Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan PDF Author: Johanna Menzel Meskill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351503375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
Alliances between sovereign states are among the least stable political associations. Despite professions of fidelity and common purpose, most are effective for only short periods, and only as long as it suits their interests. The German-Japanese alliance of World War II was not so much a marriage of convenience as a long and uneasy engagement. It was maintained because breaking the engagement would have reduced the prestige of each nation-state.Germany and Japan each found the existence and policies of the other convenient. From 1933-1945, both powers challenged the international order; other than this, nothing else united Germany and Japan. Even while they shared some of the same opponents, German and Japanese antagonism toward the Allies involved different objects of contention and questions of timing. Consequently, coordination of German and Japanese policies did not follow.Johanna Menzel Meskill argues that the German-Japanese alliance failed, not only because each power failed separately to attain its goals, but because as allies the powers failed to take advantage of their association. The failure resulted to a large extent from the discordance between their political goals and the means necessary to attain them. This work in diplomatic history is a careful analysis of presuming identities in a world of diplomatic differences.In a new introduction to the book, Thomas Nowotny looks back on the alliance from a historical perspective. He concludes that both parties overestimated the potency and effectiveness of their military power. Like many before and some after, they more generally subscribed to the offensive use of military power and effectiveness that the history of the twentieth centery has proven unwarranted.

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan

Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan PDF Author: Johanna Menzel Meskill
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351503375
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 151

Get Book Here

Book Description
Alliances between sovereign states are among the least stable political associations. Despite professions of fidelity and common purpose, most are effective for only short periods, and only as long as it suits their interests. The German-Japanese alliance of World War II was not so much a marriage of convenience as a long and uneasy engagement. It was maintained because breaking the engagement would have reduced the prestige of each nation-state.Germany and Japan each found the existence and policies of the other convenient. From 1933-1945, both powers challenged the international order; other than this, nothing else united Germany and Japan. Even while they shared some of the same opponents, German and Japanese antagonism toward the Allies involved different objects of contention and questions of timing. Consequently, coordination of German and Japanese policies did not follow.Johanna Menzel Meskill argues that the German-Japanese alliance failed, not only because each power failed separately to attain its goals, but because as allies the powers failed to take advantage of their association. The failure resulted to a large extent from the discordance between their political goals and the means necessary to attain them. This work in diplomatic history is a careful analysis of presuming identities in a world of diplomatic differences.In a new introduction to the book, Thomas Nowotny looks back on the alliance from a historical perspective. He concludes that both parties overestimated the potency and effectiveness of their military power. Like many before and some after, they more generally subscribed to the offensive use of military power and effectiveness that the history of the twentieth centery has proven unwarranted.

Economies under Occupation

Economies under Occupation PDF Author: Marcel Boldorf
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317506502
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 350

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Book Description
Nazi Germany and Japan occupied huge areas at least for some period during World War II, and those territories became integral parts of their war economies. The book focuses on the policies of World War II aggressors in occupied countries. The unbalanced economic and financial relations were defined by administrative control, the implementation of institutions and a variety of military exploitation strategies. Plundering, looting and requisitions were frequent aggressive acts, but beyond these interventions by force, specific institutions were created to gain control over the occupied economies as a whole. An appropriate institutional setting was also crucial to give incentives to the companies in the occupied countries to produce munitions for the aggressors. The book explains the main fields of war exploitation (organisation and control, war financing and workforce recruitment). It substantiates these aspects in case studies of occupied countries and gives examples of the business policy of multinational companies under war conditions. The book also provides an account of differences and similarities of the two occupation systems. Economies under Occupation will interest researchers specialising in the history of economic thought as well as in economic theory and philosophy. It will also engage readers concerned with regional European and Japanese studies and imperial histories.

Transnational Nazism

Transnational Nazism PDF Author: Ricky W. Law
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1108474632
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 361

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Book Description
The first English-language study of German-Japanese interwar relations to employ sources in both languages.

