North Korea to follow Germany's model

[Tellos Athenaios]

How is it that Pape clearly saw my point, and TA did not? I can only chalk it up to not reading my post fully, perhaps due to false preconceptions of the point he thought I was trying to make?

Eh? If your comparison is nothing more than "they both had cults of personality" and both referred to a single human as ultimate godlike authority that's like saying Greek and English are the same language because both use an alphabet.

Whatever the role of the Emperor it was also the case that Japanese officials had some degree of autonomous decision making and their authority was not solely based on being appointed by the Emperor but also by the status earned through their career. In fact, autonomous decisions by officials instead of consulting with/waiting for approval from the Emperor and adapting to changing circumstances was a major component in Japan's initial success. This has numerous practical consequences, one of which was that Japan's policies were a genuine reflection of the particular officials in power -- Japan's foreign policy or negotiations change significantly depending on who are the top few officials for instance. This is most dramatically illustrated towards the end of WW2: Japan's attitude is strongly determined by the top few military officials and while during the war the moderates had been more or less replaced with the hardliners, but towards the very end the hardliners are sidelined and Japan enters negotiations.

That is quite unlike North Korea in which it is the whims of dear leader that decide what North Korea is going to pretend to be tomorrow.

More importantly politics and by extension the "political situation" is a reflection of what kind of country we're dealing with. Fundamentally Japan was a modern country, still clinging on to some antiquated traditions but otherwise every bit as modern as the major powers of the day. Japan was a power to be reckoned with, even in the aftermath of WW2 -- much like Germany. It was despite everything still a nominally functional country with a sense of a social contract, it's politics and political situation reflected this.

North Korea is a basket case that is only allowed to survive because nobody can be bothered if they are silent and if they are not then nobody wants to deal with the mess. So North Korea's politics is little more than a careful projected image designed to extort as much from others as they can. Internally North Korea is simply the twisted and deformed result of a very strange type of dictatorship which essentially views the people as its slaves to do with as it pleases. So yeah, if anything its political situation is built around fear, around staying in the good books, around being the one to do the whipping instead of being the one to be whipped. And that means being seen to worship dear leader and to do whatever dear leader says, without question and without fail.