Talk:Germany–Japan relations

Move
Why has this article been moved from Japanese-German relations to German-Japanese relations? I am not sure which is right.

March 05

The two nations were allies in World War II, and this is seen by many historians as the starting point for "unique paths" in the development of both countries that, in similar ways, eventually led to totalitarianism. <- Unless Japan and Germany are totalirian regimes now (after WWII) this sentence makes no sense. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 79.204.159.20 (talk) 00:27, 14 March 2009 (UTC)

Aren't there any more cultural exchanges? I have heared German language used to be quite popular in Japan.

Düsseldorf has a large Japanese community! 27 Feb 2006

This site is so meaningless. Do German and Japanese Politicans have nothing to say to each other and the world - being (still) the second and third wealthiest nations on this planet? Are relations really only based on trade? This question seems interesting to me - in particular when considering technological and social matters. March 2006

move warring
Knock it off already. There is no agreed right or wrong name for this article, it has been moved three times in its history. futureperfect, the WP rule you quote applies to foreign language transliterations, which this is not. The other guy makes the better point, all articles in this category should have matching names. Shall we take it to 3O? Chris (クリス • フィッチュ) (talk) 18:13, 15 September 2009 (UTC)


 * If you don't want WP:USEENGLISH (admittedly, perhaps not the most relevant page to link to, just the most memorable abbreviation), use WP:NAME, a policy: "name the article with what the greatest number of English speakers would most easily recognize – usually the most commonly used name". The, by far and away, most natural and most frequent English form, in this and the majority of similar cases, is the adjectival one, so much so that the nominal compound form is rendered virtually ungrammatical. Look at the google searches: "German–Japanese relations" 15,500 ghits, "Germany–Japan relations": 26 ghits, including the Wikipedia article, and most of the rest being from non-native writers of English. You will find the same situation with a huge lot of other name pairs. Competent English speakers don't talk about "Germany–Japan relations", just as they wouldn't talk about crossing the "Germany–Poland border", don't watch "France–Italy talks" about "Spain–Portugal conflicts", or enjoy "Greece–Turkey friendship". All these phrases are simply not English. (By the way, it's nothing special about pairs of country names. It's precisely the same grammatical law that also makes us drink "German beer", not "Germany beer"; laugh about the "Italian prime minister", not the "Italy prime minister"; or watch a "French movie", not a "France movie".) The nominal compound forms are simply not idiomatic English. Just because some people have gone on a rampage and obsessively moved everything into a single naming scheme, sacrificing idiomaticity on the altar of misconceived uniformity, is not a valid argument for doing the same with the few remaining articles that have so far escaped. It is not a good idea to impose on the English language a self-invented uniformity that the language itself does not have. Country names are different; no single uniform naming scheme will ever fit them all, because that is just how the English language works. Fut.Perf. ☼ 18:32, 15 September 2009 (UTC)

Peer review
{{Wikipedia:Peer_review/German–Japanese

Found a misspelling of the word organizing

Opening sentence
The opening sentence dates relations to 1871, but the main text has examples of private contracts going back to the 1690s and official relations beginning in 1860. Perhaps this is based on the idea that Germany wasn't really Germany until 1871? But the word "Germany" goes back thousands of years. It was the "Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation" in the Middle Ages and the "German Confederation" after 1815.

On another note, was Prussia really "the most powerful of the numerous regional states in Germany" in 1860? At that time, Austria was also a member of the German Confederation. Kauffner (talk) 14:01, 8 February 2010 (UTC)


 * I clarified and corrected both passages. --Gliese876 (talk) 13:00, 9 February 2010 (UTC)

Hitler's vews formatting
In the lead of the section Germany–Japan relations, there is this quote:
 * It was not in the interests of Great Britain to have Germany annihilated, but primarily a Jewish interest. And to-day the destruction of Japan would serve British political interests less than it would serve the far-reaching intentions of those who are leading the movement that hopes to establish a Jewish world-empire.

Unfortunately the picture on the left can remove the indent and then it looks iike it is being stated as a fact. That's what happened to me using Google Chrome. Dmcq (talk) 08:50, 19 May 2012 (UTC)

Orphaned references in Germany–Japan relations
I check pages listed in Category:Pages with incorrect ref formatting to try to fix reference errors. One of the things I do is look for content for orphaned references in wikilinked articles. I have found content for some of Germany–Japan relations's orphans, the problem is that I found more than one version. I can't determine which (if any) is correct for this article, so I am asking for a sentient editor to look it over and copy the correct ref content into this article.

Reference named "cia": From Palau:  From Soviet Union:  From Iraq:  From Japan:  From Guam: CIA Factbook: Guam. Cia.gov. Retrieved on 2012-06-13. 

