Ricky W. Law. Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919-1936. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. 358 pp. $120.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-1-108-47463-4.
Reviewed by Miriam Kingsberg Kadia (University of Colorado)
Published on H-Asia (June, 2021)
Commissioned by Bradley C. Davis (Eastern Connecticut State University)
Historians have traditionally characterized the Axis of World War II as a weak alliance, with ties among the principal states of Germany, Japan, and Italy forged primarily through opposition to common enemies. In Transnational Nazism, Ricky W. Law demonstrates the inaccuracy and inadequacy of this depiction. Far from a simple diplomatic response to the threat posed by the United States or the Soviet Union, the eventual partnership between Japan and Germany was in fact rooted in sustained intercultural appreciation conveyed and disseminated by the interwar media. Critically, Law shows that, although cultural engagement was neither equal nor free of racism, it was mutual. This claim may come as no surprise to historians of modern Japan, who have long explored the Japanese debt to German culture and who have created a veritable subfield juxtaposing the states. Historians of Germany, by contrast, have paid little attention to the cultural impact of Japan, and do not tend to regard the East Asian nation as a worthwhile comparative case study. Law’s book is an argument for a more balanced historiography between the two powers.
In uncovering cultural rationales for diplomatic decision-making, Law’s work fits nicely within the growing field of New Diplomatic History. Unlike traditional diplomatic history, which trains a close lens on negotiations among states, New Diplomatic History considers international relations within a context of social interests, forces, and environments. Law is chiefly concerned with providing interwar cultural context for understanding the Anti-Comintern Pact (1936), a largely symbolic agreement that was nonetheless historically significant as the first formal accord among the nations that would align themselves as the Axis in the Tripartite Pact four years later.
The title of the book, Transnational Nazism, describes the phenomenon of Japanese-German mutual regard in the years leading up to the Nazi era. (Given the fact that the book explores exactly two states, “binational Nazism” might be more apt—if less trendy.) In Law’s framing, transnational Nazism allowed ordinary Japanese and Germans to identify with each other and to anticipate the accord that their governments eventually signed. The author contends that Nazism was transnational for two reasons: (1) the figure of Hitler and his message resonated with non-German/non-Aryan peoples; and (2) German Nazis allowed for the (limited) accommodation of non-Aryan foreigners within their worldview. The initial half of the book seeks to demonstrate this first proposition through the case of Japan. Law illuminates how Japanese interest in Germany, dating back to the late nineteenth century, laid the groundwork for an unlikely friendliness to Hitler and his ideology of Aryan racial supremacy and anti-Semitism in the 1930s. The second half of the book then turns to Germany, where Law shows how Japan was elevated to a “respectable, nuanced, and visible niche within the Nazi worldview and Nazified public sphere” (p. 5). Such positive representation of a non-Aryan power in turn prompted the metamorphosis of a chauvinist, inward-facing ideology into a transnational one.
Law makes his case through analysis of the media. Given the crippling constraints of “space, time, and money” (p. 4), the media comprised the primary means through which Germans and Japanese came to know each other in the early twentieth century. The book begins by taking up the representation of Germans and Germany in Japanese newspapers, then the most ubiquitous and influential venue for shaping public opinion. Despite the fact that Japan and Germany fought on opposite sides of World War I, throughout the interwar period the latter “basked in attentive, overwhelmingly positive coverage” (p. 31), often guided by favorable stereotypes of the “national character” as scientific, creative, and determined. Feature stories often focused on specific Germans, including Wilhelm Solf (the first German ambassador posted to Japan following the restoration of diplomatic ties in 1920), interwar president Paul von Hindenburg, and ex-Kaiser Wilhelm II. By the 1930s, this personality-driven style of reportage had groomed the Japanese readership to take an interest in the charismatic leader of the Nazis: Adolf Hitler.
