[higgmeister]

The story of the Japanese WWII codes is a cautionary tale about reasoning from a conclusion. There were several other spectacular successes from codebreaking, such as shooting down Yamamoto. But in every case the Japanese concluded since their code was unbreakable it couldn't have been codebreaking. So, they blamed their disasters on spies, bad luck, anything other than American intelligence reading their radio traffic.

The Japanese are still like this to a degree. I had a friend that worked for NEC and was sent to Japan to learn their telephone Switch. He said that their troubleshooting methods are exactly the opposite of our American companies. We learn to logically look for the simplest faults and then check successively up to the most difficult trouble. The Japanese are trained to look for the most difficult fail point first. My friend said it was a matter of pride with them. The would never insult anyone by asking them to look for the obvious. They would spend all day checking every component before finally checking to see if the power switch was turned on.

[colorado tanker]

Face is so important in Asian countries. It would not do to tell someone they had not, in fact, created an unbreakable code.