Japan and Germany

Press, Volume LXXVIII, Issue 23590, 18 March 1942, Page 4

Japan and Germany

It is significant that the Japanese Ambassador to Germany, Lieuten-ant-General Oshima, should be endeavouring to calm fears “ which exist even outside Anglo-Saxon “ countries ” about the future of the white race in the Far East. And it is perhaps unlikely that the Germans he was addressing were greatly reassured by his promise that after the war Germany would be able to sell machinery to Japan’s Greater Asia and receive raw materials in return. In Manchukuo Germany has already had some experience of attempting to develop trade with a Japanese-occupied country, and it has not been an encouraging experience. Before the outbreak of war, Germany developed a huge and profitable commerce with Asia, a commerce which Japan did her best to hinder because it involved selling machinery and war equipment to China. Indeed, although pre-war Germany was at some pains to flatter Japan and to encourage her military ambitions, contacts between Berlin and Chungking were on the whole closer and more cordial than those between Berlin and Tokyo. German military advisers created the Chinese army which gave such a good account of itself in the struggle for Shanghai: German plant and technical experts were responsible for the mushroom growth of China’s heavy industries; and even now Chiang Kai-shek has German military advisers on his staff. In any case, it is probably not the economic future which is worrying Germans as much as the thought that for reasons of expediency Hitler has allied them with a race

which National Socialist doctrine teaches them to regard as morally and culturally inferior, a race which thinks it has a holy duty to extirpate western influence in Asia.