All the Ear-Marks of a Sneaky Jap! (1943), a plant-security poster built on a slur

All the Ear-Marks of a Sneaky Jap! is a 1943 U.S. plant-security poster signed Alexander and held in the Office of War Information poster file. A giant ear drawn as the Japanese rising-sun flag hangs over a shipyard as one worker starts to talk and another hushes him. The headline uses an ethnic slur (NARA 513778).

What the poster prints

Content note: the headline uses an ethnic slur against Japanese people, and this page reproduces it as the sheet printed it.

The archive describes a huge ear, painted as the Japanese rising-sun flag, looming over a shipyard. Below it two workers stand together. One begins to say something about his section; the other cuts him off. The instruction at the foot is the actual security message.

ALL THE EAR-MARKS OF A SNEAKY JAP!

"OVER IN MY SECTION, WE'RE ....!!"

"HEY, SH!"

DON'T DISCUSS YOUR JOB!

Who issued it

The archive calls it a U.S. wartime plant-security poster. An RCA "E" flag appears in the scene, and the copy sits in the poster file of the Office of War Information's Bureau of Special Services. The record does not say who commissioned it, whether a company or an agency, and this page does not decide. The artist signed as Alexander.

How to read it

Strip away the headline and the poster is unremarkable: workers in a war plant should not discuss their jobs in public. That advice could stand on its own.

The headline is what makes the sheet wrong. It joins a slur to a trait, "sneaky," and pins both on a whole nationality. The archive tags it as name-calling and scapegoating. The ear in the sky gives no evidence of any actual listener; the label does the work instead. A worker is taught to hear danger in a race rather than in a specific act, such as talking about ship schedules to a stranger.

That lesson did not stay on the shipyard wall. In the same war, persons of Japanese ancestry, citizens included, were ordered out of designated areas by military order, as the site's exclusion order page documents. A poster like this one did not cause that policy, and the record does not tie it to any act. It reflects the same habit of mind.

For security posters without the slur, see A Careless Word... Another Cross and This Man May Die. For the wider set, the anti-Japanese propaganda hub and its gallery. The Roosevelt administration essay sorts the period's posters by what they asked, and notes that not every sheet aimed at the Japanese came from the government.