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Welcome to the new books network. Hello, welcome to the new books in History Channel of the New Book Network Podcast. I am your host, Ari Barbellat. Today I am thankful, grateful, and blessed to engage in a dialogue with Dr.
Svan Salar. He is the Dean of the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo, Japan. He is also Professor in Modern Japanese History in Sophia University's Faculty of Liberal Arts. Today we will discuss his newly published book that he has co-edited with Kuzo Akira and Tajima Nobou, entitled Mutual Perceptions and Images in Japanese-German Relations, 1860-2010, published in Leiden, Netherlands by Real Publishers 2017.
Svan, it's an absolute honor to be in dialogue with you today. Thank you, Ari, for having me. To begin, please kindly tell us about yourself. Where did you grow up?
What forms of events in your life made you the person you are today? Yeah, thank you. I was born and raised in Germany, and although this book we are going to discuss today is about Japan, and I'm living in Japan now, during my youth, I had no particular relationship to Japan, different from many students that I teach nowadays. I did not grow up with manga or anime, but I only had close-eyed counters with Japan after I entered university.
I was a history major and in history in most European universities, I suppose. There was a very Eurocentric way of teaching history, so basically I was studying European history with Germany at the center, and after a few years I kind of felt bored a little bit. On the one side, it's very important to learn to study your own country's history, and in case of Germany, I guess it's particularly important. But I wanted also to reach out and look at the histories of other cultures, civilization and nations.
So I started to look at East Asia. I was inspired by that by a particular seminar that was about the Soviet Union's expungent into Siberia and East Asia and the Pacific. And into North America, Alaska used to be Russian-America, so I took a seminar on the history of Russian-America. That kind of brought me to East Asia, and then at one point I changed majors and shifted to Japanese studies, and got a degree in Japanese studies with a historical topic.
In this case, the Siberian Interwension, so Japan's military intervention in the Russian Civil War following World War I, and the Russian Revolution. Yeah, maybe so far for the moment. What inspired you to write this book? What message do you hope to configure readers?
Yeah, so when I started Japanese history, I was initially trying to not focus on Japanese-German relations, because that was a topic that was kind of covered by some scholars to which I look up to very much, and I had the feeling however that it was more or less covered. And so I usually, in my student years and in my dissertation and my first years as a researcher, I stayed away from that topic. But in the late 2000s, an anniversary was coming up, namely the 150th anniversary of Japanese-German relations. And anniversaries, as you might know, are always a good occasion to apply for funding, so I applied for funding and I eventually received generous funding for a research project on Japanese-German relations, and we organized a conference, and this book is based on this conference, but the contributions were edited intensively after that for several years.
So this was about 2010, 2011, and the anniversary related to the first signing of a bilateral treaty between Japan on the one side and a German state on the other. This was in 1861, there was not Germany yet at the time, Germany was still divided up in lots of small countries like the Kingdom of Bavaria and the Kingdom of Prussia, and this Kingdom of Prussia, it was which sent a mission to East Asia to conclude trade, trade these with the Kingdom of Siam, Thailand, Korea, and Japan, and the treaty was to be signed in 1861. So in 2011, we had this 150th anniversary, and that was the starting point for this project, which that man eventually resulted in. The book.
What are the primary themes in your book? What story and stories does your book tell? Yeah, so the book is about Japan and Germany in the modern world, and one of the motivations that is also connects to your previous question, one of the motivations was that, particularly in Anglo-Fone, academia, there isn't too much research about Japanese-German relations, although Japan and Germany obviously wear and still are kind of two important countries in international relations in the world economy in all kind of respects today, Germany and Japan are number three and four economic powers in the world and in the history of the 20th century, obviously both played a significant role in the world wars, and that's why we thought it's worse to look at the bilateral relations at these countries. But in this book, the only character of this book is that we go beyond diplomatic relations, because as I also mentioned before, there was already quite a bit of research and publications on diplomatic relations between Japan and Germany also on economic relations.
