American Propaganda
"Jap Trap": Material Conservation, 1942 US poster: A bucktoothed rat in round glasses, a rising-sun cap flying off his head

"Jap Trap": Material Conservation (Douglas Aircraft poster)

A Douglas conservation poster called Jap Trap

Douglas Aircraft's 1942 "Jap Trap" poster, artist Campbell, NARA 515862. Conservation slogan paired with a rat caricature. Slur quoted, not reused as a

Techniques named on the archive record

Name-calling
Date
1942
Made by
Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., material conservation program (poster artist signed Campbell)
Medium
Poster
Country
United States
Regime
Roosevelt Administration
NARA
NARA 515862
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA 515862, local id 44-PA-2156), via Wikimedia Commons , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
Public domain in the US (published 1942 without a copyright notice); NARA: No Copyright - United States U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA 515862, 44-PA-2156)

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

"Jap Trap" is a 1942 material-conservation poster by an artist signed Campbell for Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc. The title is the sheet's slur, and the picture is a rat in a rising-sun cap caught in a trap marked Material Conservation (NARA 515862).

What the sheet said

MATERIAL CONSERVATION

"JAP TRAP"

One of a series designed by Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., under its material conservation program.

Campbell is also the signed artist on the Tokio Kid mishap sheet. This poster is a different series: conservation, not the Kid. The picture, in the archive's description, is a rat in round glasses with a rising-sun cap coming off, jaws of a mousetrap around it.

What it got wrong

Saving aluminum is a shop rule. Drawing the enemy as vermin is a different act. The rule can survive without the animal. The animal cannot survive as a description of Japanese people, or of Japanese Americans, or even of the Japanese state, which was a government with a navy, not a rodent. The title puts the slur in quotation marks on the sheet itself. Those marks do not make it a quotation from Tokyo. They make it Douglas's caption.

More Douglas and Treasury sheets that use the same vocabulary are in the US anti-Japanese posters gallery, with the identifier the archive prints on each one.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, "Jap Trap": Material Conservation, 1942. Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc. NARA 515862, local id 44-PA-2156, via Wikimedia Commons, retrieved by the archive October 2, 2026. Rights as recorded: public domain in the US (published 1942 without a copyright notice); NARA: No Copyright - United States.