WW2 didn’t help, but the influence is older. In the Meiji period government send diplomatic missions to observe various countries in the world and they usually were coming back in awe with the Germany, and since then there is a crapton of german influences in culture and law, which got hidden under the heap of american popshit after WW2 but they are still there and surface every now and then.
i honestly wonder why japanese pop-culture still includes germanic things in them 🤔
WW2 didn’t help, but the influence is older. In the Meiji period government send diplomatic missions to observe various countries in the world and they usually were coming back in awe with the Germany, and since then there is a crapton of german influences in culture and law, which got hidden under the heap of american popshit after WW2 but they are still there and surface every now and then.
There’s also artifacts of this in the language such as the word for a part-time job (arubaito)