So in this project, we were particularly looking at the images and the mutual perceptions between Japan and Germany, so not so much, or at least not exclusively, on the government level, but we are trying also to look at how common people in both countries perceive each other through, for example, looking at opinion polls and through looking at representations, mutual representations of each nation in the mass media of both countries. So that was our main focus to go beyond the traditional traditional sphere of diplomatic history to look at more the broader populations perception of other nations. So that's one of the most important characteristics and themes of this book. At the same time, just to avoid misunderstandings, we did look at images, sort of term images in the title, but we did look at the term images, not only the literal sense, so we did try to find as much visual representations of images and mutual representations as we could.
But some chapters are not about images in the literal sense at all. There are about discourse, analysis, and present in a non-literal way, images of the two nations as represented in mass media. Yeah. What does this book teach us about quote unquote, soft power in international relations?
To what degree were Japanese and Germans thinking about quote unquote, soft power in ways different from the ways it has been thought about in the 20th century or similar to ways it's been thought about in the 20th century? Yeah, thank you. That's a very important point, and it is also one of the theoretical foundations of this book. The term soft power, of course, has become very popular in media studies and political science.
And usually, most callers mainly look at contemporary issues or the last 10 or 20 years. Actually, although the term soft power goes back only to more recent years, both Germany and Japan and other countries as well, did have a foreign cultural diplomacy already since the late 19s or early 20 years to century. The term usually used was cultural diplomacy. That's a term that in German writings come up at least at the beginning of the 20th century, because at that time, globally, media representations were dominated by the British media and the German Empire, which was a rising rival of Britain was trying to counter these was trying to counter the British politics of influencing the public opinion in other countries, for example, through media campaigns.
Japan did the same because Japan in the 19th century after it was opened to foreign trade and intercourse with other nations had to improve its own image, because in the mid 19th century, Japan still was considered a uncivilized or at best civilized countries. And I'm speaking in worded commerce here, of course, so Japan tried through various means to improve its image as a civilized country, because it wanted to become equal with the Western power. So we see this over the 19th and 20th centuries, the government is supporting this kind of PR, but also say, of course, propaganda campaigns. And this goes all the way down to World War Two.
And we see a resurgence of these policies after World War Two. So obviously, Japan and Germany were not particular popular nations in 1945. We could even say they were kind of row states, both Japan and Germany, where the two countries that had unleashed World War Two and in the international community of nations, there was not much sympathy, well, neither for Germany nor for Japan. And it's amazing how Japan and Germany both combinations in the post World War Two period succeeded in what we call image restoration.
So they had massive campaigns, stayed led, but also backed up by civil society initiatives to improve their own image. And if you look at opinion polls, more recent date, you can see that both Japan and Germany are usually in rankings. There are actually rankings of the popularity of nations and Japan and Germany are usually ranking among the top five Germany at one point was the vote, and would most popular nation and Japan force as well through is cultural diplomacy has become a very popular nation. Nation branding has been very successful since 1945.
How does this book shed new light on propaganda as a form of mass communication? Yeah, so the book looks at various forms and various types of media that produce or convey images to the population. And we look, for example, at lithographs or woodblock prints in the 19th century, we look at postcards, we look at satirical journals, and we also look at other texts, for example, through quantitative analysis of weekly or monthly journals. Now, if we think about propaganda, we usually have the image that propaganda is a strongly state led enterprise.
But what we can see throughout the book is that the mass media in many ways and in many instances aligned to the state objectives. So, for example, in Germany, the public opinion regarding Japan in the 19th century was very pro-Japanese, while there were also some images that were very critical of Japan, for example, the idea of the yellow peril. This was some kind of propaganda that was instigated by the German emperor, William II. But in until World War I, we actually see that this propaganda was not very successful.
So Japan, for example, during the Russell Japanese War was very popular in German society, German media painted a relatively positive image of Japan, while it was very critical of Russia. On the other hand, the emperor himself, because he was a relative, the Russian sir, he came up with this yellow peril propaganda to criticize Japan for its attack on Russia. In World War I, however, the situation changed, because in World War I, Japan and Germany found each other on different sites. So, in the first weeks, at least, of World War I, after Japan joined the war against Germany, there was a very strong wave of propaganda, anti-Japanese propaganda, taking up now these images of the yellow peril.
