The title of tonight’s episode of “Mad Men” is, in its own way, a form of advertisement. Commissioned by the U.S. Office of War Information in order to glean a better insight into Japanese culture, the resulting work “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword: Patterns of Japanese Culture” did as much to inform American culture as well as Japanese culture itself. In other words: Ruth Benedict’s analysis altered the self-perception of the Japanese populace. Don Draper would have been damn proud.

The title refers to the inherent contradictions in Japanese culture, contradictions that made the culture seem essentially unknowable through outside eyes. Luckily, “Mad Men” itself is filled with characters full of contradictions, so it makes sense to look at tonight’s episode through the various contradictions embodied by its major players. Most of these contradictions rested in the outside perception versus the internal one, with several key characters struggling to rectify the gap between the two.

In the SDCP aspect of the show, Roger’s time in WWII came into play as Pete brought in Honda as a potential new client for the company. Still stinging from his time in the war, Roger flatly refuses to do business with them. However, out of both a business need and a lack of personal resentment (Bert fought before Roger, Don fought after, and Pete’s pretty much only fought with his fraternity brothers, and then only over which song to sign next around the piano), the rest of the partners agreed to hold the meeting anyways.

Things go relatively well at first, with SDCP tripping over themselves so as not to offend their Japanese counterparts and the Honda reps tripping over themselves to figure out how Joan doesn’t…well, trip all over herself with those breasts. (Nice to see Joan’s hold over the male population transcends all cultures. Maybe Joan should be sent to Vietnam instead of Greg.) Unfortunately, Roger returns from the lengthy lunch meeting meant to detain himself, and soon sparks start to fly. “They won’t know [the meeting’s] over until you drop the big one. Twice,” he barks, his anger transcending any language barrier.

When Don and Pete confront Roger in his office, we see a new twist on this season’s theme of the impending cultural divide that will soon split the nation as a whole. Pete feels that Roger wants to keep Lucky Strike’s precarious account perpetually precarious in order to stave off Pete’s ascendance in the firm. “The world has moved on,” he tells Roger. “The rest of us are trying to build something.” Roger’s anger towards Pete’s generation stems not from the clothes they wear or the music they listen to, but rather the apparent lack of respect for The Greatest Generation’s wartime efforts. Roger’s mind still rests with the poet PFC that didn’t make it home. For Pete to deign do business with Roger’s forever enemy is simply an affront, an affront that will no doubt be compounded when members of Pete’s generation start protesting AMERICAN soldiers in the upcoming Vietnam conflict.

As the war within SDCP over Honda rages, Don is also facing a war with a competing firm and a would-be Don Draper, Tom Shaw. (At least, I think it’s “Shaw.” Everyone kept pronouncing it “Chaw” in the episode. I’ll just keep calling him Tom lest I compound the error.) Tom isn’t really in Don’s playing field, but he advertises himself as such, and apparently even The New York Times has bought into this claim. (“The minute he declared himself the competition, we became equals,” Don tells Bethany on their third date, with the word “equals” in quotations in his inflection.) Tom’s direct attack on Don is yet another sign of his perceived weakness during this season. Whereas no one would have dared challenge his mantle in Season 1, there’s blood in the water by 1965. Tom employs a technique used by competitive cyclists and “drafts” behind Don: picking up work left in his wake, taking the effort put in and simply putting a shiny new coat on it.

Tom confronts Don at a Benihana’s, which apparently used to be super swank before the days in which Michael Scott could drown his sorrows there. Tom wants to push past the impenetrable myth and scare the mere mortal, but all he does is set a fire in Don’s belly. For all of his bravado, Tom’s essentially a copycat, and basically copied Don’s playbook in order to succeed. Don uses this to his advantage and stages a caper worth of “Shut the Door. Have a Seat,” launching an elaborate campaign to hurt his competitor.

Although the Honda representatives lay out strict rules about their pitches, Don sets up a complex con that makes Tom think Don is producing a mega-expensive commercial in order to get the motorcycle account. It’s a fall-down funny sequence, highlighted by Peggy gently rolling around an empty studio atop one of the bikes. Thanks to Roger’s outburst, Don knew he had no shot at the account, but he did manage to catch Honda’s eye by returning the $3,000 check provided by them for presentation expenses. Don’s technique was a subtle variation on a theme from last week. Then, Pete and Peggy struggled to find their own identities in a world in which there were no more suitable role models. Now, Don used what people THOUGHT they knew about him in order to put a debt in a would-be usurper.

