Saturday, June 29, 2013

Inscrutable Japanese Pep Talk

"You can tell a man's character by the way he makes advances to a woman. Men like you, for example- when the fleet's in port and you go off to have a good time, you seem to have only two ways of going about things. First you put it straight to the woman: "Hey, how about a lay?" Now, any woman, even the lowest whore is going to put up at least a show of refusing if she's asked like that. So what do you do next? You either act insulted and get rough, or you give up immediately and go off to try the same thing on the next woman. That's all you're capable of. But take a look at Western men- they're quite different. Once they've set their sights on a woman, they invite her out for a drink, or to dinner, or to go dancing. In that way they gradually break down her defenses until, in the end, they get what they want, and in style at that. Where achieving a particular aim is concerned, that's surely a far wiser way of going about things. At any rate, they're the kind of men you'd be dealing with if there were a war, so you better give it some thought."
-Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto
in 1939 to his junior officers, quoted in "The Reluctant Admiral"