Anti-Japanese Propaganda in WWII

(This must be prefaced by the acknowledgment that only the American side of propoganda is being presented. Our opponents were just as, if not more, guilty of unjustified population manipulation.)

In the decades that led up to Japan’s attack on the American fleet in Pearl Harbor, and even to some extent in the years that followed, a strong segment of the U.S. population disapproved of getting involved overseas and were content to defend their own shores and their own narrowly defined interests. After the Japanese struck and America had officially entered the war on the side of the Allies, the anger aroused by the dishonorable attack was enough to fiercely unite most, but not all, of the country against the now obvious enemy. To override the last vestiges of isolationist attitudes still held in the United States, American propagandists had to attempt to convince their audiences of the magnitude of the struggle that lay before them and the justness of their cause. Frank Capra, the acclaimed director of the highly representative propaganda masterpiece, Why We Fight, said that the overall objective behind such movies was twofold: “to win the war and win the peace.” (16) He wanted to instill American GIs with the belief that they were the last line of defense in the battle to support freedom, equality and the continued existence of their country against a vicious horde of ‘evil’ supremacists bent on global domination and destruction.

The Methods

John Dower, author of War Without Mercy; Race & Power in the Pacific War, summarizes World War Two propaganda into two categories. The first is to condemn the enemy directly, “You are the opposite of what you say you are and the opposite of us, not peaceful but warlike, not good but bad.” The second technique is to use the enemy’s words and proclamations to damn themselves, “You are what you say you are, but that itself is reprehensible.” (Dower 30) Thought slightly different, both of these categories were generally wrapped together to prepare an effective presentation of the ‘inhuman Jap.’ The US government used many techniques to help achieve this goal. In addition to official film collaborations between Hollywood and the military like Capra’s Why We Fight, newspapers, posters, books and the radio were all used to ensure that US leaders got across the appropriate message to their citizenry. US propaganda largely consisted of one-dimensional racial stereotypes such as comparing the Japanese soldiers to spiteful myopic simians, enthralled sheep blindly following their shepherds to the slaughter, or even more despicable comparisons. Numerous ‘scientific diagnoses’ attacked Japanese religion and culture as cannibalistic and uncivilized, and the Japanese race as “a kind of freak survival in the modern world.” (141) The Allied powers denied the Japanese rhetoric that the expansion that started in the 1895 Sino-Japanese war originated from the noble desire to help their Asian brothers and instead was the product of an “insatiable” imperialist appetite. (22) Dower writes that the savage treatment of allied prisoners and of the natives in China and Southeast Asia was given by the Allies “as proof of the inherent barbarity of the enemy.” (31) The US rejected Japanese claims to be working for peace and prosperity in its Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and portrayed it and the other Axis powers as “the slave world, whose histories were swollen with lust for conquest, whose leaders were madmen, and whose people were a subservient mass.” (17)

Though the straightforward, almost old-fashioned propaganda was effective on its own, efforts like Why We Fight were incredibly powerful because they relied in part on the enemy’s own words. The stereotype of Japanese national homogeneity and horde mentality was derived directly from the Japanese government’s own propaganda. Recurring ideas such as the “100 million hearts beating as one,” “the 100 million people as one bullet,” and entities such as Japan's Spiritual Culture Institute designed “to perfect and unify the entire nation with one conviction” were effectively appropriated to belittle and dehumanize the Japanese society. (31) American propagandists offered the official Japanese policy of sankò seisaku: “kill all, burn all, destroy all,” as proof of their intrinsic brutality. (43) Through the use of innovative propaganda the US and other Allied governments formed the idea in the minds of their citizens and soldiers that the Japanese were an innately cruel and violent enemy beyond repentance. Westerners from the street corner to the capitol viewed Japan as a nation built on a dangerous combination of jingoistic militaristic spirit and supremacist views that deserved or even necessitated destruction. For the US and UK, “the road to Pearl Harbor was depicted as a one-way street: Japan provoked war, and did so because of the peculiarities of its own history, culture, and collective psychology.” (29)

The Evolution of Stereotypes

To understand how US propaganda affected the Second World War one must comprehend how the popular racial stereotypes developed and evolved during the war. Even after forty-five years of successful, if gradual, military expansion Japan received little or no military recognition from its future adversaries in the Pacific. As Dower relates, “Prior to Pearl Harbor, Westerners greatly underestimated Japan’s intentions and capabilities. They rated the country, as one high U.S. military officer late summarized it, ‘as no better than a class-C nation.’” (99) Western military analysts took the fact that Japan had failed to subjugate all of China in five years as proof that their military was weak, their leadership poor and their training inadequate. The British in Malaysia even warned their troops not to overestimate their opponents and lamented that they would not have a worthier enemy to destroy. In one of the greatest Allied disasters of the war, two British capital ships, the Repulse and the Prince of Wales were completely destroyed a day after a British officer laughingly dismissed reports of a Japanese task force in the area, with a contemptuous, “Oh, but they are Japanese. There’s nothing to worry about.” Japanese pilots were written off on physical, social and psychological grounds, the most humorous of which is the ‘scientifically proven' belief that they were “generally myopic” (103) and therefore had a defective sense of balance. Westerners “either did not believe that the supposedly ‘nice little Japanese,’ could really build up such a [military] machine,” said the American chief of Japanese Affairs during the war, “or they shrugged off the growing danger with the easy assumption that one American, or one Briton, or one Australian is equal in fighting qualities to five or ten Japanese.” (111)

