Representations of Gender, Race and Culture in Wartime Japan and Germany

Much has been written to assert the affinity between the modern histories of Germany and Japan. Our aim is to reexamine this affinity from the viewpoint of comparative gender and cultural history. How did discourses about women and by women help to establish and maintain the wartime systems of both nation-states? What roles did ethnicized and racialized images of femininity and masculinity play in the visual culture of both countries and how did they contribute to the construction of an ideology of Japanese-German affinity?
By deconstructing seemingly monolithic wartime gender ideologies and by looking at women as agents producing, modifying and sometimes questioning these ideologies we address the question of women as “culprits or victims”. We also examine how representations of race (or ethnicity) and gender were intertwined in the nationalist and imperialist wartime discourses evolving within and between Germany and Japan.