But then again, it became clear that the government can channel these kind of campaigns, and actually during World War I, the German government, because it was not sure yet how things would go after the war, and they wanted to allow a way out of this anti-Japanese propaganda. They actually banned anti-Japanese propaganda. They banned the usage of this image of the yellow peril, and that was also probably one of the reasons why Germany and Japan then drew closer to each other again, relatively soon after World War I. How does this book shed light on the role of stereotypes in human behavior?
Yeah, so stereotypes are obviously very important in the imagination of other nations held by people. People always need shortcuts to understand complex issues of politics and international relations and images in the more literal sense. Now, obviously, it served this purpose to summarize very complex international relations issue and to transport these shortcuts to larger audiences often through the mass media. So this is an issue that, of course, connects to soft power, and it is very important in the mass media to present these stereotypes images, because through this you will find a readership or an audience.
In Japanese-German relations, I've referred to some of them. We see a number of stereotypes being very important. I already mentioned the stereotype of the yellow peril, a very racialized stereotype, yellow here, obviously referring to the yellow race, and then the idea of a peril, which kind of refers to the idea of a war, a future war, along racial lines. This was a very common image in international relations in the first decades of the 20th century, and it was very easy to sell these racialized images in the mass media.
Obviously, they were very popular in the mass media, not only in Japan and Germany, also in other countries. Today, we still have these stereotypes. So in our research in this project, multiple authors looked at opinion polls. And first of all, it is actually interesting to see there are such opinion polls that inquire the images and the stereotypes that the populations of these two nations, but also other nations, hold of each other.
So Japan and Germany, both nations think that the other nations are, for example, very diligent, jums think of the Japanese that they're very polite. So it's not only about images in the literal sense, we also have these kind of stereotypes in the more non-literal sense that always come up again and again in opinion polls. And some of these stereotypes also already go back to the pre-war period to the early 20th century, when we can see the first writings on what we call the national character. It's a bit we don't use anymore that much nowadays, but I think it's still around in discussions about nationhood and national identities.
Of course, some of these stereotypes also self-promoted. So it's not only a negative term in the sense that others hold stereotypes of yourself. And that's a bad thing. Stereotypes are often also actively promoted by governments or by the mass media of a certain society.
And that's also what we see throughout the book that we have these stereotypes that are being chosen to be promoted through what we discussed and self-power initiatives. In the 1960s to the early 21st century, there is a certain focus on the major period on the 19th century, because this is an era in which Japanese-German relations are very close, probably closer than, for example, after World War II. This began with what we discussed before the German or the Prussian mission to Japan in 1860, 1861, and the signing of the bilateral treaty in 1861. And after that, Germany played a very important role in supporting Japan's modernization.
Japan was looking in specific fields very much to Germany, to Germany for supporting its modernization, in particular the legal system, but also the constitution and the military. Initially, Japan had a French advisor to modernize its army, but from the 1870s, the late 1870s onwards, it invited German advisors to build up the Imperial Japanese army. That was a very strong and foundational influence on modern Japan. The army, even throughout World War I, when Japan and Germany stood on different sides, the Imperial Japanese army would always look towards Germany, would look at Germany and how the German army, the German military, developed and would get inspiration from that, notwithstanding Germany's defeat in World War I.
So that was a very foundational influence that dates back to the major period to the late 19s and early 20s century. On the other hand, there were also some flashes, some controversies, and one of them refers to the yellow parry that I already talked before, that the German Emperor, William II, the last German Emperor, had this fable for this term of the yellow parry, and propagandized it. That obviously did not go down very well in Japan. And in 1895, this even resulted in a specific policy move, namely the so-called triple intervention when Germany joined Russia and France to protest against a peace treaty that Japan had signed after the war against China, and that gave Japan a least territory in the north east of China.
Through this triple intervention, Russia, France and Germany pushed Japan to give back this territory, which China had already signed over to Japan. So the three powers pushed Japan to give back this least territory to China, and this was seen as a hostile move, in Japan. So in 1895, the public opinion about Germany in Japan changes a little bit and becomes probably anti-German. What kinds of racial prejudices did leading and prominent nazis hold towards the quote-unquote yellow race?