Following the analysis of newspaper coverage, Law takes up the image of Germany in lectures and pamphlets (in which lectures were often reprinted). Far less ubiquitous than newspapers (and correspondingly less frequently analyzed by historians), lectures and pamphlets appealed to consumers of modest means inclined to explore a particular subject in relative depth. Law shows how, in these ephemera, the xenophobic, anti-Semitic, racist ideology of Nazism—irrelevant to Japan at best and hostile at worst—was watered down into a populist, egalitarian, nationalist, and agrarian cant that appealed to mainstream Japanese audiences.
The third chapter of Transnational Nazism carries Law’s analysis into the realm of nonfiction works on Germany. Today, the National Diet Library of Japan holds around 1,100 books published during the 1920s and 1930s that deal with Germany in some way. Law “make[s] the task manageable” (p. 98) by excluding fiction writings, arcane treatises, and translations from German lacking Japanese commentary. What remains is a “few score” (p. 99) books purporting to relate objective information about current affairs, politics, culture, economics, and modern history. Like lectures and pamphlets, those published books that dealt with Nazism often displayed a superficial, instrumental grasp of the ideology, projecting an appealing vision of Hitler as an “underdog ne’er-do-well inspired by patriotism to overcome obstacles through willpower and ambition, and triumphing in the end” (p. 131).
The last chapter, on Japanese media, turns creatively to German-language textbooks (comprising around a quarter of the National Diet Library’s holdings of interwar materials on Germany). During the 1920s, linguists set forth the hypothesis that language determines the range of possible thought; beyond academia, the Japanese public widely believed that language was the repository of the national spirit and morality. Although only a small percentage of the Japanese population—mostly upwardly mobile university aspirants or professionals in science, engineering, philosophy, law, and medicine, among other fields—invested in learning German, these elites exercised a disproportionate influence on matters of state. Hitler’s consolidation of power in the 1930s was reflected in their language textbooks, which increasingly shoehorned in Nazi phrases, concepts, and images. Even as these awkward insertions degraded the pedagogical quality of lessons, they cultivated admiration for nationalism and militarism among those Japanese citizens most committed to understanding and engaging with Germany.
In the second half of the book, Law shows how German media representations of Japan as a non-Aryan state that nonetheless attained global power transformed Nazism, a chauvinist, inward-looking ideology, into a transnational one. The four types of German media chosen for analysis are not a mirror image of those covered in the case of Japan. Law assesses interwar newspapers and nonfiction in both nations, but for Germany, films and voluntary associations are targeted in place of lectures/pamphlets and language textbooks. As Law explains, whereas the interwar Japanese public exhibited strong demand for works of German-language pedagogy, “attempts to teach oneself Japanese would have struck Germans as quixotic and bizarre” (p. 268). One wonders whether lectures/pamphlets were similarly marginal in interwar Germany, and, correspondingly, how Japanese films and voluntary associations engaged with the Weimar state and Third Reich.
Law’s analysis of German newspaper reportage on Japan draws useful comparisons to the previously discussed coverage of Germany in Japanese newspapers. In contrast to the relatively centralized Japanese press, Germany maintained over 4,700 local papers by the time of Hitler’s accession to power (more than the United States or Great Britain, France, and Italy combined). Despite the multifariousness and heterogeneity of these publications, Law establishes some general patterns. Unlike the Japanese press, which covered Germany exhaustively and focused on distinct German personalities, the German news industry largely treated the Japanese sporadically and as an “anonymous mass” (p. 300). Yet even after Germany’s defeat by the Allies (including Japan) in World War I, coverage of the latter in the Weimar press was relatively favorable, with reporters representing the nation as a great power alongside the major states of the West. The outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in 1931 polarized German journalism into pro-China and pro-Japan camps, but under the Nazis the latter prevailed, with reporters depicting Japan as “an ‘old-young’ nation like Germany in the process of rejuvenation” (p. 203). By cultivating a sense of developmental closeness with Japan, German newspapers helped to birth a transnational Nazism that allowed Hitler and his henchmen to negotiate cooperation with a non-Aryan nation.
