I don’t’ quite remember when I began to wonder how World War II would look like from the Japanese point of view.  In Chinese history books and contemporary TV shows, Imperial Japan is often portrayed as an evil empire run by crazy generals and barbarous soldiers who were utterly incompetent on the battlefield but overtly obsessed with atrocities.  Thanks to these concerted efforts, many Chinese believe that version of Japan had never died; it just lurks behind the scenes, ready to reemerge as soon as we let down our guard.  Little wonder then, in Chinese social media, anti-Japanese sentiment is like a tinderbox ready to be ignited by any trivialities taken by Chinese internet users as an insult to their national pride.  I remember the years when I feel the same way toward Japan as today’s “little pinks” (小粉红）.   It is a strange feeling, an unhealthy blend of fear, anger, hatred, humiliation, and self-pity. At some point, I realize, like every story of this proportion, there must be another narrative and interpretation.  The desire to read the story from the other side is what drew me to John Toland’s “The Rising Sun”.  I was not disappointed.

In Toland’s telling, the expansion of Imperial Japan in East and Southeast Asia and her conflict with the West, culminated in the Pacific War, was rooted in the aspiration to free Asia from exploitation by the white man.  The Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere was not only an imperial propaganda, but also an ideology many idealists in Japan genuinely subscribed to.  However, as with almost any ideology, Toland noted, it “was taken over and exploited by realists”.   Toland did not believe the Pacific war was inevitable.  He documented vividly the hesitancy, strife and desperation of the Japanese government leading up to the attack on Pearl Harbor.  Indeed, even the most feverish militarists in Tokyo, including Hideki Tojo and Isoroku Yamamoto, were reluctant to go to war against the U.S., and certainly few thought they could win. Nevertheless, the war broke because “mutual misunderstanding, language difficulties”, as well as “Japanese opportunism and irrationality, and “American racial prejudice, distrust, ignorance, rigidity, and self-righteousness.”  Toland was critical of the West, especially the British Empire, for its hypocrisy and racism, to which he no doubt assigns some blame for the outbreak of the Pacific War.   “The West had two standards of freedom,” he writes, “one for itself and one for those east of Suez,… (being) convinced that Asians did not know what was best for themselves and world security”.   He quoted Churchill’s physician, Lord Moran, who wrote in diary,

“To the president (Roosevelt), China means four hundred million people who are going to count in the world of tomorrow, but Winston thinks only of the color of their skin.”

I am sure Churchill was not the only white man of his time who had a fetish for skin color and considered yellow peril a real threat.

Several things I learned from the book had made an indelible impression on me.  The most noteworthy is perhaps Japanese soldiers’ unflinching loyalty to the emperor and indifference to sufferings and death.  Brutality seems a way of life to a Japanese soldier.  He understands to be captured by enemy is to disgrace not only himself but his comrades, family, and village.  Therefore, his motto is “Always save the last round for yourself”, as demanded in his code of conduct.   “Fight to the last man” is not just a show of resolution, but an order to be taken literally. If there is a difference between foot soldiers and generals in this regard, it is that generals usually prefer more honorable hara-kiri （切腹自杀）in the true spirit of bushido (武士道).

The last Kamikaze (神风) mission was in fact flown by the inventor of Kamikaze warfare, Admiral Matome Ugaki, who was the Chief-of-Staff for Yamamoto and the Commander-in-Chief of the 5^th Air Fleet at the time of Japan’s surrender. General Kuribayashi – whose story was dramatized in a 2007 Hollywood movie entitled “the letters from Iwo Jima” – committed hara-kiri (according to one account) after leading a ferocious defense of Iwo Jima, which he knew was a suicide mission from the beginning. He was a man of letter and believed “America is the last country in the world Japan should fight”. On the tiny island of Carregidor in Philippines, Toland writes, “5,000 Japanese defenders fought for eleven days against an aggressive, overwhelming parachute and amphibious assault. All except 20 died.”   They had no chance to make even a slight difference strategically, and it would not have mattered whether they had fought for eleven days or eleven hours. Indeed, eleven hours was how long 76,000 Philippine-American soldiers had fought before surrendering to a Japanese army of similar size three years earlier, on the same island.   Even Japanese civilians frequently prioritize death over surrender.   In the Battle of Saipan, “almost 22,000 Japanese civilians – two out of three – perished needlessly”. Many committed suicides, killing not just themselves but whole families, including children.

