The Control Of Germany And Japan

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 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.

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.