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Explanation: Nazi Germany was famously antisemitic, going so far as to attempt to massacre Jewish people in the territories they occupied. They passed along a number of old canards about how the Jews were secretly trying to control the world.
Curiously, their ally in WW2, Imperial Japan, was fairly friendly to the Jewish people (though, as imperialist fascist fuckwits, certainly committed atrocities against other peoples), as Western Jews had supported them strongly in the Russo-Japanese War (as the Russian Empire was infamously antisemitic - a lot of antisemitism around at the time), which Japan felt was the war which finally earned them the right to be regarded as equal to European powers.
For that reason, and that Japan had no deeply rooted traditions of antisemitism, the overall effect of “THE JEWS RUN THE WORLD AND ALL THE BANKS” was less “Oh God, we have to stop them!” and more “Oh, they sound like they’ll be useful to have as friends, then.”
Iirc, alliances in WW2 were quite messy and with a tendency to be broken at least partially, some notable ones I remember:
The Soviet-Nazi Friendship Pact, Hungary helping Poland despite being allied with Germany, Poland being forced to declare war against Japan which they considered a friend nation, Brazil approaching Germany despite being allied with the US, China afaik also being allied with Germany but with Japan at their throats, and Finland allying themselves with Germany just to fight the Soviets.
umm… stupid question but is this a reason why Japan makes good cars?
Don’t worry! No stupid questions!
The attempt by Japan to cultivate ties with Jewish immigrants was not wildly successful, and didn’t bring in much in the way of foreign capital. In part because Japan didn’t have a large or well-established Jewish community to begin with. Always harder to be the first few folk of a specific minority in a place! In part because many Western Jews (who would have been the portion of the world’s Jewish community most likely to emigrate and most likely to have any sort of industrial capital or expertise to contribute) were ideologically aligned with liberal and left-wing movements rather than the… far-right imperialism of Japan at the time. And in part because… well, Japan was allied with Nazi fucking Germany. XD
Japan’s dominance in the auto market didn’t come about until the 60s or 70s. I’m not real sure as to the history there, I just know the vague post-war timeline of it.
It was a legacy of American reconstruction. We sent industrial engineers to Japan to test their theories after they’d proved useful during the wartime manufacturing, but American companies weren’t interested in continuing using them. This resulted in combining Japanese ideas that ultimately led to the Japanese style of manufacturing such as lean
Japanese cars, especially in the early days were really differentiated by being efficient and small (Japanese cultural and practical desires contrasted to what American consumers were believed at the time to want) and cheap and well built (this is where the industrial engineering thrived)
Thank you!
