Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 by Ricky W. Law

Abstract

Reviewed by: Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936 by Ricky W. Law Annika A. Culver Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919–1936. By Ricky W. Law. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Pp. 343. Cloth $120.00. ISBN 978-11084743634. In Transnational Nazism, Ricky W. Law masterfully seeks to illuminate the deeper ideological and cultural underpinnings of the 1936 Anti-Comintern Pact between Berlin and Tokyo. In so doing, he details a largely asymmetrical relationship: the interwar-period Japanese largely esteemed Germany above Germans’ similar considerations of Japan within interactions between the two nations during the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and early Nazi years (1933–1945), roughly analogous to Japan’s late Taishô (1912–1926) and early Shôwa eras (1927–1989). He highlights several [End Page 627] factors for this imbalance among Germans: few opportunities to learn Japanese in Germany, vast distance and expense to travel to Japan, and the entrenchment of popular stereotypes. Often formed in earlier decades, Germans held common tropes of Japan, which mirrored those widespread among Anglo-Saxon Westerners, such as a reputation as an exotic land of “cherry blossoms” (aptly symbolized by the geisha) while also evoking Kaiser Wilhelm’s militaristic yellow peril concept (embodied in the form of samurai and an invented tradition of the bushidô philosophy). These characterizations curiously echo historian Asada Sadao’s assessment of similar images of Japan in middle-class American imaginations, and Rediscovering America, Peter Duus and Kenji Hasegawa’s 2011 study on a century of Japanese perspectives of the United States. However, where and how did these ideas develop among two future Axis powers and allies? Utilizing national, city, corporate, and private German and Japanese archives in Berlin, Bonn, Freiburg, Leipzig, Koblenz, and Tokyo, Law consults an impressive source base of newspaper articles, pamphlets, popular films, documentaries, nonfiction, dissertations, and research studies. His text provides an exhaustive cataloging of how interwar-period Japanese and Germans viewed each other’s countries through the lens of these various media, which, he asserts, served to jockey influence over reader perceptions in their respective countries. Japanese media studies historian Peter O’Conner characterizes such media as “informal propaganda,” while international relations pundit Joseph Nye might reference them as examples of “soft power.” Law defines this phenomenon of interwar-period German and Japanese transfers of ideas about each other as “transnational Nazism” or “an ideological outlook” where adherents overlooked certain incompatible aspects (like Adolf Hitler’s antisemitism for the Japanese and Japan’s non-Aryan status for the Germans) amid “a worldview that combined emphasis on the nation and communal sharing of benefits and sacrifice” (2). The clear power differential setting Germans at the top of a Western cultural hierarchy, despite their humiliating 1919 prostration at Versailles, also accounts for an oftentimes fawning Japanese attitude toward Germany, such as gratuitous mention of Hitler and Nazi propaganda aped in German-language textbooks. Japanese stereotypes of the nation as a European center for science, politics, and the arts were overwhelmingly positive: much of Japan’s medical establishment had been based on that of Germany’s, with many scientists having studied there in the late Meiji (1868–1912) period, while imperial Japan’s political structure and legal framework benefited from a model derived from the Prussian constitution, with the National Diet earning its name from the German term. Later, when Adolf Hitler appeared to wrest Germany away from a devastating economic depression begun in the early 1920s, even before the global Great Depression, Japan’s pundits gazed in starry-eyed admiration at the charismatic leader. By contrast, German attitudes during the Weimar period reflected the multivalent perspectives of a democratic state, often regarding Japan [End Page 628] critically while still exoticizing its people and landscapes in ways that obscured the imperial nation’s high degree of urbanization and modernity. Notably, after the 1931 Manchurian Incident, when Japanese troops invaded northeast China, a clearly indifferent view toward China emerged in German newsreels, film, and other media, while portrayals sympathetic to Japan and its military adventurism abroad increasingly arose. However, despite its ground-breaking analysis of an often-overlooked aspect of international relations between the two countries during a...