But back to haragei. Japanese language at the higher levels is nothing if not diplomatic, as befits a people knit together by a combination of (supposed) racial purity, Confucianism, and having to live cheek-by-jowl with each other. Communication is never ever direct, always roundabout and metaphorical: you let your soul rather than your mouth speak, and the listener picks up on the cues and gets the meaning without the meaning having to be said.
Moreover, the decision-making process in Japan is referred to as nemawashi 根回し, a term which refers to bonsai tree root-pruning. Group decisions are only made after round after round after round of roundabout discussion, deliberation, analysis, and ensuring a consensus of all involved parties, particularly all involved authorities. It might be described as ready-aim-ready-aim-ready-aim-ready-aim-ready-aim-ready-aim-ready-aim-ready-aim-fire. While the nemawashi process is going on, everyone has to wait for the consensus to build.
Which takes us to mokusatsu, 黙殺. When PM Suzuki responded to the Potsdam Declaration, he used the term mokusatsu, and people have for the last 70 years or so debated just what the word was supposed to mean. It literally means "kill with silence," and it came across to the US as a slap in the face, that the Declaration was beneath the contempt of the Japanese government and so did not deserve a response. IIRC, it was this that prompted Truman to drop the bomb as an in-your-face response.
The problem, of course, is that what Suzuki may have meant was simply that the Declaration would not be accepted, rejected, or (attempt to be) negotiated until the nemawashi process was completed--something that would be obvious to any Japanese who listened, not to the words, but to the haragei. Or it could have meant that the Japanese government would ignore the Declaration until it came up with its own counteroffer. Or it could have meant, but almost certainly did not mean, that the Japanese wanted to give the Allies a slap in the face and a complete refusal to consider terms of surrender...
...except that this is exactly what the Allies took the word as meaning, because they got Suzuki's response in a Japanese-to-English translation that got the words correct and the meaning incorrect, because the meaning was hidden in haragei.
Would it have made any difference if the Allies had understood what Suzuki meant by mokusatsu? Probably not: Atlee evidently didn't care what happened to Japan (choosing Bevin as his foreign minister partly proves that, I think), Chiang was by this time more concerned with Mao than with Japan, Stalin wanted to loot Mongolia and Manchuria and maybe get the northern half of Japan...and Americans wanted to see the Japanese grovel the way they had seen the Nazis grovel, if not more. But history is a series of what ifs, and this is one of the bigger "what ifs" of WWII.
Thank-you for your comments. I’ll chew on this one all day and come back later for a second helping.
There is a time for subtlety, and a time not to be subtle.
Obviously, the Japanese warmongers didn’t know the difference.
Personally, I’m quite averse to this particular cultural trait of the Japanese. I consider it to be a form of sophistry, the shrouding of the truth rather than its forth-telling. In other words, I think it, generally-speaking, dishonest and deceitful.
I much favor Truman’s American style. Flat out tell it like it is.
Or like LeMay’s. ‘We’re going to flatten these cities. Get out or die.’
Spanish is my second language. Often when someone asks me the meaning of a sentence or phrase I tell them what it literally means, but a different and more accurate translation would be how we would express the same thought in English. And, of course, the cultural differences are not nearly as vast as between Europeans/Americans and the Japanese.