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Paper short abstract

This paper analyzes Wilhelm Nohara’s German renderings from the 1930s of Japan, China, and Manchuria to uncover how his young adult adventure stories of the “Far East” legitimated Japan’s imperial vision of itself as a modernizing, expansionist power to its ally’s next generation of readers.

Paper long abstract

Studies of the cultural products of the alliance between Nazi Germany and imperial Japan have blossomed in the last decade. Yet despite work on the role of children’s literature in promoting imperialism more broadly or that focusing on the role of ideology in juvenile fiction from the Third Reich, the young adult literature of the German-Japanese entanglement remains largely ignored. It is a comparatively small body of writings, to be sure, but works such as the German-language adventure stories by Wilhelm Komakichi von Nohara (1899-1950) sold well. They clearly had a role to play in introducing “appropriate” messaging regarding the “Far East” and Japan’s role there to young German readers.

This paper analyzes Nohara’s German-language renderings of sites at the edges of Japan’s wartime empire to uncover how his young adult adventure stories of the “Far East” glamorized and legitimated Japan’s imperial vision of itself as a modernizing, expansionist power. Nohara’s early young adult novels are written in the tradition of German adventure stories in exotic locales, reflecting his cosmopolitan upbringing and familiarity with German literary tropes: they promote a nostalgic vision of a German colonial empire. But in the mid 1930s, Nohara wrote two adventure novels about East Asia that portrayed current events. These reveal a much more nationalistic side to Nohara’s juvenile fiction. "Erwin in Schanghai" (Erwin in Shanghai, 1934) recounts a young German hero’s adventures during the Japanese attack on the Zhabei district in early 1932. "Drei Schwestern gehen nach Tokyo" (Three Sisters go to Tokyo, 1938) features the titular three sisters, all of whom journey to Tokyo to contribute to the war effort, as well as a heroic seafaring elder brother who washes ashore in Manchuria. Through a close reading of these two works, I examine how Nohara moves from a relatively nuanced depiction of Chinese, Japanese, and German relations in the earlier work to full-on promotion of imperial Japan’s war effort and involvement in Manchuria in the second. This highlights how juvenile fiction could serve the Japanese empire not only within the empire and its holdings but also much farther afield.