Law next turns to onscreen portrayals of Japan in German cinema. During the interwar period, a night at the movies typically involved three viewing experiences: a newsreel, a short documentary, and a feature film. The author mines the Federal Archives’ Film Collection for (the lamentably few) surviving exemplars of each of these types of media. By 1938, the newsreel had become a mandatory element of all film screenings; shortly thereafter, the Nazi government ordered cinemas to lock their doors as it began to prevent movie patrons from skipping the most overt propaganda. Yet as Law shows, feature presentations were also saturated with politicized messages. Compared to newspapers, all three types of film demanded a greater investment of cost, time, and technology, making them relatively powerful tools for shaping public opinion. At least initially reporters, documentarians, and directors apparently took scant advantage of the opportunity to nuance public perceptions of Japan. During the 1920s, they produced trite, stagnant images of the “exotic and enigmatic,” showing “a land of ageless traditions and arcane beliefs” (pp. 209-210). Only with the ascension of Hitler did this emphasis on “Oriental mystique” give way to a new vision of a Japan “dominated by firepower and forcefulness” (p. 211)—a worthy ally for Nazi Germany.
Law’s analysis of interwar German nonfiction writings on Japan exposes a similar shift in emphasis from orientalism to militarism. In the 1920s and 1930s, authorities on Japan were most commonly missionaries, scholars, or travelers. Whereas Japanese nonfiction about Germany bespoke a consuming interest in modernity, Germans commenting on Japan tended to highlight vestiges of the past, particularly those that struck them as odd or fantastic. Only in the 1930s did German writers begin to take a serious interest in contemporary Japanese political affairs. By this time, as Law demonstrates, it was mostly too late to revise preconceptions of the nation: even as Hitler added newly published books on Japan to his chancellery library, his conceptualization of his ally “remained the stale mix of prejudice and awe left over from his youth” (p. 236).
The final chapter of Transnational Nazism details the imagination of Japan within voluntary associations. These groups, perhaps more than any other venue considered in the book, involved interpersonal cooperation between German and Japanese citizens. They were also far less accessible to most of the population than newspapers, films, and nonfiction books—in contrast to the mass organizations often associated with fascism, interest groups centered on Japan were dominated by elites. Through the 1920s, these bodies served as venues for Germans to study and experience Japanese culture, interact with Japanese expatriates and citizens of binational descent, facilitate bilateral scholarly communication and foreign relations, and raise the profile of Japan in Germany. Following Hitler’s rise to power, participation in voluntary associations came to offer some members a means of parlaying an arcane specialty into a source of political influence. At the same time, the increasing complicity of associations with Nazism forced them to acquiesce in the persecution of Japanese and Japanese-German citizens. Leaders deemed questionable by the Nazis were ousted in favor of party men, downgrading the intellectual quality of associations.
Transnational Nazism is strikingly well written and organized, with end-of-chapter summaries and an overall conclusion that helpfully synthesize its contributions but that do not annoy the reader with repetition. Also commendable is the care Law takes to avoid overstating his claims: despite providing unusually balanced coverage of both Japan and Germany, he judiciously reminds the reader that the relationship between the two nations was not an equal one: “A distinct asymmetry marks the mutual appreciation of interwar Japan and Germany. Japan’s knowledge landscape concerning Germany was much broader, deeper, more variegated and more richly detailed. Far more Japanese knew about Germany than Germans did Japan” (p. 300). Nonetheless, by shattering the myth that Germany took little notice of Japan in the years leading up to the Anti-Comintern Pact, he rewrites our understanding of the Axis and suggests the need for additional scholarship on the nature of fascism, the cultural context of interwar diplomatic relations, and, of course, the phenomenon of transnational Nazism. If Nazism was indeed transnational, one might ask: what responsibility does Japan bear for its atrocities?
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Citation:
Miriam Kingsberg Kadia. Review of Law, Ricky W., Transnational Nazism: Ideology and Culture in German-Japanese Relations, 1919-1936.
H-Asia, H-Net Reviews.
June, 2021.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=56542
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