Abstract
In his comprehensive history of World War II, military historian John Keegan described it as “the largest single event in human history, fought across six of the world’s seven continents and all its oceans. It killed fifty million human beings, left hundreds of millions of others wounded in mind or body and materially devastated much of the heartland of civilization.”1 Most educated Americans believe that this vast conflict began with Adolf Hitler’s invasion of Poland on September 1, 1939, if not with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Very few would cite the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident” of July 8, 1937 or the “Manchurian Incident” of September 18, 1931 as the start of this greatest war of all times. Yet World War II arguably started with the 1931 Japanese attack in Manchuria, it became truly a global war with the entry of the United States following the 1941 Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor and it ended in East Asia with Emperor Hirohito’s surrender speech on August 15, 1945. Similarly, the majority of authors of the thousands of books and articles about this great struggle have a decidedly Western perspective, thus the importance of the Asian component of the conflict is often overlooked and some major issues are neglected.
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Notes
John Keegan, The Second World War (New York: Penguin Books, 1989), foreword.
For a discussion of this ideological transformation of the intellectual structure of the ideology of State Shintō from Hozumi Yatsuka in the late Meiji period to Uesugi Shinkichi in the early Taishō period, see Walter A. Skya, “The Emperor, Shinto Ultranationalism and Mass Mobilization,” in Religion and National Identity in the Japanese Context, ed., Klaus Antoni et al. (Hamburg and London: Lit Verlag, 2002), pp. 235–248.
Uesugi Shinkichi, Kokka shinron (Tokyo: Keibunkan, 1921).
Kakehi Katsuhiko, Kokka no kenkyū (Tokyo: Shimizu shoten, 1913).
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 207.
John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon Books, 1986), p. 207.
Antony Best, British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge is Asia, 1914–1941 (New York: Palgrave, 2002), p. 163
S. Hatano and S. Asada, “The Japanese Decision to Move South, 1939–41,” in R. Boyce and E.M. Robertson, eds., Paths to War: New Essays on the Origin of the Second World War (Basingstoke: MacMillan, 1989), pp. 393–394.
Carl Boyd, Hitler’s Japanese Confidant: General Ōshima Hiroshi and MAGIC Intellegence, 1941–1945 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1993), p. 53.
Adolf Hitler, Mein Kampf, tr. Ralph Manheim (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1943), p. 284.
See Michael D. Biddiss, Father of Racist Ideology: The Social and Political Thought of Count Gobineau (New York: Weybright and Talley, 1970), p. 258.
Jay W. Baird, To Die For Germany: Heroes in the Nazi Pantheon (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), p. 1.
Herbert Bix, Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan (New York: HarperCollins, 2000), p. 260.
Carl Boyd, The Extraordinary Envoy: General Hiroshi Ōshima and Diplomacy in the Third Reich, 1934–1939 (Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1980), p. 7.
Agawa Hiroyuki, The Reluctant Admiral Yamamoto and the Imperial Navy, tr. John Bester (Tokyo: Kodansha International, Ltd., 1979), pp. 141–142.
Mikiso Hane, Modern Japan: A Historical Survey (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1992), p. 288.
This was not the first time that fighting had broken out between Japanese and Soviet forces. On July 11, 1938, a fight had occurred at Changkufeng, near the juncture of Manchuria, the Soviet Union, and Korea. The Japanese attempt to seize territory from the Soviets failed and they were forced to retreat. Alvin Coox wrote histories of both clashes: The Anatomy of a Small War: The Soviet-Japanese Struggle for Changkufeng-Khasan, 1938 (Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1977) and Nomonham, 2 vols. (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1985).
Gerhard L. Weinberg, “Why Hitler Declared War on the United States,” Quarterly Journal of Miltiary History, 4:3 (Spring 1992): 18
The naval actions are described in Paul S. Dull, A Battle History of the Japanese Navy 1941–1945 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1978), pp. 103–111.
On the debate over Japanese options see: John J. Stephan, Hawaii Under the Rising Sun (Honolulu: University of Hawaii Press, 1984), pp. 89–121
H.P. Wilmott, Empires in the Balance (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 1982), pp. 436–460.
For a fascinating account of how Germany tried to provide Japan with its latest weapons and military technology by way of the U-boat in the closing weeks of the war in Europe, see Joseph M. Scalia, Germany’s Last Mission to Japan: The Failed Voyage of U-234 (Annapolis: Naval Institute Press, 2000).
After the outbreak of hostilities with the Manchurian Incident of September 18, 1931, fighting between Chinese and Japanese forces erupted in Shanghai in January 1932. An armistice was signed in May 1932. Donald A. Jordan, China’s Trial By Fire: The Shanghai War of 1932 (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2001) details this conflict.
Albrecht Fürst von Urach, Das Geheimnis Japanischer Kraft (Berlin: Zentralverlag der NSDAP, 1943).
Ian Buruma, The Wages of Guilt: Memories of War in Germany and Japan (New York: Farrar Straus Giroux, 1994), p. 35.
Emilio Gentile, The Sacralization of Politics in Fascist Italy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), p. 14.
Klaus Antoni, Shinto & die Konzeption des Japanischen Nationalwesens (kokutai) (Leiden: Brill, 1998), p. 280.
Gavan McCormack, “Nineteen-Thirties Japan: Fascism?,” Bulletin of Concerned Asia Scholars, 14 (April–June 1982): 32.
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© 2004 E. Bruce Reynolds
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Skya, W.A. (2004). Fascist Encounters: German Nazis and Japanese Shintō Ultranationalists. In: Reynolds, E.B. (eds) Japan in the Fascist Era. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781403980410_5
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