Five Years of Dragon-Swallowing (1942), Jim Berryman on "The China Incident"

"Five Years of Dragon-Swallowing -- and no end in sight!" is a Jim Berryman cartoon for the Washington Evening Star dated July 7, 1942. A caricatured officer labeled Japan chokes on a dragon lettered "The China Incident" (NAID 5743126).

What the cartoon shows

Content note: the Japanese officer is drawn in the exaggerated caricature style of the period. The archive's content note says so, and the drawing is described here as printed.

The archive describes an army officer labeled "Japan," with round glasses and a sabre, choking as he tries to swallow a dragon. The dragon's body carries the phrase in quotation marks. The words the record transcribes from the drawing are few.

"THE CHINA INCIDENT"

JAPAN

JIM BERRYMAN

Who drew it

The record credits Jim Berryman of the Washington Evening Star and dates the drawing July 7, 1942. The National Archives holds it in the Jim Berryman Political Cartoons series among the Records of the U.S. Senate. The archive files the issuer type as media, not state. This was a newspaper cartoonist's opinion. The archive says plainly that Berryman's stance is his own, and no federal office is named on the drawing.

How to read it

One technique is tagged: euphemism, or doublespeak. The target of that tag is not Berryman but Tokyo. "The China Incident" was the Japanese term for the war in China, and the cartoon puts it in quotation marks to mock it. A full war is called an incident; the cartoon answers by drawing it as a dragon too large to swallow. The catalog title supplies the count: five years, "and no end in sight!" The argument is that the war has become a trap for Japan.

Here the cartoon does what a free press is for. It takes an official word for a war and shows what the word hides. The weak point is the drawing of the officer, which leans on the period's racial shorthand for a Japanese face when the joke did not need it.

Other Berryman cartoons on this site include his July 1938 WPA money cartoon and the 1958 Faubus landslide cartoon. Charles Alston's The Savior of the Darker Races, drawn for the Office of War Information the same year, mocks Japan's claims about Asia from inside a government office, with a caricature of its own. The anti-Japanese propaganda hub collects more.