Eli5: Why did Japan side with Germany in WW2?
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The very simplified answer is that Japan and Germany (and Italy) all had expansionist aims that most countries wouldn’t have looked kindly upon. They all needed allies and they didn’t have a lot of options.
Really simply, enemy of my enemy.
Japan’s expansionist aims brought it into direct conflict with the US over hegemony of the Pacific; Britain over their colonies in Hong Kong, Singapore, Malaya, Burma and India and the Dominions of Australia and NZ; France over Indochina; and the Dutch over the East Indies.
By 1940, all four were also enemies of Germany.
Sure – I’ll help you with your homework.
It mostly boiled down to the results of being a very aspiration nation but being stuck on a relatively small, mountainous, and resource poor island. The home islands of Japan lack a lot of essential resources for a major superpower – very specifically oil and and grazing lands for Western-type farm animals. Around the 1930s Japan really started desiring to match it’s internal image (a global powerhouse destined by fate to me a leader among nations) with its external image (a relatively small, isolationist, and let’s be honest, non-globally relevant nation).
You have to be fair and factor in a specific set of grievances – the US was manhandling Japan in terms of it’s getting fossil fuel resources, and both China and Russia had repeated beaten back Japan for hundreds of years. Japan had some major bitterness against the powers that be.
So when the opportunity came in the 1940s for Japan to rise up and take it’s rightful place on the global stage as THE LEADER of Asian and Pacific power, it was only right. Of course the Time was RIPE for Japan to seize it’s rightful place and role *and especially* to make the US, China, and Russia very specifically pay dearly for their insults and injustices, well, all the better.
I am curious to know now when the Japanese learned of the Holocaust and how their people reacted.
Japan wanted to bring more power and honor to their empire like European empires were trying to do.
Portugal took over Taiwan which they renamed as “*Formosa*” (*A isla formosa /The beautiful island*). The French took over Vietnam. Britian controlled Hong Kong. Germany did not like other European empires like the French and British.
There is very little that otherwise would have endeared them except the other great powers opposed them both. The other great powers wanted to stop German expansion in Europe, and they were opposed to Japanese actions in China and Korea. They worked hard to cut off Japanese access to resources and Japan needed a friend who was “open minded” about invading neighbors.
This is a bit of “the enemy of my enemy”.
The Onion kind of summed up how ridiculous the alignment was however: “Japan Forms Alliance With White Supremacists in Well-Thought-Out Scheme”
They had two major things in common. Both outsiders of the contemporary international order, and both sought to expand beyond their borders. Japan was highly dissatisfied with the international order of the time, as it felt looked down upon by the western powers, and felt that it had not been given proportionate status in said order. Germany was similarly dissatisfied, it was an international pariah after ww1 and had been severely and arguably unfairly punished with the Treaty of Versailles.
They were two Nations who wanted to conquer and expand their empires, but they were on the other side of the world from each other and so didn’t need to worry about coming into conflict over the same territory. They had similar ambitions, shared enemies and their goals didn’t overlap.
Marriage of convenience (see other responses about expansionism and shared enemies) mixed with similar views of racial superiority leading to massacres of innocent civilians.
Really two peas in a really shitty, evil pod.
Same reason why China and Russia would team up now because they both have territorial ambitions and they think they could probably get away with it. It’s a good thing for our generation that NATO isn’t going through some internal drama, the US isn’t fracturing from within and the UN is a united and savvy peacemaker otherwise things could get pretty dicey.
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