These racisms, one touting Japanese claims to lead the peoples of Asia against White, European dominance, the other resolutely pro-“Aryan,” should have clashed and negated, one might think, any possibility of cooperation. Such pretensions to mastery buttressed their plans for empire-building in East Asia and Eastern Europe. Japanese imperialism and Nazism also each brandished ferocious ideologies of racial superiority. Resentment against the imperialist hegemons of the day-Britain and France-and the thwarting of Japan and Germany’s revisionist and expansionist aims during this crisis supplied common ground between the two countries. The deepening of the Great Depression, heretofore the most severe downturn in the history of capitalism, facilitated Hitler’s rise to power in Germany and the ascent of ultra-nationalists in Shōwa Japan. The alliance between Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan was both cause and effect of the worldwide political and economic crisis of the 1930s, as the far-right governments of the two nations felt increasingly emboldened to defy and destabilize the international system. Top Image: Hitler’s Foreign Affairs Advisor Joachim von Ribbentrop and Japanese Ambassador Kintomo Mushanokōji sign the Anti-Comintern Pact in Berlin, November 25, 1936.
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