Part 1/2

I've written on the treatment of Asian nationals in Nazi Germany more generally in this old answer where I cite the most known case of the Chinese community in Germany.

In 1935 there were about 1.500 to 1.800 Chinese people in Germany, most of them living in Hamburg and Berlin having been sailors and settling down there. The Chinese in Germany were faced with several discriminatory measure, especially since many had ties to leftism and some had even served with the Republicans in Spain.

In 1938, the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) under Reinhard Heydrich instituted the Zentralstelle für Chinesen, a bureau with the specific task of preventing Chinese immigration to Germany and controlling those Chinese who lived there. In Berlin, the members of this RSHA bureau interned all the Chinese living there in Arbeitserziehungslager Langer Morgen. Arbeitserziehungslager were not Concentration Camps in that they were not run by the WVHA but instead by the local Gestapo. These camps were smaller but the living conditions there were not significantly less brutal than in the Concentration Camps.

In Hamburg, in May 1944 the Gestapo raided the part of town to which the Chinese living there had been forcibly confined in 1942. The so-called "Chinesenaktion" resulted in an additionally 130 Chinese being sent to Langer Morgen, where some of them such as Chan Ho Bau and Liang Wong were murdered.

While there is obviously some scholarship on the aforementioned Chinese community, there is little on the Japanese community in Germany. There only is one article I could find: "Nazi racism towards the Japanese" by Harumi Sidehara Furuya, written in 1996. While the article itself does have some weaknesses in that it f.ex. puts a huge amount of faith into passages from Mein Kampf, which by the time the Nazis had taken over power were mostly nomenclatura when it came to virtually any subject except Jews and communism, it is nonetheless interesting for drawing a picture of the treatment of Japanese nationals and Japanese-Germans by the Nazis via the files of the German Foreign Office for there seems to have been a lot of communication between representatives of Japan and German officials regarding this issue.

The Japanese community in Germany was rather small. Furuya writes of about 500 Japanese people in Germany and approximately four dozen Japanese-German individuals in the 1930s. Like in the case of Afro-Germans, outside those born of relations with French occupation soldiers after WWI, this was far too small a community to have been thought of when formulating various racist laws in Germany and hence, for the longest time whether they were considered to fall under Aryan laws was unclear. In 1938, Furuya writes,

Ambassador Nagai demanded clarification from the German Foreign Ministry on the official German stance on the Rassenproblem. Nagai warned Assistant Secretary of the Foreign Ministry, Bernhard von Bülow, that German-Japanese relations would deteriorate if the Japanese ever came to be regarded as „colored,“ pointing to the racial discrimination against the Japanese in the United States and the ensuing bitter American-Japanese relations. Von Bülow promised Nagai that the German government would prevent the use of offensive expressions and avoid misunderstandings on this issue.

Subsequently, then foreign minister Neurath and other officials also clarified that Japanese individuals were to be exempt from the ban of marriages between Germans and individuals from "other races" in order to avoid upsetting Japanese officials.

However, while such insurances were frequently given by the Germans, in practice Furuya documents cases of discrimination based on the idea that Japanese individuals were "not Aryan". She cites f.ex. the case of Dr. Otto Urhan, biologist for the Institute of Biology for Agriculture and Forestry, who was fired in 1933 on account of one Japanese parent and of the daughter of Dr. Takenouchi, a sales representative of the Sumitomo Group in Berlin. Takenouchi's nine year old daughter was apparently hit by other children in school in October 1933 because she was not white – a case that made headlines in Japan. But while these cases show that in what can be conceived as the every-day practice of Nazism, Japanese individuals were confronted with racism and discrimination based on the idea of them being "non Aryan", it also bears pointing out that both of these cases took place five years before the German foreign office clarified the Third Reich's stance on Japanese individuals in Germany and that in 1933 a notably different Zeitgeist existed in the freshly created Third Reich than did in the Germany of 1938.

In ensuing years, an inner-party controversy existed in the NSDAP about the exact racial classification and treatment of Japanese individuals and the Japanese as a whole, a definitive conclusion was never really reached until diplomatic conveniences in the relations with Japan virtually dictated that Japanese individuals were not to be officially discriminated against. As Furuya summarizes: "the Nazi racial laws were ambiguous, but allowed for racial discrimination against individuals of Japanese descent – both institutional discrimination based on their legal status as „non-Aryans,“ and discrimination in the realm of marriages."

Something peculiar becomes apparent in the case studies Furuya describes in her article: The about 500 Japanese nationals residing in Germany in the 1930s were for the majority either affiliated with the official Japanese diplomatic representation, business men or students at German universities and they – for an overwhelmingly large part – did not report instances of discrimination during their time in Germany, most likely for the reason of German realpolitik towards Japan. Most cases of discrimination Furuya details concern German nationals with Japanese parents, grandparents, or spouses, who numbered at about 50 people all in all.

The cases Furuya cites are all from the files of the German-Japanese society that served as a place individuals who were either Japanese nationals or had Japanese ancestry or spouses turned to to detail the hardship they experienced. She cites f.ex. the case Hilde O., a half-Japanese German citizen:

She reported to the DJG in January 1936 that she and her Japanese mother had been verbally insulted on the open streets in the rural town of Naumburg, in particular by one retired civil servant and his wife, who yelled after them:„ ,Asian, German-Japanese mish-mash, African-Chinese ... Japanese out‘, etc.“ Ms. O. wrote that even their friends had come to alienate them since anybody who interacted with them would be committing a Rassenschande. In such a rural town as Naumburg, she wrote, psychological association between her and a Rassenschande spread so fast that consequently, she was not able to get a job, nor would she be able to marry. Therefore, she requested an official passport-like certificate proving that she was German.

O. was subsequently informed by the German interior ministry that while she wasn't considered Aryan, she counted as exempt from racial discrimination laws and advised her to file a libel complaint. What further happened is not recorded.