Why do Japanese seem to have such a high tolerance for mental and physical distress?  How could they so readily give up their lives even when, to a bystander, their ultimate sacrifice appears to no purpose?  These questions fascinated me.   Toland did not address them head-on; but if you read between lines, he has offered two clues: faith and eschatology.

Like Jesus to Christians, the emperor is the Source of Faith to Japanese.  The Imperial Way (kodo) defines Japanese morality based on the unconditional obligation to the emperor.  Most Chinese would have a hard time to understand this relationship between Japanese people and the emperor.  Through Chinese history, an emperor’s claim to the Mandate of Heaven was supposedly contingent on his being a just and able ruler.  This well-meaning principle, of course, had produced endless bloody struggles for the throne, by ambitious men who thought, often prematurely, their turn to represent Heaven had arrived. In Japan, the emperor is worshiped as God, and his reign is eternal and irreplaceable. Without the emperor, all Japanese would be without country, without parents, homeless.

According to Toland, the Japanese eschatology is best expressed in the word sayonara – it is often translated as “good-bye” but its precise meaning is in fact “so be it” (就这样吧).  To Japanese, life is ever shifting on an erratic path.  Every moment could bring abrupt changes, even death.  Thus, they say sayonara to everything every moment, which could be their last.   Paradoxically, the acceptance of death at any moment gave the Japanese “the strength to face disaster stoically and a calm determination to let nothing discourage or disappoint”.   They are always ready to take whatever life throws at them with a sayonara, so be it!

I imagine many Chinese readers would find Toland suspiciously lenient on the hideous war crimes perpetrated by Imperial Japan against other Asian countries, especially China.   This is not surprising given the book’s perspective is decisively a Japanese one.  Perhaps Toland’s wife, who was born and raised in Japan, further tilted the balance in Japan’s favor.  In any case, I agree with Toland on one thing: there is no such thing as evil people, only evil ideology. Imperial Japanese is not the first people poisoned by a lethal combination of faith and extreme ideology. Nor would it be the last.

If you’ve ever wondered why you are on track to lose nearly a third of your life to sleep, or are not entirely happy about your relationship with sleep, then this book is a must read.  I first heard about it from Sam Harris’s interview of the author, Matthew Walker, a professor of neuroscience and psychology at UC Berkeley, and was immediately intrigued by their conversation. At least this time, my curiosity did pay off, as I have learned so much that I did not know before.

Our sleep consists of two kinds, the kind with dreaming, called rapid-eye movement (REM) sleep, and the kind without, called non-REM (NREM) sleep or deep sleep. They serve different functions. Basically, NREM sleep helps clean the brain, consolidate and retain memory, and therefore is critical to learning and retaining knowledge, as well as maintaining cognitive ability.  Persistent lack of NREM sleep is a known risk factor for Alzheimer’s (old timers) disease.  REM sleep, on the other hand, is closely related to emotion and social behaviors.  The newborns of heavy-drinking mothers are more likely to suffer from mental illness—including autism—when they grow up, partly because their REM sleep are disrupted by alcohol.

Sleep is controlled by two processes: circadian cycle （生物钟）and sleep pressure.  The circadian cycle is an internal clock regulated by melatonin (脑白金)， whose main function is to tell the brain and body “it is dark and please get ready for bed”.  Next time when you take melatonin to mitigate your suffering from a jet-lag, remember that message, and that message alone, is what you are getting. The sleep pressure is created by another chemical called adenosine, which begins to build up in your brain once you wake up and which can only be reduced by sleep.  Drinking coffee, however, can resist sleep pressure because caffeine helps block the receptor cells in the brain designed to “feel” the pressure.   Two facts about caffeine are especially noteworthy – sorry coffee drinkers, but please read.  First, “caffeine is one of the most common culprits that keep people from falling asleep easily and sleeping soundly thereafter”. Second, if you cannot get through the morning without caffeine, then most likely you have “self-medicated your state of chronic sleep deprivation”.