That Don could change, even this little bit, is a sign that the letter he started to write last week to Allison was not an isolated incident but rather one that will hopefully be part of a pattern. One could argue that his change in technique with Honda was meant to hurt a competitor more than help himself. But one cannot help but notice that Faye’s presence in the office might finally melt a little of Don’s hesitation to open up about his private life. He’s still skeptical about the notion of people talking through their problems, but nevertheless does share a few thoughts with her over some sake in the SDCP kitchen. Don straight up admitted that he felt relief upon dropping off his kids back with Betty: would this admission have come at anytime in 1964? Doubtful.

As for those kids…yea, let’s talk Sally. Let’s talk poor, completely effed-up Sally. Let’s talk about a girl every bit the contradiction described in Benedict’s book. She’s 10 going on 50, and not in a “13 Going on 30” way. That latter way was kinda fun. This way is awkward and painful and involves scenes that I cannot believe were shot in the way most Americans can’t believe that food product in their refrigerator isn’t butter. She’s seen death, birth, the dissolving of her parents’ marriage, the creepy overtones of Glenn, and has no one with whom to talk about any of these matters.

So no wonder she chops off her hair and lets her roam to placed unmentionable: she’s running on instinct rather than concrete information, looking around at her environment and feeding off of it at a time in her childhood when things change more rapidly than America will as a whole in 1965. I’m not sure she’s acting up so much as merely reacting badly to external stimuli all around here. She’s not interested in being a grown-up, per say, but she is interested in being something that she’s not, and all she’s got around her are messed up adults as role models. Granted, they don’t talk to her, leaving her to learn about the birds and the bees (badly) from Glenn and other classmates, but those misinformed conversations nevertheless point to some vague way towards adulthood. She fairly loathes her mother, but she wants to be part of what she is in whatever way she can. And yet when Betty takes her disheveled daughter to the salon to fix her hacked hair, what does Betty have the salon employee do? Give Sally get the same frakkin’ haircut as her!

And yes, Betty. Completely awful Betty. She slaps Sally around and vows to cut off her fingers, and with the way she gazes at the dollhouse in Dr. Edna’s office, it’s easy to see why. She treats her children as misbehaving dolls, led of course by a woman that probably got a dollhouse of her own as a child and never let go of the idealized state that that dollhouse produced in her mind’s eye. And now, her oldest doll is acting in a way that Betty somehow twists around to make HER life miserable. Awesome. If so many characters in “Mad Men” deal with the inability to recognize their place in an ever-changing world, Betty is the character that refuses to see that anything has changed at all. Is it any wonder that she opened up to a child specialist far more than she ever did to her psychiatrist in Season One?

At this point, I just feel bad for Henry Francis, who should be every bit the lush that Don is at this point. He’s properly pissed at Don for going out on a date during his weekend with the kids (which allowed the opening for Sally to cut off her hair in the first place) but has to remind Betty to place all anger towards him, not their daughter. Henry thought he was gaining a wife and three children but really inherited four children from a previous marriage. Bringing Gene into live with them might have been the worst thing Don could have ever done: his death infantilized Betty, traumatized Sally, and hastened the probably inevitable divorce that has led everyone into the position that they are currently in.

But I keep coming back, in my mind’s eye, to the image of Peggy riding a Honda motorcycle against a blank cyclorama. Outside, SDCP’s competitors are painting a wild set of images in their mind, completely unaware of what’s really going on. It’s that juxtaposition that “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword” sought to address, albeit on a much more personal level. Near the end, Joan stops Roger from dwelling on war-time horrors, knowing that Greg will soon be shipped off. She insists that his efforts made the world a safer place. But when confronted by him about that fact, she simply replies, “I have to.” Right now, the world of “Mad Men” is far from safe, because people are far from understanding one another. Their inability to rectify the contradictions within themselves leave them unable to see complexity in anyone else. These yields snap judgments, ones incorrect and detrimental to mutual decency and respect. In other words: they might see the chrysanthemum, or they might see the sword. But they fail to see both. And before anyone will have time to square the circle, all hell will break loose, severing any chance for common ground.

What did you think of “The Chrysanthemum and the Sword”? Leave your thoughts below!