If you worked as hard and fast as a Jap we'd smash Tokio a lot quicker is a 1943 poster copyrighted by Heppenstall Co., Steel Forgings, of Pittsburgh. Under a large Rising Sun flag, a caricatured man with round glasses and bared teeth bends over a desk (NAID 514597).
What the sheet prints
Content note: the headline uses an ethnic slur for Japanese people, and the figures are racial caricatures. Both are described here as printed.
A big Rising Sun flag fills the top of the poster. Below it a man drawn with round glasses, bared teeth and yellow-green skin bends over a desk at work, and rows of figures drawn the same way stretch out behind him. The words run in two lines.
If you worked as hard and fast as a Jap
we'd SMASH Tokio a lot quicker
COPYRIGHT 1943, HEPPENSTALL CO., STEEL FORGINGS, PITTSBURGH, PA.
Who made it
The only name on the sheet is a company's: Heppenstall Co., a steel forging firm in Pittsburgh, which copyrighted it in 1943. No federal office is printed on it. The National Archives keeps a copy with the World War II posters in Record Group 44, and the archive classes the issuer as a corporation and the purpose as mobilizing or securing compliance. The record gives no artist, no print run and no account of where it was posted.
What it gets wrong
The archive reads the ask as a call for faster work, and the method is shame. The reader is measured against a whole people, named by a slur and drawn as a type: similar faces, rows of them. The archive tags name-calling for the slur and the faces, and transfer for the enemy flag hung over the scene.
Two wrongs are packed into sixteen words. The first is the insult itself, which treats an enemy government's war as a trait of a race. The second is quieter. The drawing turns people into a mass of interchangeable workers, and then holds that up as a standard an American should meet. A free worker owes an employer an honest day, and the poster could have asked for that plainly. It chose to ask for it by way of a racial cartoon.
The same years saw Americans of Japanese ancestry removed from their homes by category (the 1942 exclusion order). This private poster did not order that, and the record shows no effect from it. Other plant posters built on the same slur include All the Ear-Marks of a Sneaky Jap! and the Tokio Kid sheets, such as Tokio Kid Say. The anti-Japanese propaganda hub and its poster gallery gather the rest.
Sources
- FRAME object record, If you worked as hard and fast as a Jap we'd smash Tokio a lot quicker, 1943. Heppenstall Co., Steel Forgings, Pittsburgh, Pa.
- U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Record Group 44, World War II Posters, 44-PA-1070, NAID 514597, retrieved by the archive 4 October 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain (U.S. government work).