Can you comment on the perception of Japanese as something like super Germans? Can you comment on Heinrich Himmler's fascination with Japan? Yeah, thank you. So this is another very ambiguous topic as we all know, I suppose, the Nazis were very racist, and they had this idea of racial hierarchy and of creative races, of races that destroy culture and of races that don't create culture, but kind of carry on culture.
And in Hitler's categorization, the Japanese were somewhere in the middle, so they were not culture destroying race, but they were also not creative. So they were not obviously of the leading Aryan race that Hitler postulated, but they were also not necessarily on par with Germany and the German race in the eyes of Hitler and leading Nazi propagandists and ideologues. Now, there were some exceptions, and you already mentioned Heinrich Himmler, the leader of the SS and the German police, he had some kind of a very positive image of the Japanese, and he kind of tried to separate the image of the Japanese as a part of the yellow race, which you could just not publicly say that there is something positive about the yellow race. But he said the Japanese have this special code of being a warrior nation, and probably his influence came from debates, and this course is in the first half of the 20th century about Bushido, this Japanese idea of the way of the warrior, about which there has been a lot of research recently.
This was not a traditional idea, it was there were some writings about Bushido in the 18th century, but it was not a clearly formulated code or ideology as many people think of it nowadays, it was really only constructed in the late 19th century, and then was also propagated as one of these images of Japan, the self images of Japan, in the first half of the 20th century. So Hitler was obviously, Hitler and also Himmler in particular, were influenced by that, and Hitler said, well, okay, let's not talk about the racial qualities of the Japanese, but they definitely have the warrior spirit, and that's what we also need. And he even said we need to apply this wonderful, quote unquote, Japanese warrior spirit to the Germans in the later years of the war, Himmler, sometimes even referred to the suicide attacks, the so-called tukkopilates or kamikaze pilots who in the last years of World War II took their planes and they did dive into enemy planes to sink them. And Himmler said, this is the spirit that Germans so just also need.
At one point, he had to back down a little bit, because if you exaggerate this too much, then of course it doesn't look your own soldiers very good, right? So if you'll tell your own soldiers, you need more of the Japanese kamikaze spirit or busido spirit, then that implicitly means you guys are lazy, you are not fighting with all you have. And so in the last phase of the war, Himmler and others who promoted this idea stepped down a step back a little bit from this strategy. Can you elaborate on the increased attention Japan received after its military successes in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894 and 1895, the Boxer War in China between 1899 and 1900, and the Russo-Japanese War of 1904 and 1905?
Yeah, these military conflicts fall in the major period, so the late 19s and early 20s century, and these military conflicts show two things, namely for Japan, first of all it showed that you needed military success to become a equal power and to receive recognition as an equal power. In the 1970s and 80s the discussions about the plays of Japan in the international community was more about civilization, is Japan civilized or not? Is it civilized enough to be recognized as an equal to say France, Britain or Germany? But eventually the Japanese realized that it's not really about civilization, it's eventually military power, and with every military victory, Japan became actually more recognized among the Western powers, and it was the Russo-Japanese War that made Japan become recognized as what was called at the time a first-rate nation.
So one of the big powers that dominate international relations and through the protocol that relates to that was that after the Russo-Japanese War for the first time European nations sent ambassadors to Japan. To date very common, every country sends ambassadors to other countries before 1945, this was not the case because the system of international relations was inherently unequal and ambassador-level diplomatic contacts were only established by the big powers in the 19th century, the big five. Now towards the end of the 19th century the United States was admitted to this exclusive club of leading or big powers and in 1905 Japan also joined and this was expressed through this sending of ambassadors to Japan and then also Japan could send diplomats on the ambassador level to say Paris, London or Berlin. So these military conflicts were very important in Japan's quest to achieve equality and to become an equal member of the international community of nations but a member of the leading nations, the big powers.
Who was Carl von Eisendecker? Why is he significant? Carl von Eisendeche was the second envoy, not ambassador at the time, of Germany in Japan. So he was originally from the small stage of Aldenburg but he joined the Prussian navy as a young man and he already joined the 186061 mission to Japan and East Asia that I mentioned before.
