Brigitte Amor comments

"However, in Japan, a tremendous deal of company bonding and teamwork strengthening occurs outside of the office at these gatherings."

Seems to me, a tremendous deal of company bonding and teamwork strengthening should be occurring in the goddamn office. No wonder the Japanese are such robotic automatons. Their entire lives are governed by their companies -- a form of indentured slavery, since they certainly don't get paid for being forced to attend these useless forms of worker abuse.

They just show up at the office the next day hung over and doing half the work they might have done had they been allowed to go home and get a decent nights' sleep the day before.

Absolutely typical from a nation of robots raised as such from cradle to the grave.

Umm . . . people forget that this was in an era when young men didn't just sign up to fight in "The Great War," they practically trampled each other to get in line. When entire countries treated anyone who went to war as Magnificent Men Willing to Sacrifice Themselves for King and Country."

No one much discusses the legions -- hundreds of thousands is probably a pathetic undercount -- of young men who actually survived yet as human wrecks, both physically and mentally. The injuries incurred alone were horrific enough to traumatize an entire generation. Yet who remembers any of that?

"Go down with the ship, damn the torpedoes" were the watchwords of a sadly deluded catastrophe of a human generation that did everything possible with the wrongest of motivations, where men murdered wives and savaged children with impunity, where humanity was at the end of the middle ages yet not ready to step into modernity. Make no mistake -- it was a grisly time to be alive, and for a man such as Hosono to be "vilified" for saving himself is just a sad monument to the misbegotten motivations of a sadly infantilized human race.

They proved every word I just said by repeating the entire ordeal just 20 years later. You'd better believe you're living in a more "civilized" era, though many would undoubtedly rather return to that age of ignorance and indifference to human life.