemoaning how young people are not as respectful to their elders as they used to be, and that their society was becoming morally bankrupt.
Every generation looks at their children as being somehow increasingly disrespectful and making poor moral decisions. That perception is weirdly constant.
Except for an objective few with clear heads, like Cicero. His defense of Marcus Caelius Rufus contains a lot of wisdom about the nature of youth and reasonable expectations of those afflicted. If you haven't read it I recommend it.
Myself I hope the age will yet dawn when useless and paranoid reactionary moralism (of which Cicero too was ultimately guilty, most obviously in his commentaries De Legibus) will finally subside.
When I was growing up admittedly cell phones were much more optional, but nonetheless you seem to have missed where I mentioned 'allowance'. The other thing is that child labor laws regardless, kids usually work for neighbors when they need extra money, I know I did. I would help them clean their houses/yards/cars ... take care of their pets when they went on vacation, things like that. Not to mention the occasional yard sale.
Seems a real poverty of imagination... that if money doesn't come from some licensed employer it's somehow impossible to obtain. Ugh. No initiative, no intelligence...
You mean the logic of economy that underlies all of human society? Yes, I can see how that is somehow exclusive to age. Bullshit.
Never mind the fact that I say it worked for me, and don't talk to me about backbone, I'm a goddamn bi atheist in a family where every generation is populated solely by Biblical literalists who thinks 'the gays' deserve to die. I have more backbone than you have brain cells.
Work ethics are fundamental to a person's development, and I've seen enough of it in every legitimately successful person's history I know to be confident without the signature of some abstract theorist who gets paid to find new bullshit methods they can market to rubes on the self-help aisles of Barnes and Noble.
So, fuck off troll, I'm glad at least to be reminded why you're on my foes list.
Parents reap what they sow. I think the problem is that helicopter parents coddle their precious snowflakes too much and that encourages the kids to become both brats and ineptly fragile in many dimensions. As counterintuitive as it seems to be for most in society, you shouldn't treat children like babies forever, you need to let them do things on their own, get hurt, make mistakes, learn consequences, etc. Instead I see parents always swooping in and doing things for their kids, leading to the kids never learning anything and feeling entitled to boot, or bailing kids out of even minor difficulties so they don't develop any respect for consequences.
Any parent whose children are not, for most purposes, de facto independent by high school is a failure.
I couldn't have a cell phone until I could pay for it and every minute of use, and I don't see why it should be any different for kids now. The other thing is that any sort of 'allowance' should be tied to grades as well as chores, so if they start failing their money dries up. Put these things together and any problems should self-correct. I know it's how I will approach my daughter when she starts school.
You reading comprehension must be quite low. 33% is the figure of those willing to take pay cuts. I wager that those wishing to telecommute without pay cuts is at least double that.
Many tribal organizations also have monopolies on the legitimate use of force, thus your distinction fails. That such a definition of a state were even valid, it does not equate to compatibility with democracy. There is nothing about that which logically follows.
1. Monopoly on the legitimate use of force
2. ???
3. Democracy!
Pathetic. You deny the things you've said, even when repeatedly quoted (and I'm not talking about where I paraphrase you to try to understand your carelessly written unsourced nonsense), and ignore direct challenges to your quoted assertions. I am done spinning in these circles. Any further post from you that does not address my repeated specific challenges to your quoted statements will be ignored.
Western states are strong and stable.
The Japanese state was strong and stable.
Therefore the Japanese state is similar to a Western state.
Granted, it depends on your definition of 'similar', but if strength is the *only* similarity, what is the point of calling out Western-ness? Hence the chauvinism. It basically equates strength with Western-ness, so anything else that is strong must be 'Western' even it is nothing like it.
It's hard to really address anything you say because you mostly make negative statements. I'm not quixotic enough to try to start arguing negatives. Since you're trying to use them to wriggle away, let's return to the statement that started this:
The socio-political structures of both these countries were very similar to those we have in the west so it really wasn't terribly difficult to make it a western liberal democracy.
I challenge you, again, to name the specific 'Western' socio-political structures here referenced. Just being 'a state' does not mean that state is automatically similar to the West because the West has 'states'. That remains ludicrous. Further there is nothing indicative in the entire span of recorded Japanese history that Japanese society would be conducive to liberal Western democracy except under the terms of duress imposed by the US occupation, and I would challenge you to demonstrate otherwise.
Holy cultural chauvanism Batman! You do think that because the Japanese had a strong and stable state that made them similar to the West! You think that the 'opposite' of the 'Western' state is tribalism, completely discounting and ignoring the difference between Western and Eastern social paradigms as applied to politics and underlying cultural values and motivations. Such heinous folly I have not seen in months.
The occupational government in Japan was focused on governance - not on creating a state and the necessary infrastructure and fighting an insurgency.
This is the exact opposite of historical facts. The new Japanese constitution was drafted primarily by US Army lawyers Milo Rowell and Courtney Whitney. The Japanese constitution as passed during the occupation has never been amended.
Further while there might not have been an insurgency analogous to that in Afghanistan or Iraq, if you think the transition was some simple void to be filled, I have to go so far as to say you must be stupid as well as ignorant. Many, many forces were at work against the interests of the US occupation, including but not limited to the zaibatsu, the military and police infrastructure (see The Police In Occupation Japan: Control, Corruption and Resistance to Reform by Christopher Aldous), the yakuza, the Soviets and Japanese communists, etc. Just because the insurgency wasn't blowing shit up did not mean there wasn't one.
If you seriously are denying the day in and day out atrocities committed by the Japanese against the Chinese during every phase of their occupation and government you are delusional. If you think those atrocities are a fluke occurrence limited to just that generation of Japanese, you are fucking ignorant. I suspect it's both.
We [...] made a horrific mess out of their society by forcing Western merchant culture into it.
Now, let's pull back the curtain of white guilt and knee-jerk anticorporatism and introduce ourselves to reality. Do you know what the Zaibatsu are? The Zaibatsu are Japanese vertically integrated monopolies. Companies like Mitsubishi and Nissan; however, the oldest Zaibatsu like Mitsui and Sumitomo were founded in Japan's Edo period. These were wholly Japanese companies founded by Japanese men born in a feudal society and run in a thoroughly Japanese way. Rather than introduce "merchant culture" the US occupational administration actively tried to dismantle it because it was perceived to be a threat to US economic and military interests. So, sorry to break it to you, but *real* history is the exact opposite of your sentimental fantasy.
The simple fact is that East Asia was never populated exclusively by Buddhist mendicant monks, and that "merchant culture" has been integral to the entire continent for millennia. No period in Japanese or its neighbors' history has been immune to the fundamental human desires for wealth and power and the attendant trappings thereof. Albeit Chinese, Tang dynasty Chang'an had the largest market in the history of the pre-modern world in a city several times larger than Rome at its high water mark. The Japanese were trying as fervently as any nation from Europe to colonize the rest of East Asia and if not for WW2 would have succeeded.
Holy hell are you ignorant of history. The US ran an occupational government in Japan for seven years. And basically helped them draft their constitution at gunpoint. Democracy in Japan was most assuredly not a natural occurrence.