Knock Off a Japanazi (1942), a war stamp sheet as a target range

Knock off a Japanazi with a war stamp is a 1942 poster of the War Stamp Council, Liquor and Wine Industries, cooperating with the U.S. Treasury. A machine gunner fires above a grid of enemy silhouettes, and the coined word "Japanazi" folds two enemies into one (NAID 514832).

What the sheet prints

Content note: the headline coins a slur from an ethnic insult, and the sheet presents enemy silhouettes as targets. Both are quoted and described here as printed.

At the top a gunner in a helmet works a machine gun. The middle of the sheet is laid out like a page of stamps, a grid of small black figures with no words among them. Some figures carry swastikas; others are drawn in the outline of a Japanese soldier. Each square is a stamp, and each stamp is a target.

KNOCK OFF A JAPANAZI

WITH A WAR STAMP

TAKE YOUR CHANGE IN WAR STAMPS

WAR STAMP COUNCIL—LIQUOR AND WINE INDUSTRIES—COOPERATING WITH U. S. TREASURY DEPT.

Who issued it

This is an industry poster. The issuer line names a War Stamp Council of the liquor and wine trades, acting with the Treasury. The instruction "take your change in war stamps" suggests where it was meant to hang: at a counter where a customer received coins back and could be offered stamps instead. The FRAME record does not name an artist or give a print run.

What it gets wrong

"Japanazi" is a slur built for speed. It contains an ethnic insult for Japanese people and fuses it with the name of the German party. The effect is to make two enemy governments into one breed of target, and to make shooting them a matter of small change.

The Nazi state and the Imperial Japanese state were real enemies at war with the United States. That part is true. The poster goes further: it names the Japanese enemy by an ethnic label rather than by a government, in a year when ancestry alone was being used at home to order American citizens out of their neighborhoods (the 1942 exclusion order). A stamp drive did not need the word.

The purchase itself was voluntary, a small loan to the Treasury. The wrong is in the picture, not the price.

See the anti-Japanese propaganda hub and the anti-Nazi propaganda hub for both halves of the coined word, and Aim to Win for a Treasury bond poster of the same year that makes its case without an enemy. The Roosevelt administration essay sorts the period's posters by what they asked, and notes that not every item of the period was a government product.