First study of the fascinating parallelism that characterizes developments in Japan and Germany by one of Germany's leading Japan specialists.With the founding of their respective national states, the Meiji Empire in 1869 and the German Reich in 1871, Japan and Germany entered world politics. Since then both countries have developed in strikingly similar ways, and it is not surprising that these two became close allies during the Second World War, although in the end this proved a "fatal attraction."
Bernd Martin is Professor of History at the University of Freiburg.
AcknowledgementsChapter 1. Fatal Affinities: the German Role in the Modernization of Japan in the Early Meiji Period (1868-1895) and its AftermathChapter 2. Japan during the World Economic Crisis: Big Business and Social UnrestChapter 3. Three Forms of Fascism: Japan - Italy - GermanyChapter 4. Germany and Pearl HarborChapter 5. The German Japanese Alliance in the Second World WarChapter 6. The Pacific War and the Twentieth CenturyBibliographyIndex
"[These articles] offer crucial points of orientation to an understanding of German-Japanese relations in modern times and encourage further research into this complex subject matter." Historische Zeltschrift