Bakuryo.

Joel of Far Outliers is posting passages from Japan, 1941: Countdown to Infamy, by Eri Hotta, and I found this one interesting as an example of a phenomenon that has more than once struck me in my readings of history: we tend to assume great national decisions are made by top leaders after conferring with their top aides/ministers/experts, but in fact they’re often driven by people much farther down the totem pole, like the ones described here. But this paragraph is also of interest from a linguistic point of view: This sort of painstaking institutional groundwork was carried out by middle-ranking military planners, most of whom did not even attend the liaison meetings of the top leaders. They were aptly called bakuryo, which literally means “officers behind the curtains.” In the olden days, the word baku (curtains) had a double meaning in explaining concentration of power. One was political, synonymous with the government, as in bakufu (shogunate), meaning “a regime behind the…