Скачать или смотреть The Nazis Hated Other Races... So Why Did Japan Join Them?

The Nazis weren’t exactly shy about the fact that they didn’t really care for individuals of a race other than the one they idealized. Further, the Japanese seemingly had no problem with peoples like the Jews, even going so far as in WWII taking in Jewish refugees from German occupied lands. Further, unlike Germany’s European allies during WWII, when the Nazis attempted to pressure Japan to join in on their anti-Jewish activities, the Japanese government not only didn’t listen, but even had official policy in place explicitly prohibited expelling any Jew from Japan or territories they occupied- a policy they maintained throughout the war, even as Jews who escaped from Nazi occupied regions continued to flood in to Japanese territories. Japanese Diplomat Yōsuke Matsuoka summed up, “I am the man responsible for the alliance with Hitler, but nowhere have I promised that we would carry out his anti-Semitic policies in Japan. This is not simply my personal opinion, it is the opinion of Japan, and I have no compunction about announcing it to the world.”

Given all of this, it seems rather odd that Japan and Nazi Germany should sign a series of agreements with one another culminating in the famed Tripartite Pact in 1940, which ultimately allied most famously Nazi Germany, Italy, and Japan, but also eventually the likes of such countries as Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Croatia, and, for two whole days, Yugoslavia, all into the so-called coalition of Axis Powers. (More on the interesting reason Yugoslavia’s joining only lasted 2 days in the Bonus Facts later on.)

So why did Japan join up with the Nazis? And for that matter, why did the Nazis want to join Japan not only so far away from their own country, but also populated by non-Aryans who not only couldn’t have cared less about Nazi ideology, but actually pretty fundamentally disagreed with it?