Because Nazi Germany and Japan were allied, were there any Nazi influences in Japan that the Americans attempted to "de-nazify"?

by J2quared

Such as ideas of racial superiority? Did the Americans ever attempt to show the Japanese footage of the Holocaust?

ParkSungJun

The Japanese certainly had ideas of racial superiority, but it was a bit different than that of the Nazis. The main line of Japanese propaganda was that the enlightened Japanese needed to protect and lead their uncivilized Asian brethren kicking and screaming into the modern world, and that the Japanese needed to kick out the perfidious Western imperialists out of Asia. There was certainly many endeavors during the US occupation to denationalize the Japanese state-for instance, the Shinto Directive, which sought to enforce a strict separation of church and state in Japan as it was thought that state support of Shintoism was a contributing factor towards the Japanese support of the war (whether or not it was in fact such a factor, or whether or not the government still supports Shintoism, is another story).

But did the Japanese have anti-Semitic policy like the Nazis did? The answer is complex (as it always is) but tends towards an answer in the negative. There were (and are) anti-Semitic elements in Japan (the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a fraudulent "Jewish" text written by Russian nationalists, being popular), but they were never quite to the same extent as that of the Nazis. In fact, Japan was seen as a relatively safe haven for Jews, and many Jews from Europe fled either through or to Japan to escape the Nazis. Admittedly, I suspect the main reason they were allowed in was because they had the paperwork (the Japanese consul in Lithuania, Chiune Sugihara, having unilaterally decided to issue visas en masse to desperate refugees) rather than any particularly benevolent aspiration by the Japanese government, but the fact remains that Jews were allowed into Japan as opposed to many other countries (the infamous voyage of the St. Louis, for instance). They did not have an easy life in the Japanese empire (as the Japanese grew worried of Allied espionage, the Jews were relocated to a ghetto in Shanghai) but they did not face the same fate of their compatriots under Nazi rule: in fact there were several complaints by the Germans to exterminate the Jews under Japanese rule that were blithely ignored.

I stress that once again this had nothing to do with any benevolence or humanitarian effort by the Japanese government, though the Japanese populace was quite friendly to the Jews when they initially arrived in Japan. If anything, this was due to Japanese indifference to anything foreign that did not affect Japan personally. The Japanese never did truly trust their German allies, so it is hardly surprising that they would be less than embracing of German ideology.