The Prussians of the East: Samurai, Bushido, and Japanese Honor in the German Imagination, 1905-1945

During the spring of 1944, the Deutsch-Japanische Gesellschaft , an organization devoted to improving and expanding German-Japanese cultural and intellectual engagement, solicited the German public for their thoughts and impressions about Japan through an essay contest. Participants were asked to identify the political, economic, and cultural values and institutions that united Germany and Japan against the United States, and — by most accounts — the results were better than expected. Out of the total submitted essays, 420 were judged to have met the minimum requirements for the contest; these submissions originated from across Germany and its occupied territories and had been written by a fairly diverse demographic crosssection of the German nation. Professional men, students, soldiers, housewives, and even a few foreign nationals all participated in the exercise. The essays themselves range from short, crude polemics written on scrap paper to elegantly argued theses, carefully typed and edited; in eff ect, what these essays represent to the historian is a survey — perhaps not comprehensive but nevertheless still useful — of German public opinion towards the Japanese during the last years of the Second World War.