Imperial Japan at Its Zenith

Imperial Japan at Its Zenith PDF Author: Kenneth J. Ruoff
Publisher: Cornell University Press
ISBN: 0801471818
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
In 1940, Japan was into its third year of war with China, and relations with the United States were deteriorating, but it was a heady time for the Japanese nonetheless. That year, the Japanese commemorated the 2,600th anniversary of the founding of the Empire of Japan. According to the imperial myth-history, Emperor Jimmu, descended from the Sun Goddess Amaterasu, established the "unbroken imperial line" in 660 BCE. In carefully choreographed ceremonies throughout the empire, through new public monuments, with visual culture, and through heritage tourism, the Japanese celebrated the extension of imperial rule under the 124th emperor, Hirohito. These celebrations, the climactic moment for the ideology that was central to modern Japan's identity until the imperial cult's legitimacy was bruised by defeat in 1945, are little known outside Japan. Imperial Japan at Its Zenith, the first book in English about the 2,600th anniversary, examines the themes of the celebration and what they tell us about Japan at mid-century. Kenneth J. Ruoff emphasizes that wartime Japan did not reject modernity in favor of nativist traditionalism. Instead, like Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, it embraced reactionary modernism. Ruoff also highlights the role played by the Japanese people in endorsing and promoting imperial ideology and expansion, documenting the significant grassroots support for the cult of the emperor and for militarism. Ruoff uses the anniversary celebrations to examine Japan's invention of a national history; the complex relationship between the homeland and the colonies; the significance of Imperial Japan's challenge to Euro-American claims of racial and cultural superiority; the role of heritage tourism in inspiring national pride; Japan's wartime fascist modernity; and, with a chapter about overseas Japanese, the boundaries of the Japanese nation. Packed with intriguing anecdotes, incisive analysis, and revelatory illustrations, Imperial Japan at Its Zenith is a major contribution to our understanding of wartime Japan.

The Man in the High Castle

The Man in the High Castle PDF Author: Philip K. Dick
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547572484
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Slavery is back. America, 1962. Having lost a war, America finds itself under Nazi Germany and Japan occupation. A few Jews still live under assumed names. The 'I Ching' is prevalent in San Francisco. Science fiction meets serious ideas in this take on a possible alternate history.

Imperial Japan's World War Two: 1931-1945

Imperial Japan's World War Two: 1931-1945 PDF Author: Werner Gruhl
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412809266
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
Gruhl's narrative makes clear why Japan's World War II aggression still touches deep emotions with East Asians and Western ex-prisoners of war, and why there is justifiable sensitivity to the way modern Japan has dealt with this legacy. Knowledge of the enormity of Japan's total war is also necessary to assess the United States' and her allies' policies toward Japan, and their reactions to its actions, extending from Manchuria in 1931 to Hiroshima in 1945. Gruhl takes the view that World War II started in 1931 when Japan, crowded and poor in raw materials but with a sense of military invincibility, saw empire as her salvation and invaded China. Japan's imperial regime had volatile ambitions but limited resources, thus encouraging them to unleash a particularly brutal offensive against the peoples of Asia and surrounding ocean islands. Their 1931 to 1945 invasions and policies further added to Asia's pre-war woes, particularly in China, by badly disrupting marginal economies, leading to famines and epidemics. Altogether, the victims of Japan's World War Two aggression took many forms and were massive in number. Gruhl offers a survey and synthesis of the historical literature and documentation, statistical data, as well as personal interviews and first-hand accounts to provide a comprehensive overview analysis. The sequence of diplomatic and military events leading to Pearl Harbor, as well as those leading to the U.S. decision to drop the atom bomb, are explored here as well as Japan's war crimes and postwar revisionist/apologist views regarding them. This book will be of intense interest to Asian specialists, and those concerned with human rights issues in a historical context.

Doctors of Empire

Doctors of Empire PDF Author: Hoi-eun Kim
Publisher: University of Toronto Press
ISBN: 1442660481
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 266

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Book Description
The history of German medicine has undergone intense scrutiny because of its indelible connection to Nazi crimes. What is less well known is that Meiji Japan adopted German medicine as its official model in 1869. In Doctors of Empire, Hoi-eun Kim recounts the story of the almost 1,200 Japanese medical students who rushed to German universities to learn cutting-edge knowledge from the world leaders in medicine, and of the dozen German physicians who were invited to Japan to transform the country’s medical institutions and education. Shifting fluently between German, English, and Japanese sources, Kim’s book uses the colourful lives of these men to examine the impact of German medicine in Japan from its arrival to the pinnacle of its influence and its abrupt but temporary collapse at the outbreak of the First World War. Transnational history at its finest, Doctors of Empire not only illuminates the German origins of modern medical science in Japan but also reinterprets the nature of German imperialism in East Asia.

