拒否権！ (Veto!): a 1953 poster for Japan on the Soviet UN veto

A Japanese-language U.S. Information Agency poster, catalog date 21 May 1953. A spotlight beam joins the UN emblem at the top to a small top-hatted figure with a Japanese flag at the bottom, a red hammer and sickle bent into a hook lies across it, and the text says only the Soviet Union rejected Japan's UN application (NAID 5730066).

The picture

At the top, the United Nations emblem is ringed by member flags. A spotlight beam runs between it and the bottom of the sheet, where a small man in a top hat and striped trousers holds a Japanese flag. Across the beam lies a red hammer and sickle, bent into a hook.

拒否権！

ソ連だけが、日本の国

連加入申請案を拒否す。

今や57回も

ソ連は他の国連諸国の総意に反対したのだ!!

[English, as given by the archive:] Veto! Only the Soviet Union rejects Japan's application to join the UN. Now, as many as 57 times, the Soviet Union has opposed the unanimous will of the other UN member states!!

Provenance

FRAME credits the U.S. Information Agency, from the records of the State Department's International Information and Educational Exchange Program and the agency that succeeded it. The archive took the image from Wikimedia Commons, which drew it from the National Archives, Record Group 306, NAID 5730066; the Commons file page cites it as a U.S. government work. The catalog date is 21 May 1953. Nothing printed on the poster names the United States, and FRAME classes the source as blurred.

One number, no context

The archive tags card stacking and transfer. Transfer is plain in the design: the UN emblem crowns the beam, so the organization's standing is lent to Japan's side of the argument. Card stacking is in the arithmetic. The poster gives a single tally, 57, and calls it the number of times the Soviet Union opposed "the unanimous will" of the other members. It does not say what the 57 occasions concerned, over what years they were counted, or whether any other permanent member had used the same power.

The claim on Japan's application may be accurate; the record does not test it, and neither does this page. What a reader in Japan could not do was check it. The sheet cites no session, no vote and no source, and it does not tell him that a foreign government wrote it. A citizen weighing a claim about his country's place in the world deserves both.

Earlier that year, a Japanese sheet in the same file did a different job: The New Government of the United States explained who had chosen whom in Washington. Kremlin's Words and Deeds made a related UN case with a table of contributions. For the UN framing in the same month, see the Indonesian Flags of the United Nations chart and the U.S. Information Agency hub.