After their preliminary dismissal of the pathetic Japanese, western observers were shocked by the stunning successes scored by the Japanese military at Pearl Harbor, Manila, Singapore, Rangoon and the Dutch East Indies in the early months of the war. Even after they received the news of the defeats many insisted that, because the Japanese themselves were obviously incapable of such operations, they had to have been the result of Japanese forces led by German officers. Eventually, after their original stereotypes showed themselves to be inaccurate, many observers reversed course and erred again by over-exaggerating the enemy’s strengths. Dower writes that, “In 1942, many of these English and American military experts became almost morbidly obsessed by the specter of a seemingly invincible foe, capable of undreamed of military feats.” (99) The Japanese superman had been born. Until Japan’s first defeats midway through 1942, its troops were invincible, planes unstoppable, ships unsinkable and its threat unimaginable. Lieutenant Colonel Archie Roosevelt declared that the Japanese soldier “has been built up, officially and unofficially, as a sort of superman-superdevil, in ability, ferocity, and training.” (115)

To complete the cycle, almost immediately after the first inklings that the tide had been turned in the Pacific “there emerged…a campaign in both journalistic and official circles devoted to debunking ‘the myth of the Japanese superman,’” (99) and the pendulum of popular stereotypes gradually swung back in the direction of the disparaged subhuman simian warrior. After the conclusion of the war, when the United States effectively put on the mantle of colonial administrator rebuilding the country, the same racial stereotypes and idioms of the war years were used in yet another manner. Language that had formerly been used to emphasize “the unbridgeable gap between oneself and the enemy proved capable of serving the goals of accommodation as well.” (13) The malicious simian caricature was quickly altered into the picture of a domesticated pet that only needed a little training and education to become a truly charming plaything. (186)

The Repercussions

The consequences of the war-fanned racial stereotypes and hatreds are difficult to enumerate in such a short piece, but nonetheless they are the most important part of the discussion. Propaganda is not dangerous in its aim to instill a sense of patriotism or pride in place or duty. The dangers of propaganda and population manipulation lie in “the attachment of stupid, bestial, even pestilential subhuman caricatures on the enemy, and the manner in which this blocked seeing the foe as rational or even human, and facilitated mass killing.” (89) Why did we Hiroshima and Nagasaki happen? Such attacks on defenseless, militarily unimportant cities cannot be condoned except when the two opponents have reached the point that the humanity of one’s opponent is actually in question and one’s position is just and unassailable and the enemy is thought to be beyond rational diplomacy. By the time the first atomic bomb was dropped over Hiroshima, many Allies had gone beyond the desire to simply achieve an unconditional surrender and had become convinced that Japan “was an enemy that not only deserved to be exterminated, but had to be.” (52) The fact that the table of Allied prosecutors could sit with a clear conscience amidst the ruins of Tokyo in 1946 and sentence men to death for supporting the indiscriminate destruction of “men, women and children alike” is revealing. For them, Japan had merely reaped what it sowed. (41)The idea of “No Good Jap” led to an incredible amount of unnecessary death and pain. The problems of battlefield atrocities, prisoner massacres, and even the sheer intensity of the fighting in the Pacific theatre owed their cause to the racial stereotypes that were developed on both sides of the war. Dower writes that:

Race hate fed atrocities, and atrocities in turn fanned the fires of race hate. The dehumanization of the Other contributed immeasurably to the psychological distancing that facilitates killing, not only on the battlefield but also in the plans adopted by strategists far removed from the actual scene of combat. (11)

The dehumanization that Dower speaks of is the truly fatal consequence of the racial hatred generated by such systematic propaganda. To know nothing about an entire race but what is designed to engender fear and loathing will lower ones enemies below the level of humanity. They are no longer simply lesser men, or even evil men, instead they are something else, something inhuman. “War hates were not new to the mid-twentieth century, nor were race hates or the killing of noncombatants. Holy Wars were surely not new.” (294) Such hatred and loathing have always been a part of human history, but what was different in the Second World War was the sheer power of the modern techniques designed solely for the purpose of “mobilizing and sustaining such sentiments at fever pitch.” What had once been limited in scope to governmental pronouncements and tracts now involved “not only the sophisticated use of radio, film, and other mass media, but also a concerted mobilization and integration of the propaganda resources of the whole state apparatus.” The techniques first used in WWI were perfected two decades later. (294) The enemy Other became remote and monolithic; “a different species (294)” that did not deserve the benefits of human decency or respect. This dehumanization, in conjunction with the incredible advances in the technologies of death, allowed killing to become much easier. War was not a detached fight for the survival of the individual combatants; it became a Manichaean struggle between Us and Them, Good and Evil. Men were fighting for freedom and humanity against slavery and brutality. The man on the other end of the rifle was not simply trying to kill you; instead, he was trying to destroy everything you held dear. “The natural response to such a vision [of a struggle between incompatible antagonists] was an obsession with extermination on both sides—a war without mercy.” (11)

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