Ways of Forgetting, Ways of Remembering (6 page)

Five categories subsume the racist perceptions of the Japanese that dominated Anglo-American thinking during World War II. The Japanese were subhuman. They were little men, inferior to white Westerners in every physical, moral, and intellectual way. They were collectively primitive, childish, and mad—overlapping
concepts that could be crudely expressed but also received “empirical” endorsement from social scientists and old Japan hands. At the same time, the Japanese also were portrayed as supermen. This was particularly true in the aftermath of their stunning early victories, and it is characteristic of this thinking that the despised enemy could be little men and supermen simultaneously. Finally, the Japanese in World War II became the nightmare come true of the Yellow Peril. This apocalyptic image embraced all others and made unmistakably clear that race hates, and not merely war hates or responses to Japanese behavior alone, were at issue.

Fig. 2-1. As this popular song title reveals, Americans routinely regarded the German enemy as but one part of the German populace (“Hitler,” “the Nazis”), while at the same time identifying the “Japs” as a whole with an even larger Yellow Peril. © Galerie Bilderwelt/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

Fig. 2-2. The notion that “the only good Jap is a dead Jap” was an American cliché during the entire course of the war. Undiluted rage at the surprise attack on Pearl Harbor greatly reinforced this sentiment, as seen in this graphic that appeared in a monthly magazine for Marines. From
Leatherneck
, March 1942.

Dehumanization of the enemy is desirable among men in combat. It eliminates scruples and hesitation from killing, the reasoning goes, and this contributes to self-preservation; the enemy, after all, is simultaneously dehumanizing and trying to kill you. Among
Allied fighting men in the Pacific, this attitude emerged naturally in the ubiquitous metaphor of the hunt. Fighting Japanese in the jungle was like going after “small game in the woods back home” or tracking down a predatory animal. Killing them was compared to shooting down running quail, picking off rabbits, bringing a rabid and desperate beast to bay and finishing it off. The former sportsman was now simply “getting
bigger
game.” One put the crosshairs on the crouching Jap, just as in deer hunting back home.

The kill did not remain confined to the combat zones, however, nor did the metaphors of dehumanization remain fixed at this general, almost casual level. In the United States, signs appeared in store windows declaring “Open Season on Japs,” and “Jap hunting licenses” were distributed amid the hysteria that accompanied the incarceration of Japanese Americans. The psychology of the hunt became indistinguishable from a broader psychology of extermination that came to mean not merely taking no prisoners on the battlefield, but also having no qualms about extending the kill to the civilian population in Japan. Here the more precise language and imagery of the race war became apparent. The Japanese were vermin. More pervasive yet, they were apes, monkeys, “jaundiced baboons.” The war in Asia popularized these dehumanizing epithets to a degree that still can be shocking in retrospect, but the war did not spawn them. These were classic tropes of racist denigration, deeply embedded in European and American consciousness. War simply pried them loose.

Vermin was the archetypal metaphor Nazis attached to the Jews, and the appalling consequences of that dehumanization have obscured the currency of this imagery in the war in Asia. On Iwo Jima, the press found amusement in noting that some marines went into battle with “Rodent Exterminator” stenciled on their helmets. Incinerating Japanese in caves with flamethrowers was referred to as “clearing out a rats' nest.” Soon after Pearl Harbor, the prospect of exterminating the Japanese vermin in their nest at home was widely applauded. The most popular float in a daylong victory parade in New York in mid-1942 was
titled “Tokyo: We Are Coming,” and depicted bombs falling on a frantic pack of yellow rats. A cartoon in the March 1945 issue of
Leatherneck
, the monthly magazine for Marines, portrayed the insect “Louseous Japanicas” and explained that though this epidemic of lice was being exterminated in the Pacific, “before a complete cure may be effected the origin of the plague, the breeding grounds around the Tokyo area, must be completely annihilated.” “Louseous Japanicas” appeared almost simultaneously with initiation of the policy of systematically firebombing Japanese cities and accurately reflected a detached tolerance for annihilationist and exterminationist rhetoric at all levels of United States society. As the British embassy in Washington noted in a weekly report, Americans perceived the Japanese as “a nameless mass of vermin.”

