Images of Japan and East Asia in German Politics in the Early Nazi Era

Home , Eugen Ott (ambassador), Joachim von Ribbentrop, Reichswehr

CHAPTER 10 Images of Japan and East Asia in German Politics in the Early Nazi Era

Tajima Nobuo

The twelve-year period between Hitler’s “seizure of power” (Machtergreifung) in January 1933 and Germany’s defeat in May 1945 marked an era of close Japanese-German relations. Various treaties, including the Anti-Comintern Pact of 1936 (Ōhata 1963; Tajima 1997, 2009b, 2011), the Exchange of Information and Strategy Agreement of 1938 (Tajima 1997; 2006; 2011; 2017), or the Tripartite Pact of 1940 (Hosoya 1963; Miyake 1975; Krebs 1984), demonstrate that Japan and Germany closely cooperated in the political, diplomatic, and military fields during this period.1 Economic, social, cultural, educational, and personal exchange between both countries also expanded, and mutual relations reached an unprecedented high.2 This era constituted a peak within the broad- er history of 150 years of Japanese-German relations alongside the Meiji period (1868–1912), which is sometimes also known as the “Golden Age of Japanese- German relations.” (see introduction and ch. 8 of this volume) Scholars working on the topic of Japanese-German relations have typically focused on the 1930s and early 1940s. Representative studies include those by Presseisen (1958), Sommer (1962), Ōhata (1963), Hosoya (1963), Martin (1969), Miyake (1975), Krebs (1984), and Yoshii (1987). However, these research efforts have a number of shortcomings. First, research on German attitudes toward

1 Even this twelve-year period of Japanese-German relations had its ups and downs. Friction arose because of the Nazi regime’s racial ideology that discriminated against Asians. There was also political discord in the early phase of the Second Sino-Japanese war (1937–1938), since Japan regarded China as an enemy state, whereas Germany supported the Guomindang government under Chiang Kai-shek. Relations further soured after the German-Soviet Non- Aggression Treaty of August 1939. Moreover, after the German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941, a strategic rift occurred between Germany, which aimed at continuing the war against the Soviet Union, and Japan, which saw political advantage in reconciliation with the Soviets. This rift was not settled until the defeat of both countries. For more details, see Tajima 2008a and 2009a. 2 On the economic, social, educational, cultural, as well as personal fields of Japanese-German exchange, see for instance, Pauer 1984, Hack 1996, Yō 2003, Kudō 2008, Yanagisawa 2008, Kudo 2009, Koltermann 2009, and Ogawa 2010.

Japan in the initial phase of the Nazi era, in particular, the years 1933 to 1934, is scarce. This is due to the fact that negotiations for the Anti-Comintern Pact, an agreement that helped deepen the relationship between the two countries, began only in the second half of 1935. Secondly, there has been an emphasis on the image that Adolf Hitler (1889–1945) and a few Nazi party members held of Japan—even within the discussion of the years 1933 to 1934—while the aware- ness of East Asia and Japan by other political, diplomatic, or military actors has on the whole been neglected. This chapter analyzes German images of Japan in the early stage of the Nazi era. In addition to Hitler’s view of East Asia, I will investigate the image of East Asia by other German politicians, diplomats, bureaucrats, and military officers. This includes Hitler’s right-hand man and commander-in-chief of the Luftwaffe, Hermann Göring; Hitler’s advisor in foreign affairs (and foreign minister since 1938), Joachim von Ribbentrop; Nazi ideologue and Head of the Foreign Policy Office of the National Socialist Party (NSDAP), Alfred Rosenberg; Minister of Foreign Affairs (1932–1938), Konstantin Hermann Karl Freiherr von Neurath; Vice-Minister of Foreign Affairs, Bernhard von Bülow; Germany’s ambassador to China (1931–1938), Oskar Trautmann; the Supreme Commander of the Reichswehr General, Kurt Freiherr von Hammerstein-Equord; the army of- ficer and later German ambassador in Tokyo, Eugen Ott; and finally the head of the “Foreign Armies” branch of the Ministry of Defense’s General Staff Office, Carl-Heinrich von Stülpnagel. This chapter attempts to augment previous research through a quantitative and qualitative analysis of primary sources relat- ed to these individuals and present fresh results regarding the image of Japan among Germany’s leadership during early Nazi rule.

Adolf Hitler

An analysis of Hitler’s image of East Asia before 1933 must include an exami- nation of the contents of his two-volume Mein Kampf (My Struggle; published in 1925 and 1926) and his Zweites Buch (Second Book; written in 1928, Hitler 2004). Table 10.1 employs a content analysis method to show a country-specific “reference frequency” (omitting “Germany”) for Hitler’s major works (Tajima 1992: 75).3

3 This method involved counting the respective nouns and adjectives, but excluding pronouns and relative pronouns. The following editions were used for this study: Hitler 1935, Bd. 1, Abrechnung; Hitler 1939, Bd. 2, Die nationalsozialistische Bewegung; Hitler, 1961.