Which made him in the 1870s, one of the very few people, just a few dozen of people who ever had been to Japan and who had any knowledge of the country. So after a relatively successful military career in the Prussian and later German navy, he changed jobs and became a diplomat. His family was kind of close to the family of Bismarck, Otto von Bismarck, the chancellor of the German Empire since 1871. So there was also this connection that allowed him to join a state of service and as a diplomat he was then sent to Japan in the 1870s to be the German diplomatic representative in Tokyo in the capital of Japan.
And he stayed here for six or seven years and he is kind of specific and special because he entertained very friendly, on a personal level, very friendly relations with Japanese politicians in a time when Japan was still not yet considered truly quote unquote civilized. So that made him kind of special. The other representatives, the representatives of France and Britain for example, they tried to uphold their country's superiority vis-a-vis Japan. All of these nations had signed trade treaties which were also unequal.
These were unequal treaties that very much disadvantaged Japan in many respects. And Japan always wanted to re-wise these treaties and the British, the French and others were not open to this suggestion because they said Japan is still not yet sufficiently civilized. But Karl von Eisendesher, the Prussian-German diplomat, he was very open to these suggestions and he actually initiated the first round of treaty revision negotiations that would eventually much later though lead to the revision of these unequal treaties. And that's why in pre-war Japan he was quite well known in the historical memory, in the historical narrative as one of the early Westerners who kind of had an open idea to Japanese demands for treaty revision.
So that makes him quite important. He's much better known I think in Japan, but in the pre-war purity was well known in Japan, much more so than in Germany where he was a pretty much book art and historical figure. What does this volume offer to students of diplomatic history? Yeah, so as I mentioned before, we first of all we try to go beyond diplomatic history with this book because there are a number of books that these scholars that also have written, who have written contributions for this book have published previously, patia my co-editors, professor Kudo, and professor Tajima, they have edited additional volumes on the diplomatic relations and also on economic relations.
But still this is the most up-to-date book in a sense and the another unique feature is that it covers 115 years. So if you want to get an overview of Japanese-German relations, even you are in the field of diplomatic history, this book will give you kind of this overview of the changes and the changing character of Japanese-German relations from the from the mid-19th century, so from the period of imperialism through the two world wars until the post-war era and pretty much until the present. So that is a very helpful feature we think of this volume. What findings and discoveries surprised you most in your research and preparation process?
Yeah, so one thing was that although this topic is not very well studied in Anglo-Fone scholarship, there is a constant development of Japanese-German relations, obviously Japan and Germany, where important countries in international relations and that is why throughout the modern history of the world and of international relations, the two are important players in world politics and they always relate to each other in one way or the other and these relations are also always a part of the discussions in domestic politics. So and whatever era you look at, you will find references to Japanese-German relations in the domestic discussions about how to conduct foreign relations in Germany and in Japan. And this goes all the way up to the present right now, there are again intensifying discussions in both Japan and Germany. Both countries try to cooperate closer with each other in an era in which leadership in international relations has become a complicated issue.
So this is something that shows again that obviously the numbers three and four economic powers of this world are relevant to each other, much more relevant I think than previous scholarship has shown particular previous scholarship in English. In Germany, in Japanese has been lots of research on Japanese-German relations but with this book and also another set of volumes or three volumes actually published before this by the same publisher, we try to show also to end of own scholarship that Japanese-German relations is a topic that is was looking at. What made Germany in particular such an object of emulation and admiration for Japan as opposed to other European countries? In the 19th century, Japan was looking at all kinds of countries when it embarked on the process of modernization which at the prime men's generally westernization also in Japan people at the time did not have any problem to speak of westernization, the term westernization in Japanese orca was explicitly used.
