Articles
Honor and Loyalty : Staging Chūshingura in Nazi Germany
Abstract
Between 1938 and 1944 there were five adaptations of Chūshingura staged in Nazi Germany. These adaptations may have served as convenient advertising for the German-Japanese alliance, but that was, at best, a secondary consideration for the dramatists. Rather, they reflect and capture Nazism’s ongoing fascination with Japanese martial culture, and particularly with the figure of the samurai. A potent symbol of a supposedly intact national ethos, the samurai were consistently represented in Nazi Germany as an aspirational model for what a reconstructed German “national community” (Volksgemeinschaft) could be. As a historical anecdote, Chūshingura validated this narrative; as a dramatic performance, it brought it to life. Chūshingura’s popularity in Nazi Germany may have benefited from its alignment with the regime’s ideological aims and expectations, but it was not a product of state intervention; rather, it emerged out of an organic German fascination with the samurai which predated the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Moreover, the fact that it was not just transcribed or translated but performed is significant in what it reveals about the intensity of Nazism’s attempted appropriation of the samurai into their own iconography of “honor and loyalty.”