As he appeared to be an ardent Nazi, Sorge was welcome at the German embassy. One Japanese journalist who knew Sorge described him in 1935 as "a typical, swashbuckling, arrogant Nazi... quick-tempered, hard-drinking". As the Japan correspondent for the "Frankfurter Zeitung", Sorge developed a network of sources in Japanese politics, and soon German diplomats, including the ambassador Herbert von Dirksen, came to depend upon Sorge as a source of intelligence on the fractious and secretive world of Japanese politics. The Japanese values of "honne" and "tatemae" (the former literally means "true sound", roughly "as things are", and the latter literally means "façade" or roughly "as things appear"), the tendency of the Japanese to hide their real feelings and profess to believe in things that they do not, made deciphering Japan's politics especially difficult. That Sorge was fluent in Japanese further enhanced his status as a Japanologist. Sorge was very interested in Asian history and culture, especially those of China and Japan, and when he was sober, he tried to learn as much as he could. Meanwhile, Sorge befriended General Eugen Ott, the German military attaché to Japan and seduced his wife, Helma. A military attache, Ott sent reports back to Berlin containing his assessments of the Imperial Japanese Army, which Helma Ott copied and passed on to Sorge, who, in turn, passed them on to Moscow (Helma Ott believed Sorge to be working merely for the Nazi Party). As the Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, German influence was strong and so Ott had good contacts with Japanese officers.