This paper examines the making of the fascist alliance between Nazi Germany and imperial Japan in the 1930s. Specifically, it focuses on the ways in which the alliance was made through the establishment of simultaneous radio broadcast between JOAK (today known as NHK, Japan’s public broadcaster) and the German Zeesen stations from 1933. The broadcasting of German symphonic music was important in this exchange across linguistic divides to create a sense of shared community between peoples. The paper therefore takes as a case study Richard Strauss’s 70th birthday celebration in 1934, during which a programme of international broadcast exchange took place between Japan and Germany. The Japanese composer, Kōsaku Yamada, who conducted several celebration concerts from Japan, will be the paper’s central character. Still known as one of twentieth-century Japan’s most influential composers, his career was inextricably involved in state politics, including through the infrastructure of radio, where orchestral music, due to its lack of words, became a common ground for both Japanese and German listeners (Law 2019). Aligning itself with recent developments in musicology wherein scholars have sought to reassess biographical writing in light of its historical and ideological context (Cormac 2020, Wiley and Watt 2019), this research seeks also to explore the infrastructure of the radio in the German-Japanese fascist alliance to bring together two converging approaches, with the biographical turning outwards to broader historical analysis and the infrastructural inwards to considering what large infrastructure projects mean for individuals’ hopes, fears, and desires (Larkin 2013).

“Harbin is a charming city. Harbin is a cheerful city… Alongside fascists and social democrats, they live freely and easily.” Thus began the satirical foxtrot “Harbin-Papa” recorded by the Russian-born émigré Ilja Livschakoff for Polydor Records in Berlin in 1935. A parody of the famous Yiddish song “Odessa-Mama,” the recording became wildly popular among the Russian diaspora in Harbin, then under the occupation of Imperial Japan as part of the Great Empire of Manchukuo. The biting lyrics of the tune offer insight into the shared experience of insurgent fascist politics in East Asia and Central Europe. This paper explores the circulation of popular 78 rpm musical recordings between Berlin and Harbin, and how Russian émigré musicians embedded themselves within the framework of an Inter-Axis recording industry. Studies of music in the Axis military coalition have long neglected the perspectives of minority populations, and how they promoted and critiqued global fascism. Drawing on previously unresearched archival materials and popular music recordings digitized for the first time, I show how new circuits of Russian-language gramophone trade developed alongside the formation of the Axis Coalition. I argue that Russian émigré musicians were instrumental in facilitating the convergence of Japanese and German cultural influences in the Axis recording industry, even if they did not always receive credit for their work. To emplace Russian recordings from Manchukuo in the circuits of Inter-Axis musical exchange upends conventional theories of nationalism and belonging, underscoring the entanglement of record labels in diasporic politics and state ideology.

This presentation examines inter-Axis musical exchange during World War II, emphasizing on Japanese importations of German and Austrian classical music and German music teachers. This paper seeks to highlight Japan’s attempt to integrate musically into the Western culture league, one that ideologically followed the Germanosphere. Using writings and reporting from wartime newspapers and music journals, this study reconstructs a historical period in which the Axis powers had reinforced alliance through musical education and propagation that pivoted to the notion of cultural purity and supremacy. I posit that imperial Japan’s disproportionate coverage and promulgation of Germanophone music and composers, along with its invitations to Germanophone music educators helped facilitate the production and eventual popularization of gunka, Japanese military music, during

Japan’s Fifteen Years War (1931-1945). Japan’s modern music revolution dates back to the Meiji government’s establishment of the ongaku shirabe gakari (1879-1887), a music research center dedicated to the study of Western music traditions and its integration into Japanese practice. As part of the oyatoi gaikokujin initiative (1868-1899), the Meiji government recruited music teachers from Germany, France, and the U.S. Throughout the late Meiji, Taishō, and Shōwa eras, Japan sent music students to study in “music capital” Berlin. Imperial Japan’s celebrations of the Axis alliance at times invited schoolchildren from Germany and Italy and utilized music and dance as cultural bonding activities. I seek to engage the audience with the overarching historical question of the country’s effort to transform itself musically, in turn nearing the cultural stature of its Western allies.