第一次世界大战中最鲜为人知的事实是什么？
About 300 German/Austro-Hungarian merchant sailors were interned in Japan from 1914–20. While imprisoned, they petitioned the Japanese government to form a band. It was approved and the band was formed. They were so effective the government permitted them to tour the country and give concerts. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony was a crowd favorite (even today).
After the war, about sixty (60) members asked the Japanese if they could remain in the country and continue performing. Permission granted. I feel many of these men had nothing to return to, had probably learned the language and married local women. See image below:
I found out about this while researching a novel set in contemporary Japan, over Christmas.
“Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s 9th. They call it “Daiku” and it is described as the most popular Christmas song. And tradition is to sing it in German.
Because those German POWs sung it.
I wonder how the Japanese would sound, singing it in German. German has consonantal clusters - even more so than English - which must surely baffle them, given that Japanese has very few, if any, such clusters, and all.words end in vowels apart from the ones ending in ‘n’.
Guess you gotta go to Japan some Christmas.
Just be sure to preorder your KFC chicken bucket for Christmas dinner!
Pretty good, at least some times — I just checked out a YouTube video of a huge chorus/orchestra doing it.
One of the oldest Bavarian-style restaurants in Tokyo, called Ketel, is rumoured to have been founded by one of the ex German POWs of the Great War.
All look well feed and nice uniforms? Completely different from the treatment handed out by the WW2 Japanese and their allied POW’s. 🤔
The Russians captured in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–1905 were full of praise for their treatment at the hands of the Japanese. Things changed radically after 1930, of course.
The USSR, Germany, Japan… what happened in the 20s and 30s to make such unrelated countries go psycho?
In order, Communism, Nazism and Imperialism. They got drunk on the “Manifest Destiny” mentality ans “Main Character” syndrome.
And, if you want to… do away with other people that might stand in your way, it helps if you dehumanize them.
They're evil, they’re weak, they're corrupt, they don't deserve what they have, they envy us and what we can achieve, always plotting against us, trying to keep us weak, to keep us down, waiting for the moment to strike. They're not good, honest, deserving people like you and me.
Yes, but the Japanese descent into barbarity in the 1920s and 30s does not fit neatly into a Western ideological box. Much, if not most, of it had to do with internal Japanese power struggles, Japan’s place in the world, the role of the emperor, factional battles, which sometimes turned lethal, between militarists vs. civilian politicians, modernizers vs. traditionalists, one old samurai clan vs. another, and so forth. Western ideologies played a role in all this, but most of it was based on unique Japanese scenarios that were largely opaque to outsiders. In short, the militarists eventually won the internal struggles, and feeling affronted by the West over the terms of the Washington Naval Conference and its treatment at the League of Nations over its involvement in China, became more and more confrontational in its dealings with the U.S., Britain, France, and the West in general. At the same time, its brutal war in China led to Japanese soldiers and officers viewing Japan’s enemies as less than human (as you noted), and adopting a perverted form of Bushido as the military’s guiding principles.
Not bad but you left out the western rejection of the “racial equality clause” put forth by the Japanese in the Treaty of Versailles. The opposition was led by none other than that champion of democracy and self determination, Jim-Crow President Woodrow Wilson. One part of the Washington Naval Treaty that is often overlooked is the US pressuring the UK to end the Anglo-Japanese alliance. Then there was the immigration act of 1924 barring all immigration from Asia. The Smoot Hawley Tariff Act of 1930 basically created a Malthusian trap for Japan allowing the radicals to gain the upper hand since 70 years of modernization both industrially and institutionally had failed to achieve their goal of being seen as equals to the “civilized” nations they had looked up to. The invasion and annexation of Manchuria followed not long after.
Desperate nations pushed to the brink can simply loose it and the darker side of humanity rears its head. “The Black Earth, The Holocaust as a History and a Lesson” though about Germany not Japan is a great book on how deprivations can cause the guardrails of civility at a national level to fail.
All true. Japan also believed, with some justification, that it had gotten snookered at the Treaty of Portsmouth which ended the Russo-Japanese War, leading many in Japan to think they had won the war, but lost the peace. So, yeah, Japan had more than sufficient grievances to begin viewing the collective West as inherently opposed to Japan’s ambitions. This does not excuse Japan’s descent into some of the worst depravity mankind has ever witnessed, but it does provide some insight into how it got there.
Trump takes his lead from the same playbook. As he says himself he loves the poorly educated and ignorant. It’s easy to see why.
I thought it was a samurai thing, that they despised a soldier that surrendered
Merchant sailors with classical instrument training? How our idea of ‘education’ has rotted away in a century!
The tradition of “Hausmusik” came up during the 19th century, when composers, like Beethoven, sold sheet music of chamber music to pay their bills. It became standard in the new middle class families to e.g. have a piano in the parlour (which became affordable back then) and studying an instrument became a social “must”. Remember back then, before recorded music, if you wanted to hear music, you had to make it yourself.
And with cheaper, factory made, violins etc., this also filtered down to the working class.
Many of the big composers of the late classical and romantic period wrote sheet music just for this type of clients, pieces, which could be played by a handfull of musicians in a parlour.
Even during WW2 I know of a sailor and musician (could have been Woody Guthrie or A. L. Lloyd - Wikipedia, who hired on a new ship and the new sailors were greeted by a band made up from an accordion, guitar and mandolin. They joked that they had joined a floating orchestra
I am a lifelong musician. I firmly believe that musical training should be part of all educational curricula worldwide. When people are working together to create good music, they cannot simultaneously be engaging in hate, killing, and war.
This was when Japan still treated its POWs humanely. All that changed later in the late 20’s when militarism and Bushido took over Japanese thinking and brutality took over the armed forces during WWII.
The military officers didn't even treat their subordinates with any respect.
What a great little slice of history!
There were also about 4,500 German and Austrian POWs in Japan, after the Germans surrendered the fortress at Qindao in China in 1914. Some of them stayed in Japan, too.
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