I recently had the opportunity to participate in The Samurai Game developed by George Leonard. The following are some of my thoughts as the respective leader (Daimyo in Japanese) of my team.
*Spoiler alert.* Minor details of the game will be discussed. Every game will operate in likely vastly different ways depending on the facilitator. Thus reading this is unlikely to give you any advanced competitive knowledge.
Being picked as a leader was a rather surreal moment for me. It is done non-verbally and is done through an eventual consensus like process where everyone must look and face the person they would wish to lead. Only one person can be chosen. Having nearly 20 people all silently starting at me felt somewhat like this perhaps:
My greatest lesson learned as the Daimyo is that I need to articulate precisely how it is that I wish to lead and what the expectations of my team is. Due to the way the samurai system was framed beforehand, many people thought I should rule single-handedly with no input from them. Some people thought of themselves as pawns, and that I was the master chess player. This is NOT how I like to lead. Ultimately I do like to make all the final decisions however I want feedback and opinions and ideas all the way there. I see my role as a leader more as an ultimate decision maker, not all knowing micro-managing god.
On the other hand some of the very outspoken women on my team, just begin throwing suggestions and ideas in, and I very much appreciate when people take a participatory role in helping things out. I very much dislike micromanaging so the auto self-delegation was nice.
The responsibility of leading I find stressful in some regards, and I got to explore what that is like. I am scared of being wrong, and most of all terrified of hurting peoples feelings. This is a big one for me and one I am going to have to get over.
Also I realized I feel most comfortable leading when I understand all the variables very well, and have time to think and make decisions. In the Samurai game very little information is given about what to expect in terms of battles so it’s impossible to create a strategy. Much of the battle is up to the individual team members so as a leader I spend most of my time watching.
I realized some people make better leaders in situations where there is a lot of unpredictability and spontaneity. I feel that ESFJs or ESTJs are better suited to those roles. Those kind of leadership roles are more fitting of the “captain/Lieutenant/commander” title. ENTJs really are Field Marshals the ones who have the highest rank and captains report too. In essence I as ENTJ am a better leader of leaders rather than a leader of the bottom ranks in the field on the ground.
Figuring out that distinction was a nice lesson for me. I still need to practice my “captain” leadership more though. When I am in that role I like to lead from the front, but the structure of the game had me leading from behind. I realized I quickly get activated as I try to account for all the variables. This quickly can overwhelm a person and dissociate them. Being relaxed and being ok with making mistakes is a necessity.
The Fates/facilitators tested me hard by being downright rude and challenging me on every little thing, demanding perfection. They were trying to overwhelm me on purpose to see if they could crack me! Not cool, but I saw through their game and didn’t care.
Two rules of the game I found particularly annoying was one you are not allowed to smile and two you are not allowed to look the facilitators (the fates) in the eyes or catch their gaze. Doing either of these things would result in severe consequences of some kind. These rules are in keeping with the overall style of the game adhering loosely to traditional Japanese Samurai honor code. However they also reflect Japanese society at large.
I have always had a love-hate relationship with Japanese culture. I took Japanese in high school and learned to read and write in their two basic alphabets. I have also traveled to Japan to experience their culture first hand visiting the largest feudal castle on the planet and seeing all the major sites. Japan is an incredibly xenophobic and homogeneous society and can be quite racist. Startlingly so. Seeing non-Japanese people walking the streets of Tokyo is a rarity considering many of the other major cities international I have been to in the world.
I have always admired their technical expertise, attention to detail and travelling there is a bit like travelling to the future. Their society on the surface seems Utopian and perfectly run. Everyone is overly polite and courteous. Japanese culture also has strong similarities to my ethnic German heritage in terms of emphasis on reason/intellect and order. As myers-briggs archetypes both cultures are overtly archetypal INTJ and ISTJ. Those archetypes are the cultural standard which everything in therms of value, integrity and honor is measured against.
Which brings me to the things I dislike about Japanese culture. Japanese people as a generalization have a bit of a superiority complex. With honor comes great pride, however a pride based primarily on negating emotions and adherence to order and logic to an extreme. Japanese people publicly display very little emotion, although you can tell behind those faces the repressed emotions are taking their toll on their collective souls. It is unquestionably the most emotionally repressive society on earth. Becoming angry in public is like losing face. It is simply something you just do not do. Unlike in north america public displays of emotion are seen very frequently.
Japanese culture is incredibly hierarchical. The flip side of honor is shame, and those two always go hand in hand. Shame is feared very strongly. A friend of mine who lives in Japan told me how kids in one grade simply do not make friends with kids in the next grade. It is unacceptable to make friends across even simple differences such as age by a couple of years. Paradoxically in a country jam packed with people, isolation and loneliness are rampant. Talking to strangers is very, very rarely done. Thus people suffer greatly, to the point where Japan has one of the highest suicide rates in the world. Their honor system is killing them….
Back to the game. Leaders are expected to rule their teams with an iron fist. In fact the Fates frame it this way, by giving in the instructions often somewhat ambiguous terms and allowing no room for questions or clarification. This often giving rise to confusion later in the game. There are too many rules for any person to remember 100% which breeds frustration. I believe this is done on purpose.