Walker is eager to tell everyone who would listen that getting sufficient sleep, at least seven hours a day, is of pivotal importance to human health, neurologically and physiologically. Human beings routinely give up sleep in exchange for activities deemed more productive, valuable, or enjoyable.  In some cultures, self-inflicted sleep deprivation is an emblem of work ethic, if not a badge of honor.   Walker repeatedly warns us of the grieve danger of this chivalrous attitude toward sleep. His book documents, sometimes with gruesome details, how sleep loss could inflict devastating, even lethal, effects on the brain and the body, causing or worsening countless disorders and diseases, ranging from anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder to cancer, diabetes, obesity, and infertility.   Remember, 99% of humans cannot function optimally without at least seven-hour-sleep a day; so obviously your odds of being among that 1% (who has a sub-variant of a gene called BHLHE41) is not as good as you might like.

Let me end with a laundry list of Dos and don’ts. First and foremost, neither sleeping pill nor alcohol can help you sleep better.   As sedatives, these substances give you not so much good sleep as induced unconsciousness.   In other words, you may think you have slept, but you would not get any benefits associated with sleeping.  Here are a few things that do help: (i) reduce caffeine and alcohol intake; (ii) avoid exposure to LED light before sleep (including from screens of your phones, tablets, and computers), (iii) have a cool bedroom (around 18 degree Celsius);  remember, to initiate sleep, your core temperature need to drop about 1 degree Celsius, and finally (iv) stick to a regular bedtime and wake-up time as much as possible.

Until I come across John Rawls’ book, I have never thought the word Theory can be associated with Justice (公正).  I was reluctant to commit my leisure time to reading “theories” (my job gives me plenty already), but my better judgement was overridden by the charisma of the loaded buzzword of our time.  Don’t get me wrong: the book is worth reading.  However, getting through five hundred pages of hard (and dry) reasoning and argument—with few stories or quips to catch a break—was quite a mental exercise.  Well, here is what I have learned.

A theory of justice is a set of principles designed to resolve the conflict of interests arising from human cooperation.  These principles form the basis for regulating social behaviors and arranging political institutions.   Rawls’ theory, which earned him the reputation as one of the most influential political philosophers of the 20th century, is dubbed “Justice as Fairness”.   It consists of three principles. The first principle (A) guarantees an equal right to “most extensive” basic liberties.  The other two state social and economic inequalities are just if and only if they (B) are attached to positional goods open to all under conditions of equal opportunity, and (C) maximize primary goods enjoyed by the least advantaged members of society.  The three principles follow a lexical order: the equal liberty principle (A) takes priority, followed by the equal opportunity principle (B) and the difference principle (C).

At first glance justice as fairness seems decisively egalitarian.  Rawls advocates compensation for the “undeserved inequalities” from birth and natural endowment.  Under the difference principle (C), “society must give more attention to those with fewer native assets and to those born into the less favorable social positions”.  An example is spending greater resources on “the education of the less rather than the more intelligent”.  In fact, Rawls has gone so far as to assert the willingness to make an effort is also contingent upon social circumstances. In other words, even inequalities caused by laziness may be undeserved and thus warrant social redress.    To be sue, Rawls does not support eradicating inequalities all together. Instead, inequalities are to be tolerated in so far as they benefit everyone, especially the most disadvantaged.    Moreover, positional goods should be distributed based on the equal opportunity principle, and if doing so leads to inequalities, so be it.  Thus, Rawls seems to prefer meritocracy to equal-outcome when it comes to positional goods. There is a catch though: everyone must “have reasonable opportunity to acquire the skills on the basis of which merit is assessed”.  Needless to say, compensations are necessary to meet such a requirment.

