Japanese officials sought German territorial-revision tactics as their own irredenta faded

Evidence

Third, while the general population must cope with its losses, forced migration is also usually accompanied by a political movement for restitution, led by speakers who tend to inl ate the extent to which they actually represent the interests of their constituents. … Although Chyla and his fellow ministers agreed that the lost Japanese islands in question (whose name they had already forgotten) could “never be closely compared” to the Lost German East, they did recognize that in Japan, as in West Germany, “consciousness threatens to weaken within a great portion of the general public that this island group is Japanese land.” Fully aware that public awareness of the German East was “weakening,” Chyla nonetheless presented the latest works of Ostforschung to Kume, hoping perhaps that the Japanese would have better luck in crafting an appealing ofi cial narrative. — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 1631

Categorization

• XREF: Directly documents the manufactured-external-threat dynamic the reader studies — elite irredentist speakers inflating popular support while awareness itself was weakening. — connects to: Exposure to the transformed Heimat eroded commitments to territorial revisionism — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East: Forced Migration…, 1091; Germany lost forty percent of its 1937 territory through postwar border changes — Manuel Borutta and Jan C. Jansen, Vertriebene and Pieds-Noirs in Postwar…, 179
• SEED: A comparative cross-national piece on how fading irredentist elites borrow tactics from each other as their publics’ interest decays.

Broader Connections

• Exposure to the transformed Heimat eroded commitments to territorial revisionism #responds-to (0.85) — Andrew Demshuk, The Lost German East, 1091