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 sober tried to learn as much as he could. During this time, Sorge befriended General Eugen Ott, the German military attache to Japan, while seducing his wife Helma. As 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 his turn passed them on to Moscow (Helma Ott believed Sorge was merely working for the Nazi Party). As the Japanese Army had been trained by a German military mission in the 19th century, German influence on the Japanese Army was strong, and Ott had good contacts with Japanese officers. In October 1934, General Ott and Sorge made an extended visit to the sham-independent "Empire of Manchukuo", which was actually a Japanese colony, and Sorge, who knew the Far East far better than Ott, wrote up the report describing Manchukuo that Ott submitted to Berlin under his name. As Ott's report was received very favorably at both the Bendlerstrasse and the Wilhelmstrasse, Sorge soon became one of Ott's main sources of information about the Japanese empire, creating a very close friendship between the two. In 1935, Sorge passed on to Moscow a planning document provided to him by Ozaki, which strongly suggested that Japan was not planning on attacking the Soviet Union in 1936. Sorge guessed correctly that Japan would invade China in July 1937, and there was no danger of a Japanese invasion of Siberia. On 26 February 1936, a military coup d'état attempt took place in Tokyo. It was meant to achieve a mystical "Shōwa Restoration", and led to several senior officials being murdered by the rebels. Dirksen, Ott and the rest of the German embassy were highly confused as to why this was happening and were at a loss as to how to explain the coup to the Wilhelmstrasse, and they turned to Sorge, the resident Japan expert, for help. Using notes supplied to him by Ozaki, Sorge submitted a report stating that the "Imperial Way" faction in the Japanese Army, which had attempted the coup, were younger officers from rural backgrounds upset at the impoverishment of the countryside, and the "Imperial Way" faction was not communist or socialist, just merely anti-capitalist, believing that big business had subverted the emperor's will.