Until recently, scholarship on Nazi Germany's wartime alliances has tended to align with one of two long-standing interpretative frameworks. The first, which emerged during the war in American propaganda and evolved over the course of the Cold War, interprets the Axis alliances as symptomatic of a mutual pathology, variously diagnosed as totalitarianism, a delayed or abortive modernization process, or some other socio-cultural divergence from a presumed normative model of historical development. The second, favored by diplomatic and political historians, claims that Nazi ideology—in particular its stance on race—preordained that any alliance was, at best, a cynical strategic calculation of mutual interest. In the last several years, however, works like Benjamin Martin's The Nazi-Fascist New Order for Europe (2016) and Arnd Bauerkämpfer and Grzegorz Rossolinski-Liebe's edited volume Fascism without Borders (2018) have offered a new perspective on this topic through their investigation of these relationships from a specifically transnational perspective. What they have revealed so far is that the relationships between the various right-wing and nationalist movements, parties, and regimes of the interwar era were more meaningful to their participants, and more complex with respect to ideological and practical motivation, than those earlier analytical models acknowledged.
Ricky W. Law's book offers an important and necessary contribution to this emerging field in its examination of the oft-misunderstood German–Japanese relationship, although Law's use of the term transnational is ultimately more conceptually inclined. In Law's analysis, the relationship that ultimately emerged between Germany and Japan following the First World War was made possible by a sense of reciprocal admiration and appreciation, facilitated by media images positively representing each country and its culture—or at least an essentialized approximation thereof—to the other. At the center of this relationship was what Law refers to as “transnational Nazism,” which he defines as “an ideological outlook. Its Nazism centered on Hitler's personality and elemental National Socialism as a worldview that combined emphasis on the nation and communal sharing of benefits and sacrifice” (2).
Law refers to this version of Nazism as transnational because it was selectively embraced by elements of the Japanese media, which, in Law's words, “shared Germans’ excitement about Hitler” (1). For its part, the German media smoothed the way for an eventual German–Japanese alliance by employing a series of positive stock tropes and stereotypes about Japan and Japanese culture, and later allowing for some accommodation of the Japanese within Nazi racial ideology. The interwar German–Japanese relationship was therefore almost entirely an invention of the media. Although it may have been “words rather than people or objects [that] were the main instrument for interaction and exchange” (19) between Germany and Japan, it was these media images—rather than strategic calculations or a shared cultural tendency toward authoritarianism—that enabled the eventual formal alliance between the two states.
Despite the frequent use of the term transnational, the work is actually structured as a fairly straightforward comparative study. In addition to the introduction and conclusion, the book is divided into two halves—each consisting of four chapters—with the first half focusing on images of Germany in the Japanese media and the second half focusing on images of Japan in the German media. Each chapter is devoted to a different media form or genre—for example, newspapers, nonfiction, film, and so forth—with each individual chapter covering roughly the same chronology. Although this choice occasionally makes it seem as though the individual chapters are just variations on a theme, it also helps to highlight what is undoubtedly this book's greatest strength, which is its sources. Law has compiled a remarkably comprehensive collection of sources in both Japanese and German, ranging from newspapers to nonfiction publications, films, and even language textbooks; indeed, the sheer quantity of material that he consults throughout this book is itself evidence of the two countries’ mutual interest in each other.
One potential drawback to this, however, is that in attempting to present all of the source material compiled, Law struggles at times with fully developing his analysis. For example, one of the most intriguing revelations in the first chapter—which discusses Japanese newspapers’ coverage of Germany—is that the German public figure most frequently featured in the Japanese press during the interwar era was not Adolf Hitler or Paul von Hindenburg, but former Kaiser Wilhelm II. Also of note is that many political changes in Germany prior to 1933 were interpreted in Japan as evidence of a possible “imperial restoration” (35–36). This is clearly a moment in which the Japanese press was reading events in Germany through the lens of its own domestic politics, and yet Law does not unpack the implications of this phenomenon with respect to his concept of “transnational Nazism.”
This is one example of several such missed opportunities throughout the book, but it is reflective of a broader point. In framing this project comparatively around the concept of “transnational Nazism,” Law is defining the German–Japanese relationship as inherently skewed in favor of Germany, with the Japanese relegated to the role of willing recipient. This may have been true prior to the First World War, when German art, science, and culture had carried significant weight in Japan, but seems rather less plausible with respect to the interwar era. Moreover, as discussed in Reto Hofmann's The Fascist Effect: Japan and Italy, 1915–1952 (2015), Japanese intellectuals and policymakers actively debated the ideological content and geopolitical implications of Italian Fascism during this same time period. Although Ricky Law's book offers an important first step in reassessing the German–Japanese alliance from a cultural perspective, its reliance on comparative methodology does not allow for the possibility that these countries did not merely react to each other but that they also interacted with each other.