I apologize if any of the above are effectively identical; I am just a simple computer program, so I can't determine whether minor differences are significant or not. AnomieBOT ⚡ 08:36, 7 October 2012 (UTC)

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History focus
This article is too focused on only history. Most articles on foreign relations have a section on history among other sections. For example, Japan–United States relations has sections on current economic relations, military relations, and historiography. Germany–United States relations has many other sections, including those on perceptions and values, as well as military, cultural, and economic relations. This article either needs to be expanded in scope, or else renamed "History of Germany-Japan relations".Tessa Bennet (talk) 14:13, 3 July 2017 (UTC)

"Stalling"
What this article says here about Hitler "stalling" for an alliance with Japan in 1938-39 is dead wrong. Germany wanted a military alliance with Japan from November 1938 on, and so too did Japan-the principle problem was who it was to be directed against. The article does not say anything about this at all, but from late 1938 German foreign policy was essentially anti-British rather than anti-Soviet. The gigantic fleet envisioned in the Z Plan of January 1939 was not intended to fight the Soviet Baltic Fleet. With the Z Plan, Hitler took the Kriegsmarine from third in the allocation of raw materials like steel to the first place. If Hitler's foreign policy in 1939 was mainly anti-Soviet, he would not had been weakening his army in order to strengthen his navy. And until the Z Plan fleet was built, which would take several years and never was in fact, Germany needed allies with strong navies to take on Britain, of the which the two most logical candidates were Italy and Japan. A point that needs to be made here is that German naval planning in the 1930s was not based upon the guerre de course strategy that was actually followed in World War with the U-boats. The decision to go with the guerre de course strategy was an improvised reaction to the fact that in September 1939 the construction on the vast Z Plan fleet had only just began. The leadership of both the German and Japanese navies for that matter were deeply influenced by Alfred Thayer Mahan's 1890 book The Influence of Sea Power Upon History, where Mahan explains at considerable length how the greatest sea powers are always the greatest world powers, and dismisses guerre de course as a strategy. Mahan believed in big fleets centered around big battleships that would fight big battles to win command of the sea, a way of thinking that deeply influenced both the German and Japanese navies right until 1945. It is not for nothing that both the German and Japanese navies loved to build very big battleships. Admiral Erich Raeder was appropriately enough for a protégé of Admiral Tirpitz a big battleship man who wanted big battleships to fight big battles in the North Sea. For Raeder, the battleship was the queen of the seas, and for him, the bigger the battleship the better. That was the war on sea that the Third Reich was planning for. Leaving aside for the moment the fact that the H-class battleships that Raeder had started to build would have been the biggest battleships of all time, indeed would had been too big to fit into dock in the world if they were ever finished, it takes time to build such truly colossal battleships. In 1939, the German surface fleet was not big enough to fight the big battles in the North Sea that Raeder planned on fighting, which is why Hitler needed allies with big navies in the interim that might divert the Royal Navy into the Mediterranean and the Pacific in order to give the Kriegsmarine a chance until the Z Plan was finished. When Britain declared war on Germany on September 3rd, 1939, Raeder grimly write in the Kriegsmarine war diary that the war had started five years too soon, and all the Kriegsmarine do now was "die gallantly". The Z Plan was supposed to be finished about 1944, but that was highly optimistic interpretation, and 1949 was a much more probable date. Hitler did not "stall" for an alliance with Japan, which he needed very badly as part of his anti-British strategy.

In November 1938, Hitler ordered Ribbentrop to convert the Anti-Comintern Pact into an anti-British military alliance. Ribbentrop was able to sign the Pact of Steel with Italy in May 1939, but as many historians have noted that the task of converting Anti-Comintern Pact into anti-British alliance was well beyond Ribbentrop's abilities (most things were with that strange, amateur diplomat who was operating well beyond his level of competence as German foreign minister). It has often been noted that there was a huge contradiction in Hitler's foreign policy in 1939 in that he was planning on a war with Britain whose chosen instruments like the Z Plan fleet would take several years to create vs. reckless short-term actions like attacking Poland that going to cause a war with Britain that year. Unbelievably, Ribbentrop managed somehow to convince Hitler that neither France nor Britain would do anything if Germany attacked Poland in 1939. Ribbentrop put forward various reasons for why he believed Britain and France would do nothing, but even he saw the value of deterrent diplomacy. Signing alliances with nations with strong navies like Japan and Italy were intended to deter Britain from going to war if Germany attacked Poland. Later, the non-aggression pact with the Soviet Union was intended to serve the same purpose, namely by making the German economy blockade-proof, that it would deter Britain from going to war with Germany. The popular theory that Hitler signed the non-aggression pact in order to take Poland and then turn west confuses intentions with results. In August 1939, when the non-aggression pact in Moscow was signed, it is quite clear that both Hitler and Ribbentrop expected the British to renounce the "guarantee" that been given to Poland only in March of that year. Getting back to early 1939, Ribbentrop tried very hard in 1938-39 to get the Japanese to join this projected anti-British alliance, so I don't understand why this article talks about Hitler "stalling". The problem with creating German-Japanese alliance that the Japanese had no interest in an anti-British alliance in 1938-39, and wanted only an alliance that was anti-Soviet. It is striking that the Japanese military attache in Berlin was instructed to join the talks for an alliance with Germany, but not the naval attache, which rather disappointed the Germans. Hitler didn't "stall" for an alliance with Japan in 1938-39. It was the just the question of whom this proposed alliance was to directed against that was the problem. The Tientsin incident of 1939 does show that the Japanese were willing to provoke the British, but also noteworthy that the Japanese backed off on that. With Japan embroiled in a war with China and a border war with the Soviet Union, saner heads in Tokyo realized that now was not the time to start a war with Britain, no matter how much Ribbentrop might wish otherwise. There is a very long chapter on this in The Foreign Policy of Hitler's Germany Starting World War II by Gerhard Weinberg, which traces the German-Japanese talks of November 1938-August 1939 in exhaustive detail. --A.S. Brown (talk) 04:37, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

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