Rawls contends justice as fairness is preferred by moral persons at the original position.   He assumes moral persons know what is right (i.e., have a sense of justice) and what constitutes their own good.  As such, moral persons are entitled to equal justice. As Rawls puts it, “those who can give justice are owed justice”.   The original position, on the other hand, wraps everyone with a veil of ignorance. From behind this veil, nobody knows their social status or natural asset.  As a result, they cannot and will not tailor the principles to their own advantage.   Rawls’ moral persons are not altruistic, but mutually disinterested and rational.  This means they (i) strive to maximize their own good, as defined by the rational plan of life, and (ii) are indifferent to the good of others, in both absolute and relative terms.    Rawls’ faith in the better angels of our nature is admirable, but I am not sure our cravings for justice can resist the incessant onslaught of envy, vanity, and self-serving biases.   A society built on justice as fairness may be ideal, even optimal. But will it be stable?  Perhaps that’s what Benjamin Franklin had in mind when he proclaimed, “A republic if YOU CAN KEEP IT!”

Rawls staunchly opposes utilitarianism, the idea that a society is property arranged when its institutions maximize the net balance of welfare.  He believes “each person possesses an inviolability founded on justice that even the welfare of society as a whole cannot override.”   Therefore, justice “denies that the loss of freedom for some is made right by a greater good shared by others.”   These words ring so true as I am, like many of my friends are, trying to understand what the heck is going on in Shanghai.

To the heatedly debated nature vs. nurture question, Plomin’s Blueprint gives an unnuanced answer: it is the nature that makes you who you are.  According to the book, DNA explains half of the differences among us, in both physical and psychological traits.  At first glance, this verdict seems to leave at least the other half to the impact of nurture or the environment.  But here is the catch: the environmental effects are not only strongly correlated with DNA, but also unsystematic and unstable.  In other words, there is very little we can do about them. Your weight, for example, is almost 70% heritable (i.e., 70% of the differences in weight among a population come from genetical differences).   To cite another example that many might dismiss as a reductio ad absurdum, even your likelihood of getting a divorce has a heritability of 40%.

These findings have fascinating implications for society at large, especially parenting and education.  For one thing, those who are obsessed with getting their kids into Ivy League should know schools contribute only 2% to educational achievements.   In other words, excellent students produce excellent schools, not the other way around.  More importantly, parents have much less systematic impact on their children’s outcomes than they are led to believe.   Tiger moms should not expect their kids to be “blobs of clay that can be molded however they wish”.   In fact, kids are not even quite a blank canvas on which you can paint your favorite pictures. They are more like a canvas with a blueprint that your paint brush could either refine or ruin.

The book is an easy and enjoyable read, and the DNA literacy it tries to provide is well delivered and much appreciated.  Yet, I was sometimes taken aback by the tacit fatalism in the book. and wondered how it might undermine our commitment to good parenting.  I am also deeply troubled by the prospect of using genomes as a scientific fortune teller, to label and classify human beings at birth.

Nevertheless, the book does convince me that we are all fundamentally shaped by our DNA, more so than any other factors.  To me, this means life is like a constrained optimization problem for which we may choose the objectives but not the constraints.  That is, your free will can still decide where you land, so long as the target is within the feasible set.

Professor Sowell’s contempt for “intellectuals” is remarkable.  In his telling, intellectuals create and promote ideas that often harm society gravely; they pretend to master subjects on which they have no more expertise than a layman;  they advocate radical societal  changes to whose disastrous consequences they are neither accountable nor susceptible;  they demand society treat their lofty visions “as axioms to be followed, not as hypothesis to be tested”; they are self-righteous narcissists whose primary preoccupation is to gain and maintain moral hegemony over the mass.  In a nutshell, intellectuals are the “enemy of the people”, to quote Mr. Trump. Or in the words of the Dear Leader from another time, they are the filthy ninth (臭老九) who deserve to be condemned to the lowest rung of society and be continually reeducated by proletariat.

While Sowell’s sweeping denunciation apparently applies to all intellectuals, you need not to read between the lines to understand his real target is left-leaning liberals.  Conservative intellectuals—the likes of Friedman and Hayek—are the good ones.  To borrow a cliché from the gun advocates, only the good guys with ideas can stop the bad guys with ideas.

To be sure, Sowell’s harsh critiques of liberals contain more than a grain of truth. However, as a lifetime intellectual himself, his completely lopsided approach is still puzzling, and sometimes feels personal.   Shockingly, Sowell cannot even bring himself to praise liberals’ support for Civil Rights Act, which prohibits discrimination against his fellow African Americans.  “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day” is how he shrugs off the only good thing he has to say about liberals in the book.