So Japan did not exclusively look at Germany just to make this clear at the outset but Japan did look at Germany at because it thought it is a good example of how to modernize a nation in specific areas and these areas included core areas of a nation, namely the military and the constitution. In case of the constitution it was particularly important to see that Japan had a choice and there were politicians in the 1880s who argued for adopting a political system modeled after the British political system with a not so strong monarch and a very strong parliament but these voices were discarded and those who eventually drafted the Japanese constitution which would be promulgated and enacted in 1889 and 1890, these politicians would look towards Germany because Germany had an emperor and the emperor they thought had a relatively strong position particularly as the supreme commander of the military. So in Japan this combination was very strongly designed following the German example, the emperor being the supreme commander of the Japanese military as in the Japanese case and because this point was so important also explains why its wife, World War I because as we all know Germany lost World War I, the William II and the last step down went into exile and Germany became a republic, the Weimar Republic, this did not happen in Japan because the army said well Germany didn't really use the war, lose the war, this was an argument made by the German army, the German military and German conservatives themselves after World War I, this was also called a step in the back legend, the army didn't lose the war, it was basically sold out by the political leadership of Germany and the Japanese military kind of accepted this idea and they said yes the army didn't lose the war, that's why we don't need to re-wise our military organization or the way the supreme command of the Japanese imperial army is structured. Can you say something about the German East Asiatic Society?
Yeah so this is also one of the quite interesting sides of Japanese-German relations namely academic and cultural exchange, so this is something that started in the early major period in the 1800s and the 70s and is still a very characteristic of Japanese-German relations until today Germany and Japan are tied together by a very very tight and network of academic exchange agreements and institutions engaging in academic and cultural exchange and the German East Asiatic Society, usually abbreviated ORG was a society of German merchants and scholars who lived in Tokyo and later in Japan in early major Japan in the 1800s and 70s to kind of come together, there was also a social element of social gathering involved but also to study Japan and this kind of led to the first to the foundation of the first Japan studies journal in German language. This German East Asiatic Society published reports frequently with the results of their research about Japan and these journals were very popular also beyond Germany. At the time German was a very important science language in the late 19s and early 20s centuries or people in France and Britain etc. could read German usually and we know from the lists of where the the editions of these journals were sent to that they had a very wide circulation in academic terms so this was not a mass publication, it was an academic publication and this German East Asiatic Society still exists today so it was founded in 1873 and is now far more than 150 years old and we also recently actually published the history of the first 100 years of this German East Asiatic Society as a very important institution of Japanese German research and also an institution that of course contributes to the shaping of the images and the mutual perceptions in both nations.
How was Kaiser Wilhelm II received in Japan? What were his views of Japan and policies towards Japan? Yeah so William II is a very good example of how mutual perceptions may differ in both countries but even within the countries. Kaiser Wilhelm II was the one who was the main promoter of the image of the yellow peril in Germany but as I have shown in a different article which is not included in this book he did not find much acclaim with that in Germany.
There were lots of people who actually wrote protest letters to Kaiser Wilhelm and asked him to stand down to to stop this anti-Japanese propaganda. So in the archives of the German foreign ministry for example I found letters from a director of the German conglomerate group which was very much in the business of selling armaments to Japan and any country that could favor it and a croop made very good business in Japan. Now croop was kind of getting worried because if the emperor would make too much anti-Japanese propaganda then a croop thought the Japanese government might not sign any contracts with German companies anymore so they send a very clear letter to the German emperor telling him basically to stop it. On the other hand in Japan because Japan also had an emperor the German emperor not withstanding this anti-Japanese propaganda was held in relatively high esteem so we see quite a few visual representations of his in the Japanese mass media in weekly and monthly magazines where you have full page portraits of the emperor and he's usually portrayed in a relatively positive light which of course has to do also is the fact that the German constitution was to a certain degree a model for the Japanese constitution with the emperor being the absolute sovereign and the commander of the military and therefore you could not really criticize the German emperor because at least implicitly this could be read by the authorities as a criticism of the Japanese emperor and that was almost total taboo in pre-war Japan so there's a lot of ambivalence of both sides in the images of emperor William the second in Japan and also in the image of Japan that emperor William the second himself held.
