5 ideas
In wartime Japan, authority was spread across the emperor, cabinet, army, navy and bureaucracy, and each derived its legitimacy from proximity to the throne rather than from its own decisions. As a result no actor ever owned a choice. Everyone could claim they were carrying out the imperial will or the 'trend of events', so policy moved forward while responsibility vanished at every link in the chain.
They said they had simply accepted a fait accompli or bowed to the general mood. Maruyama contrasts this with the Nuremberg defendants, who at least owned their choices. The Japanese leaders, by their own account, never decided the war they waged.
In a hierarchy where each rank's value comes from closeness to the supreme authority, people offset the pressure from above by pushing arbitrary pressure onto those below. Humiliation passes downward link by link to the lowest soldier, who then vents it on colonized or occupied peoples. That transfer is the psychological mechanism Maruyama uses to explain the brutality of Japanese troops abroad.
Unlike European states, which after the wars of religion treated inner values as a private matter, the Meiji state set itself up as the source of both truth and morality, centred on the emperor. Because the state claimed a monopoly on value, no independent ethical standpoint remained from which individuals could judge or resist state action. Obedience therefore became indistinguishable from virtue.
Look at how decisions get justified. If leaders cite 'the situation that has developed' or 'what had already been done' instead of their own judgment, the organization is being run by accumulated facts rather than by choices. Seeing through this lens shows how elites can be dragged along by subordinates' faits accomplis, such as field army incidents in Manchuria, and then ratify them afterward as though they were inevitable.