Being as this game was developed by an american, the Fates acted more like angry temperamental american military commanders than Japanese anything I have ever seen. I even trained in Japanese swordsmanship briefly many years ago and the way the Fates behaved themselves was characteristicly NOT-Japanese in any way. Which royally pissed me off. I have zero respect for that kind of taunting disrespectful behavior.
For a game billed on as principled on honor the Fates acted altogether dis-honorably and on purpose. This hypocrisy among others annoyed me deeply. The examples being set were conflicting.
The honor-shame system does still exist in Japanese society and while it has certain romantic elements to it, it also has serious disadvantages. The recent Fukushima nuclear disaster is a case in point. Japanese society and its organizations are structured in the same way the game is in that you do NOT question authority and do NOT give advice to authority. Leaders rule dictatorially and fear of shame keeps everyone in their place. Needless to say this bodes very poorly for bottom to top lines of communication and feedback, because the flow of information typically only goes one way. From top to bottom.
This can cause fatal mistakes to occur, as is VERY evident in the game. Ideas of honor get wrapped up in this philosophy and all kinds of conflicting viewpoints come to the forefront. Do you act according to personal ideas of honor to self? Do you act of honor to your leader? Or some other imagined abstract ideal? Do you die for the greater good or not? Is family honor greater than society at large?
The film The Last Samurai was referenced many times throughout the program, and the final battle is one scene that always stuck out in my mind. In it the “last” samurai are mercilessly decimated by machine guns having come with mere swords and horses to do battle. The big question for me always has been; is running fearlessly and suicidally straight into machine gun fire and subsequently dying honorable or just plain stupid?
The biggest dilemma that typically comes up for people in the game was the question of is it honorable to exploit an opponents weakness? Most people would likely say no, they want things to be fair. But when in human history has WAR been about fairness? What about life?
The mixed martial arts systems I personally have trained in took the opposite stance in that they trained me to exploit weakness rather than to fight “fairly”. In my quest to discover the most effective combat systems in the world the Japanese due to their very rigid thought systems which made them predictable in battle was one of the worst out there.
Japanese Karate has got to be one of the least effective combat systems in the world and also the most rigid. Combat is inherently unpredictable so adaptability and creativity may be more important than anything else. Most military systems involve extreme forms of self-discipline which is a double edged sword in that if that kind of linear thinking is carried forward in life/combat/war in general it’s going to fail pretty quickly. There are some great concepts in Aikido, however you don’t see it being used to win MMA tournaments. It is the type of system that only works in highly controlled predictable environments where your opponent only comes at you in one specific way.
So the game enforces linear style samurai thought, and then throws a punch of spontaneous elements at you. It’s a contradiction in terms and the biggest flaw of the game.
Japanese people have proven themselves not to be a very adaptable culture. They progressed really well technologically when it was largely linear logical straight forward progress, but recently have suffered greatly in terms of creative innovation. Samsung now makes the best electronics instead of Sony, and Hyundai makes the best quality cars instead of toyota. Japan is falling behind quickly, they are losing in terms of creative adaptability.
Sometimes I wonder if they even invented many profound things to begin with. It seems they merely improved on outside ideas because nearly all their technology from the combustion engine to the integrated circuit came from the western world. Even their exceptional quality they have a reputation for, was largely fostered and due to a white dude (Demming) going over there after the war and helping them out.
The structure of the samurai game did NOTHING to foster creative adaptability in terms of its philosophical framework. The samurai/Japanese philosophy works against the very process of the game as it still does in their society. It’s a society that at the cultural level is exceptionally resistant to change.
This was my experience in the Samurai game and actual independent samurai combat training. The general samurai philosophy is one that is counter-productive to nurturing creativity.
It is why the Fukushima nuclear disaster has no end in sight, and why the countries total debt to gdp ratio is in excess of 500% with complete denial of the public and government at large. Fiscally Japan is about to hit a massive brick wall and almost no one sees it coming. (watch Kyle Bass lecture on it)
One thing I noticed was the Samurai “code of honor” put at the front of the room with its rules had at least two rules that took the form of negations. I don’t remember what they were but an example it would be something like “Do no evil”. Which is a terrible rule, in that in order to not do evil one has to think about what it is to do evil, and then to not do that which one is thinking of. The mind works best when given rules in the positive such as “Do Good”.
In the end my team had the most people standing. The opposing Daimyo was given an opportunity (after having declined seppuku several times) for one last chance to face myself in battle. I had the option of accepting or declining. Accepting meant he could still win, declining I would give up the “highest samurai” honor of the ability to commit seppuku (ritual suicide). I gladly gave up that honor as a gigantic fuck you to the samurai honor system and declined.
After all was said and done many people came up to me and complimented my leadership. However, two ESFJ tank grrrls came up to me to tell me they thought what I did was a dick move. My worst fear of offending someone came true, and in the end I actually felt good about having offended at least some people. As a leader it’s impossible to make everyone happy and the sooner you can learn to realize that and own it the more effective you will be.
Personally I feel the Samurai Game along with Japanese/samurai ideas on honor is a terrible way to foster personal development. The overarching philosophy runs into direct conflict with what the game tries to get people to learn. It will leave people more confused than anything with no clear path forward steeped in old archaic ideas from a culture that has lost context in the fast paced changing modern world.
Thus “winning” in the end felt bittersweet and reminded me of this scene from Indiana Jones – Raiders of the Lost Ark
Moral of the story…. Don’t bring a knife to a gun fight.
Heroic Mastery 