What ways if any was Japan's perception of Germany unique vis-a-vis the other Asian societies perceptions of Germany likewise in what ways if any was Germany's perception of Japan unique vis-a-vis other European countries perceptions of Japan? Generally there were of course lots of similarities but Japan practically in the 19th century when it looked for models for its modernization it made clear distinctions between the strengths of each edition so Germany was chosen as a model for Japan's military and the constitution written was chosen as the model for Japan's navy France was chosen for other legal modernization drives and Japanese students and also government officials were sent for example on a very famous mission in the 1870s to a lot of European countries to look at how and what these countries did best and then Japan chose these countries as a model for specific parts of the Japanese modernization process. In comparison to other Asian countries Japan was a little bit ahead of everything in China for example modernization started somewhat later because in China until the late 19th century there was still very strong self-image of the Middle Kingdom so some Chinese politicians the more conservative Chinese politicians didn't really see a need to modernize until basically they lost the war against Japan in 1894, 1895 that is what made for them very clear that they had to modernize particularly the military sector and China went a similar way as Japan they also sent students and government officials to Europe and the United States to study these countries to study the military and they also chose in a similar way as Japan these European models for their own modernization and this would then also connect to images, imaginations and stereotypes so in China it was very similar the stereotypes and the images held off European nations where similar house those in Japan. How did German political caricatures view Japan in the years preceding World War One would such characters in your view be perceived as funny today or would the humor in them need to be understood strictly in the local and historical context?
Political caricature is very difficult to read and indeed needs a lot of context so even the people depicted in caricature are often sometimes rather obscure figures at least by now they are obscure figures so sometimes if the emperor for example in Germany if Emperor William II comes up in a caricature we know of course how to read that but very often we don't exactly know who the person is and why he is taken up at a specific moment in time in a specific edition of a satirical journal but in terms of the national stereotypes the caricatures are a little bit easier to read because as I mentioned all of these stereotypes and images that nations have of each other they are surprisingly stable so the image for example in Japan of Germans being diligent which also is an image that Germans hold of the Japanese has been very stable over many decades and that is also something we can find in caricature in an exaggerated way so the Japanese working too hard is an image that is sometimes taken up in German caricature in Japan there was also a caricature satirical journals like the Tokyo Puck which is kind of an imitation of a British satirical journal was published in the 1910s and 1920s and it also criticizes very much Japanese politics at the time and also foreign nations so also in this journal we see images as stereotyped images these shortcuts to other nations coming up and Tokyo Puck is also very critical of Western imperialism in Japan and some of the images we find here are very difficult to read because they usually refer to contemporary events and some of these events are not very well known anymore today so it requires a lot of digging into also newspapers what do newspapers record about this event possibly and there was no contribution about Tokyo Puck in this volume but there is a contribution about German satirical journals which in excellent ways contextualizes and picks out this context through which the satirical journals and the caricatures in those satirical journals can be understood can you elaborate on Japan's relationship with Ethiopia under highly salassie yeah Japan had very strong straight interests in Ethiopia and Ethiopia at the time so we're speaking about the 1920s 1930s was one of the few independent territories and states in Africa but as listeners probably will know Ethiopia was invaded by Italy in the mid 1930s and eventually colonized by Italy under Mussolini now Italy at that time a very ambiguous relationship with Japan as had Germany there were in 1935 for example there were no alliances or treaties yet between these countries and the conflict in Ethiopia actually did lead to a Japanese-Italian conflict because in Japan the public opinion was really against this colonization of an independent nation by a European power which now pursued colonialist policies colonialist policies of course were also pursued by Japan but after World War I generally there was a tendency away from colonizing other territories so after World War I there were still territories that were brought under the control of the western powers for example through the League of Nations as mandated territories territories mandated by the League of Nations for example to France Britain but also Japan but you could not just colonize a territory anymore as it was totally normal before 1914 now Japan made that point very clear that it was against Japan against Italy colonizing Ethiopia and the background to that was also that Japan was at the point in the process of colonizing the north east of China a region also known as Monturia and the League of Nations had condemned Japan for these steps but Japan on the other hand had argued we are not colonizing Monturia we are supporting the Monturians in creating their own state so there was a state called