Eli5: Why did Japan side with Germany in WW2?
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Before WW2 there were people in the US who were happy with the idea of “giving China to Japan.”
An alternative history would have had Japan join the allies and take huge chunks of China and all of Korea.
Short answer: war is really expensive, so having friends (well, “friends”) to split the costs is always a good thing.
Long answer: aside from having similar goals and national philosophies, Japan and Germany had the benefit of having no big conflicts of interest: Germany wanted hegemony over Europe, Japan wanted hegemony of Asia. Germany and Japan both being at war with the Allies forces the Allies to essentially fight 2 wars at the same time, so they have to split resources and manpower: every bomb dropped on Dresden is a bomb not being dropped on Osaka; every boot on the ground in Tokyo is a boot that’s not in Berlin.
Japans leadership mostly had similar sympathies to the nazi propaganda and belief that their race was the superior one. Germany needed japan to destabilize their eastern enemies, and lied to them that they were on the same team. Hitler would have hit japan if the eastern war went his way. But ya the Japanese were pretty fucked up for the longest time, until they got humbly gay bombed.
Part of it has to do with the emperor digging himself a hole to dig himself out of another hole.
He was under the impression that siding with the United States and Britain (which he respected) would force them to go to war in Europe if and when it happened, and Hirohito did not want to be dragged into a war. He allowed his ministers to sign a deal with the Berlin-Rome Axis under the pretense that they wouldn’t drag Japan into a war, which, to be fair, they did not – Japan dragged *them* into a war. Biographies of Hirohito seem to agree he regretted the decision almost as he took it and it was basically eat shit or eat shit.
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