Fascist Encounters: German Nazis and Japanese Shintō Ultranationalists

Abstract

In his comprehensive history of World War II, military historian John Keegan described it as “the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all its oceans. It killed fifty million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.”1 Most educated Americans believe that this vast conflict began with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, if not with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Very few would cite the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” of July 8, 1937 or the “Manchurian Incident” of September 18, 1931 as the start of this greatest war of all times. Yet World War II arguably started with the 1931 Japanese attack in Manchuria, it became truly a global war with the entry of the United States following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and it ended in East Asia with Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech on August 15, 1945. Similarly, the majority of authors of the thousands of books and articles about this great struggle have a decidedly Western perspective, thus the importance of the Asian component of the conflict is often overlooked and some major issues are neglected.