Today’s conventional wisdom yesterday

• “long endurance of America”? Check.
• “shipbuilding and defense production” sped up in wartime by “psychological pressure to unprecedented levels”? Check.
• “fearful risk of complete defeat by extending the war”? Check.

Mason’s forecast is overly generous to “Tokio”. It claims it’s “scarcely” possible that Japan could be drawn into war by “axis arguments based on desperate hopes”. Mason’s forecast is equally overly generous to Berlin in claiming it’s “scarcely” likely it had reached a “state of mental outlook” that would lead to war with the United States. Mason’s working definition of “scarcely” seems to equal one year, plus or minus a few weeks.

It wouldn’t surprise me if Mason’s Japanese acquaintances were among those Japanese who “can be realistic”. Americans often see foreign things through interlocutor eyes with enough shared tics to completely veil the alien. However, Mason’s qualified use of can reflects some awareness that the Japanese did not have to be realistic, at least according to Masonic definitions rooted in American notions of what is realistic under conditions of scarcely. Some Japanese knew that Japan’s chances of victory in a Materialschlacht with the reigning Master of More were materially non-existent. Cue ominous music, background to yet another seemingly prophetic incantation of Yamamoto Isoroku’s supposed quote.

Yamamoto’s supposed compliment is popular in this country, land of the “sleeping giant”. It’s a meditation on our own awesomeness, like listening to the sound of one back slapping. This sketchy acknowledgment impressed some later Americans so much that they sometimes elevate Yamamoto to honorary American, in consciousness if not de jure. Yamamoto was a reverse Mason: he spent time in America. He must have known he would lose as far back as 1919. Tojo and friends must be blockheads if they don’t listen to their Yamamotos and preemptively surrender to American awesomeness.

But some foreign observers were realists even by Masonic standards. They saw American “moral aggression”, felt its potency, and saw that their only realistic counter was to scale up to American economies of scale, even if the scaling up was a gamble on the sleeping giant staying asleep while they carved out American beating lebensraums out of some promising part of Eurasia. Adam Tooze has argued that, after 1916, American power was so overwhelming that other global polities that aspired to greatness were de facto international insurgents against American dominion and its Masons. A Japanese “who can be very realistic” was someone like Lt. Col. Kanji Ishiwara, Imperial Japanese Army. He gambled that Japan could carve its American beating lebensraum out of China, allowing teeny Japan to materially go toe to toe with the American colossus before the colossus scarcely knew what hit it. Ishiwara gambled, a gamble that fathered a cascade of gambles toppling towards Hiroshima.

For Ishiwara, there had to be a shortage of Masons that could see what he or his German mentors were up to as they tried lebensrauming Eurasia if his gamble was to succeed. Unfortunately for Ishiwara, there were enough Masons, some even deigning to write columns read in Oshkosh, Wisconsin and other outposts of America’s trend-setting lebensraum, to frustrate Ishiwaran insurgents of the mid-20th century. These Masons of a new order knew what was up with Ishiwara and ilk. This made Ishiwaran projects unrealistic. For Ishiwara and friends, nemesis was spelled Willard Sidney Kellett: they were cruising for his bruising.

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