I’ve been informed by Allen Nightingale that the Kunduz bombing resembles the Panay Incident of 1937. Indeed, it does.
Japan had been at war with China for 6 months. A U.S. ship, the Panay, had informed the Japanese of who it was, where it was and its mission to evacuate U.S. military persons, civilians, and embassy persons. The ship was clearly marked. Nevertheless, the Japanese attacked and sunk the vessel. Several Standard Oil tankers evacuating company personnel were also sunk.
“Modern historians have gone back and analyzed the attack. Many now believe that the attack may have been intentional. According to John Prados, Navy cryptographers had intercepted and decrypted traffic relating to the attacking planes which clearly indicated that they were under orders during the attack and that it had not been a mistake of any kind.”
“… the presence of U.S. Navy flags, which would have been visible from the air, suggests the attack had not been a mistake, but rather a type of unauthorized action known by the classical Japanese term Gekokujō.”
What is “Gekokujō”? “In the context of Confucian tradition, Gekokujō is a kind of ‘government from below’ that is condoned; and a ‘government of men’ is contrasted with a ‘government of laws.'”
“Later centuries used the concept of gekokujō as justification for junior and mid-level military officers engaging in principled disobedience if they were motivated by moral principles. This happened in Manchuria and Tokyo several times during the 1930s. Army officers engaged in provocative attacks in Manchuria in attempts to create justification for seizing territory from China. In Japan, ultranationalist military officers led waves of assassinations against political and business leaders to ‘purify’ Japanese society of the corporate and political party influences that they believed were preventing Japan from attaining its rightful place among nations through Asian expansion.”
Although there is no evidence at the moment that the Kunduz attack arose from principled disobedience of an organized body of rebellious U.S. special forces, it resembles a wildcat strike, a kind of limited case of gekokujō. It may turn out that this Japanese concept applies to Kunduz as it applied to the Panay.
9:58 am on October 10, 2015