The Wages of Guilt

The Wages of Guilt PDF Author: Ian Buruma
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1590178599
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In this now classic book, internationally famed journalist Ian Buruma examines how Germany and Japan have attempted to come to terms with their conduct during World War II—a war that they aggressively began and humiliatingly lost, and in the course of which they committed monstrous war crimes. As he travels through both countries, to Berlin and Tokyo, Hiroshima and Auschwitz, he encounters people who are remarkably honest in confronting the past and others who astonish by their evasions of responsibility, some who wish to forget the past and others who wish to use it as a warning against the resurgence of militarism. Buruma explores these contrasting responses to the war and the two countries’ very different ways of memorializing its atrocities, as well as the ways in which political movements, government policies, literature, and art have been shaped by its shadow. Today, seventy years after the end of the war, he finds that while the Germans have for the most part coped with the darkest period of their history, the Japanese remain haunted by historical controversies that should have been resolved long ago. Sensitive yet unsparing, complex and unsettling, this is a profound study of how people face up to or deny terrible legacies of guilt and shame.

The Attractive Empire

The Attractive Empire PDF Author: Michael Baskett
Publisher: University of Hawaii Press
ISBN: 0824831632
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
"Because imperialism has had such an appalling ideological reputation, we’ve lost sight of its excitement, the breathless anticipation of adventures in far-off lands. The Attractive Empire is a tour de force of enthralling historical scholarship that puts the appeal, and seductions, of imperialism on display, without underestimating its ugly consequences. Like its chosen subject, the book covers an astonishing array of texts, events, people, and issues. The clarity and vividness of the writing make it work effortlessly. Baskett’s organizational skills, narrative, and rhetoric deftly orchestrate a complex subject." —Darrell William Davis, University of New South Wales "Michael Baskett removes imperial Japanese film from its solitary confinement and commandingly analyzes how it functioned internationally. He commits a depth of research rarely found in English-language studies of Japanese cinema, and his mastery of the primary and secondary sources from beyond Japan’s borders distinctly set his book apart from previous scholarship on the subject. Not only is this a work that historians and film scholars will appreciate but also one that I look forward to assigning to undergraduates." —Barak Kushner, Cambridge University Japanese film crews were shooting feature-length movies in China nearly three decades before Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon (1950) reputedly put Japan on the international film map. Although few would readily associate Japan’s film industry with either imperialism or the domination of world markets, the country’s film culture developed in lock step with its empire, which, at its peak in 1943, included territories from the Aleutians to Australia and from Midway Island to India. With each military victory, Japanese film culture’s sphere of influence expanded deeper into Asia, first clashing with and ultimately replacing Hollywood as the main source of news, education, and entertainment for millions. The Attractive Empire is the first comprehensive examination of the attitudes, ideals, and myths of Japanese imperialism as represented in its film culture. In this stimulating new study, Michael Baskett traces the development of Japanese film culture from its unapologetically colonial roots in Taiwan and Korea to less obvious manifestations of empire such as the semicolonial markets of Manchuria and Shanghai and occupied territories in Southeast Asia. Drawing on a wide range of previously untapped primary sources from public and private archives across Asia, Europe, and the United States, Baskett provides close readings of individual films and trenchant analyses of Japanese assumptions about Asian ethnic and cultural differences. Finally, he highlights the place of empire in the struggle at legislative, distribution, and exhibition levels to wrest the "hearts and minds" of Asian film audiences from Hollywood in the 1930s as well as in Japan’s attempts to maintain that hegemony during its alliance with Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy.

Japanese-German Relations, 1895-1945

Japanese-German Relations, 1895-1945 PDF Author: Christian W Spang
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1134292996
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
Written by a team of Japanese and German scholars, this book presents an interpretation of Japanese/German history and international diplomacy. It provides a greater understanding of key aspects of the countries' bilateral relations from the end of the Sino-Japanese War in 1895 to the parallel defeat of Germany and Japan in 1945. New research is explored on the military as well as ideological interconnections between Japan and Germany in the closing years of the nineteenth century, the First World and the development of bacteriological warfare during the Second World War. In addition, the book's focus on the Second World War significantly re-interprets two familiar axis of Japanese-German relations: the impact of Nazi ideology on Japanese "fascism", and the Axis Alliance. Drawing on German as well as Japanese archival sources, the book presents a revealing examination of a crucial period in the modern history of Western Europe and East Asia. As such it will be of huge interest to those studying the modern history of Japan/Germany, comparative and world history, international relations and political science alike.