"Jap... You're Next! We'll Finish the Job!" Flagg's 1944 Army poster with a slur

"Jap... You're Next!" is a 1944 U.S. Army official poster, ISD No. 198, signed James Montgomery Flagg. An older Uncle Sam rolls up a sleeve and holds a wrench under a headline that uses an ethnic slur for the Japanese (NARA 513563).

What the poster prints

Flagg drew an Uncle Sam who is older than the one in his famous 1917 recruiting poster: white-haired, in a star-spangled vest and striped trousers, rolling up a sleeve with a heavy wrench in his other hand. No Japanese person is drawn. The headline does the naming, and it names with a slur.

JAP... You're Next!

We'll Finish the Job!

U. S. ARMY OFFICIAL POSTER

I.S.D. No. 198 PC-X-9-RPB-9-6-44-40M

[signature] James Montgomery Flagg

Who issued it

This is an official Army poster in the ISD series, not a private print. The signature is James Montgomery Flagg's, the artist of the 1917 "I Want You" Uncle Sam. The archive's themes for the record include race and ethnicity alongside the home front.

How to read it

"You're next" casts Japan as the next target. "We'll finish the job" is addressed to Americans at work; the wrench makes it a production poster rather than a combat one. The archive tags it name-calling and transfer. Uncle Sam lends the country's face to the job, and the slur picks out the target.

The slur was wrong. It was the United States Army, on an official sheet, using a racial epithet for an enemy nation, in the same years the government was confining Japanese Americans by ancestry. Japan's government was a legitimate enemy in a declared war. Its people as a race were not, and the word did not distinguish between them. Saying so is not a judgment on the soldiers or workers the poster addressed. It is a plain description of what the Army printed.

The record does not say how widely the sheet was posted. For the wider pattern, see anti-Japanese propaganda in the United States and its poster gallery. The broadcaster the press called Tokyo Rose is the subject of a separate case study. 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.