Fred Hirsch was no big-time economist.  His brief academic career was cut short by ALS, the same disease that killed Tony Judt. Yet, his Social Limits on Growth is a masterpiece, probably not a book you could read for fun lying on the coach, but definitely worth the time and effort.

According to Hirsch, capitalism is doomed to trap everyone in counterproductive competition for positional goods such as Ivy League education and elite jobs.  This phenomenon may be best described as “involution” （内卷）, to borrow a popular Chinese Internet Meme.   Economic growth cannot solve the involution trap. On the contrary, growth is bound to fortify it, by fulfilling the ever-increasing demand for material goods. Nor could redistribution overcome the scarcity of position goods. As Hirsch noted, “there is no such thing as leveling up” when reward is set by the position on the slope, because “the slope itself prevents a leveling”.    Therefore, the image of “a rising-tide-lifts-all-boats” is an illusion because the tide cannot keep rising and not all boats could stay above the water at the same time.

Hirsch seems rather pessimistic about finding any operational solution to the social limits on growth. In the end, he wonders whether the belief in incremental progress itself is but a pipe-dream, “a nonfiction version of the happy-ending”, or “a faith that is as utopian as the Utopianism it seeks to replace”.

Winners take all is about the dream of “doing well by doing good”, the idea that there is always a win-win solution to every social problem, and the belief that elites equipped with technology and market tools should be entrusted to lead social changes, preferably independent of the democratic processes, or politics. The author argues these ideas are largely an illusion, if not a deception, because the overlap between individual and collective interest is limited.  There is nothing wrong about wanting to do well by doing good; but we are kidding ourselves if we believe these do-gooders are saviors of our collective future.  The book is very harsh on the intellectuals who promote these ideas.  These so-called “thought leaders” are described as the cheerleaders employed by the “idea industry” to project positive energy, presumably at the expense of our collective good.

Overall, a good and easy read, and the main argument is fair and well-reasoned, if not entirely neutral.

This short review was originally written in April of 2021.

Overall,  Antifragile is a disappointment.  This is not to say it offers no interesting and useful ideas. It does.  What strikes me the most are the oversized impact of tail events (black swans) and their utter unpredictability, our ruinous obsession with optimization and intervention, and the agent problem ubiquitous in modern societies.  However, Taleb could have explained these ideas in 40 pages. Instead, he wrote 400, filling many of them with impulsive bragging, as well as his signature rant against the entire intellectual establishment.  In the end, I felt these self-inflicted distractions severely undermine the narrative and the logic flow.    I was looking forward to reading Black Swan, but after this experience, I wonder whether it would be worth my time.

A special note for my fellow academics who might be interested in Taleb’s work: he absolutely hates professors and minces no words berating them, so if you take the challenge, buckle up for a bumpy ride.

One of the good things that came out of COVID19 pandemic is I suddenly discovered (or rediscovered?) a new hobby: reading.  Post War is among the first books I read after the pandemic starts. This short review was written in December 2020.

Tony Judt’s Post War is a great read for anyone who is curious about Europe since WWII.  You may be disappointed if you expect a completely objective narrative based on data and stories. Don’t get me wrong—Judt is a good storyteller and he tells a wide range of stories, in fact, so broad he even commented on David Beckham, describing him as “an English player of moderate technical gifts but an unsurpassed talent for self-promotion”….He does, however, insistently make you feel his presence, preference, and emotions in these stories. I love his style, but I realize some may prefer historians without strong opinions.

Judt never hides his love for the “European Social Model”, which recognizes the state has the duty to “shield citizens from the hazards of misfortune or the market”, and “social responsibility and economic advantage should not be mutually exclusive”.  At the end of the book, he passionately compares Europe with America and China, writing, “America would have the biggest army and China would make more, and cheaper, goods. But neither America nor China had a serviceable model to propose for universal emulation. In spite of the horrors of their recent past—and in large measure because of them—it was Europeans who were now uniquely placed to offer the world some modest advice on how to avoid repeating their own mistakes. Few would have predicted it sixty years before, but the twenty-first century might yet belong to Europe.”