Montugo and Japan of course was controlling the state some people state was a puppet state but it was still an independent state so the the form was not one of colonization but of in in in direct controlling a territory through creating a in this case Japan-friendly government now Italy was doing something different Italy went in for the war even used chemical weapons and everything and colonized Ethiopia and Japan protested very loudly against this but eventually the two countries came together and decided that they recognized they recognized each other's new possessions so Italy was one of the first countries recognizing this puppet state of Montugo and it recognized Japan's control in the north east of China and in a turn Japan the government eventually recognized Italy's control of Ethiopia on the other hand this was on the on the government level on the other hand in civil society there were some right-wing pressure groups which continued to to to to to to to all nice campaigns anti-Italia campaigns basically criticizing Italy for colonizing an independent nation what new insights are presented in this volume regarding the relationship between imperial Japan and Nazi Germany Nazi Germany had a very ambiguous relation to Japan because of its racial policy and its racist ideology so initially it didn't look very likely that Germany and Japan would come together on a equal level because the Nazis just did not consider the Japanese racially equal but international relations and this connects to the previous question about Ethiopia now did lead to Japan Germany and also Italy coming together in a new alliance of anti quote unquote Anglo-American or Anglo-Saxon dominance so the three countries Japan Germany and Italy where the three countries that left the League of Nations to ban was the first one in 1933 Germany shortly after that he left the League of Nations and Italy also left the League of Nations as a result of its invasion of Ethiopia and the sanctions against Italy taken by the other member states this resulted in the three countries coming together in 1936 37 initially they Germany initially Germany and Japan signed a treaty that was directed against international communism and that's why it was called the anti-comintern pact the common turn was the communist international a organization in Moscow that was supposed to promote world revolution and Japan and Germany now agreed we don't want communist revolution in our country so we need to do something against communist agitation and that's why they signed the anti-comintern pact and several years later in 1940 Japan Germany and now Italy signed the trepottide pact which has sometimes been seen as a prelude to World War II and particularly in East Asia to Japan going to war with the United States and Britain in 1940 war was already going on in Europe so this is the pact that is sometimes seen as the decisive when emerging the two conflicts the war going on already in Europe and the war going on between China and in East Asia and now it all merges and becomes World War II so this is the 1940 three-part height treaty and it is also criticized in a way because it wasn't very in terms of contents it didn't say a lot actually it wasn't very decisive it did not have any saying that one of the nations needs to enter a war if one of the other countries goes to war with another country it was very a shallow and it was not a alliance it was not a military alliance it was not even a political alliance that made it obligatory for one of the signatories to go to war or support one of the other signatories but it did lay out basically the international constellation that we see later in World War II namely Germany, Japan and Italy on the one side was the allied powers on the other side. As we bring her dialogue today to a close can you kindly tell us about where your time and attention have gone since completing this work? Yeah thank you so since publishing this book I have published a number of other books one of them was also previously introduced in the new books network it's titled Men in Metal and it is a history of a public statuary in Japan from the 1880s until the present I also have done some research on something we touched upon this day namely the today the term Bushido and how this term was applied in Japanese-germ relations for example how Germans reacted to this term Bushido the way of the warrior and how they praised Japan although being racially quote unquote inferior being a warrior nation that Japan needs to ally with. On top of this we also are preparing now a follow-up volume about Japanese-germ relations in the post-war period this is also a topic that has not been explored very much by previous research in this case not even in Germany and Japan.
This is a translation the book has already been published in Japanese and now we are preparing an English version that will hopefully be published in a couple of years it's a translated and updated version that for the first time presents a comprehensive analysis of Japanese-German relations from the late 1940s until the 21st century. Sounds truly remarkable I really wish you the best of luck with that it's so important. Thank you Ari for having on the show today. It was my honor I was really grateful and really lucky.
As we enter dialogue today I'm signing off as Ari Barbalette your host on the new books and history channel of the new books that were podcast today I've been grateful to engage in dialogue with Dr. Sven Salar he is Dean of the Graduate School of Global Studies at Sophia University in Tokyo Japan he is also professor in modern Japanese history in the Faculty of Liberal Arts. We have been discussing his recently published book that he has co-edited with Kudo Akira and Tajima Nobuo entitled mutual perceptions and images in Japanese-German relations 1860 to 2010 published in Leiden Netherlands by Brill Publishers 2017 thank you