# Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away! (1943), a War Production Board caricature

Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away! is a 1943 War Production Board scrap-metal poster printed by the Government Printing Office. A grinning caricature in a Japanese army cap, with round spectacles and bared teeth, thanks the reader for wasting a can.

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- Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away! (1943), a War Production Board caricature

      Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away!

      Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away! (1943), a War Production Board caricature
      A 1943 War Production Board scrap poster puts a mock-pidgin "Hon. Spy" caricature in a Japanese army cap beside the line "Thanks for the can you throw

## Techniques named on the archive record

Name-callingTransfer
      Date1943Made byU.S. War Production Board (Emergency Management Office), scrap-metal conservation poster printed by the U.S. Government Printing OfficeMediumPosterCountryUnited StatesRegimeRoosevelt AdministrationSourceIdentified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they areSourceNorthwestern University Libraries, World War II Poster Collection (object no. IIID.20) , retrieved October 2, 2026SourcePublic domain (U.S. government publication; Northwestern: No Copyright - United States) Northwestern University Libraries, World War II Poster Collection (Government & Geographic Information Collection); the Libraries ask that users cite the item URL and Northwestern University Libraries.
      Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

      Full record at propagandaarchive.org

  Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away! is a 1943 War Production Board scrap-metal poster printed by the Government Printing Office. A grinning caricature in a Japanese army cap, with round spectacles and bared teeth, thanks the reader for wasting a can.

## What the sheet shows

Content note: the figure is a racial caricature of a Japanese soldier, and the text uses mock-pidgin speech. This page reproduces neither in softened form.

The ground is black. A grinning figure in a Japanese army cap, with round spectacles, squinting eyes and bared teeth, appears beside a cream card. The words on the card are in red script.

HON. SPY SAY:

Thanks

for the Can

you throw away!

U.S. GOVERNMENT PRINTING OFFICE 16—[illegible]—1

Transcription in the FRAME record, read from the image and not independently checked. Full record at propagandaarchive.org. Northwestern University Libraries, World War II Poster Collection, object no. IIID.20.

## Who issued it

The archive credits the U.S. War Production Board, through the Emergency Management Office, and the sheet carries a Government Printing Office imprint, though the job number is only partly legible. This copy comes from Northwestern University Libraries rather than the National Archives, so there is no NAID. The archive notes that the stamps and pencil notes on the library's copy were added by the library and are not part of the printed poster. No artist or print run is recorded.

## What it gets wrong

The request is ordinary. Tin cans were wanted for the scrap drive, and a household could choose to save them. The War Production Board's own Save Your Cans sheet of 1942 made that request with four numbered steps and no enemy at all.

This one makes it with a caricature. The archive tags name-calling for the distorted face and the mock-pidgin "Hon.," and transfer for the uniform: throwing out a can is staged as a favor to an enemy spy. That is two moves at once. It shames a household chore into a kind of treason, and it does so with a face drawn from a racial type, not from any soldier or government. A federal agency printed it, so the government owns the choice.

A year earlier the government had ordered Americans of Japanese ancestry out of their homes on the basis of that ancestry (the 1942 exclusion order). The record does not show what this poster did to anyone's view of their neighbors. It drew the same line. The anti-Japanese propaganda hub, its poster gallery, and the Tokio Kid page collect other sheets that put words in a caricature's mouth, and Save Your Scraps to Bomb the Japs is a private salvage poster built the same way.

## Sources

- FRAME object record, Hon. Spy Say: Thanks for the Can You Throw Away!, 1943. U.S. War Production Board (Emergency Management Office), printed by the U.S. Government Printing Office.

- Northwestern University Libraries, World War II Poster Collection (Government & Geographic Information Collection), object no. IIID.20, item record, retrieved by the archive 2 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government publication; Northwestern: No Copyright - United States).

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/collection/hon-spy-say-thanks-for-the-can-1943/