Perception of the Japanese as apes and monkeys similarly was not confined to any particular group or place. Even before Pearl Harbor, Sir Alexander Cadogan, the permanent undersecretary of the British Foreign Office, routinely referred to the Japanese as “beastly little monkeys” and the like in his diary. Following Japan's capitulation, United States General Robert Eichelberger, alluding to the Japanese mission en route to the Philippines to arrange the surrender procedures, wrote to his wife that “first, monkeys will come to Manila.” Among Western political cartoonists, the simian figure was surely the most popular caricature for the Japanese. David Low, the brilliant antifascist cartoonist working out of London, was fond of this. The
New York Times
routinely reproduced such graphics in its Sunday edition, at one point adding its own commentary that it might be more accurate to identify the Japanese as the “missing link.” On the eve of the British debacle at Singapore, the British humor magazine
Punch
depicted Japanese soldiers in full-page splendor as chimpanzees with helmets and guns swinging from tree to tree.
Time
used the same image on its cover for January 26, 1942, contrasting the monkey invaders with the dignified Dutch military in Indonesia. The urbane
New Yorker
magazine also found the monkeymen-in-trees
conceit witty. The
Washington Post
compared Japanese atrocities in the Philippines and German atrocities in Czechoslovakia in a 1942 cartoon pairing a gorilla labeled “Japs” and a Hitler figure labeled simply “Hitler.” In well-received Hollywood combat films such as
Bataan
and
Guadalcanal Diary
, GIs routinely referred to the Japanese as monkeys.

The ubiquitous simian idiom of dehumanization came out of a rich tradition of bigoted Western iconography and graphically revealed the ease with which demeaning racist stereotypes could be floated from one target of prejudice to another. Only a short while before they put the Japanese in trees, for example,
Punch's
artists had been rendering the Irish as apes. Generations of white cartoonists also had previously refined the simian caricature in their depictions of Negroes and various Central American and Caribbean peoples. The popular illustrators, in turn, were merely replicating a basic tenet in the pseudoscience of white supremacism—the argument that the “Mongoloid” and “Negroid” races (and for Englishmen, the Irish) represented a lower stage of evolution. Nineteenth-century Western scientists and social scientists had offered almost unanimous support to this thesis, and such ideas persisted into the mid-twentieth century. President Franklin D. Roosevelt, for example, was informed by a physical anthropologist at the Smithsonian Institution that Japanese skulls were “some 2,000 years less developed than ours.”

In the world outside the monkey house, the Japanese commonly were referred to as “the little men.” Their relatively short stature contributed to this, but again the phrase was essentially metaphorical. The Japanese, it was argued, were small in accomplishments compared with Westerners. No great “universal” achievements were to be found in their traditional civilization; they were latecomers to the modern challenges of science and technology, imitators rather than innovators, ritualists rather than rationalists. Again, the cartoonists provided a good gauge of this conceit. More often than not, in any ensemble of nationalities the Japanese figures were dwarfish.

Fig. 2-3. Taking its caption from Rudyard Kipling's
Jungle Book
, this full-page illustration appeared in the British humor magazine
Punch
on January 14, 1942, as Japanese forces were advancing down the Malayan Peninsular. On January 31, the British abandoned Malaya, leaving close to 40,000 prisoners in Japanese hands. Two weeks later, on February 15, Britain's “impregnable fortress” at Singapore surrendered unconditionally to a much smaller Japanese army numbering roughly 30,000 men, and an additional 80,000 Commonwealth forces (British, Indian, and Australian) became prisoners of the Japanese. Reproduced with permission of Punch Limited.

Fig. 2-4. The popular Anglo-American rendering of the war in Asia as a conflict between Japanese “monkeymen” and civilized Caucasians was conveyed to a national audience in
Time
magazine's cover for January 26, 1942, which portrayed the commander of the Royal Dutch East Indies Army and a simian soldier dangling from a tree. Japanese forces invaded the Dutch East Indies (present-day Indonesia) in mid-January, and the Dutch surrendered in Java on March 8—consigning over 40,000 Dutch military and civilians to internment camps and paving the way for a Japanese occupation regime that brutalized the native population. “Major General Poorten” © 1942 Time Inc. Used under license.