Put the Squeeze on the Japanese (1943), RCA's "Beat Your Promise" vise

Put the squeeze on the Japanese is a 1943 poster from RCA Manufacturing Company's "Beat Your Promise" production series. A worker labeled "You and I," in an "Increased Production" vest, clamps a caricatured Japanese officer in a vise beside a dagger marked "Remember Pearl Harbor!" The scan is held by the UNT Digital Library.

The vise and the man in it

Content note: the poster's central figure is a racial caricature of a Japanese officer.

RCA's poster turns a shop tool into a weapon. The worker turning the vise wears a vest marked "INCREASED PRODUCTION," and "RCA" is lettered on his wrist. The man caught in the jaws is a Japanese officer, drawn, in the archive's description, with buck teeth, glasses and exaggerated features. He shouts in brush marks meant to look like Japanese writing; the record calls them pseudo-Japanese and illegible. A dagger in the foreground bears a slogan of its own.

PUT THE SQUEEZE ON THE JAPANESE

YOU AND I

INCREASED PRODUCTION

RCA

REMEMBER PEARL HARBOR!

BEAT YOUR PROMISE

Form 155360

Printed in U. S. A.

Who "You and I" are

The label on the worker is the poster's whole theory of the war. "You and I" are the people doing the work, and the enemy is squeezed by output. "BEAT YOUR PROMISE" reads as a call to do better than a pledge already made. The issuer type in the record is "Corporation," and the purpose field reads "Mobilize or secure compliance." The audience is "Domestic public." The speaker is a company, not a federal office.

Asking workers to outdo a production target was a legitimate request in wartime. The drawing goes past it. The archive tags name-calling, and the name-calling is visual: the officer is drawn as a racial type, not as one enemy soldier. The headline names "THE JAPANESE," not an army or a government. The drawing invites a worker to see the people, not the government, in the vise.

Where the scan comes from

This copy is not from the National Archives. The University of North Texas Libraries hold it in their World War II Posters collection, and the archive records it as public domain because the scan shows no copyright notice. No print run or date of issue beyond 1943 is given.

The poster is in this site's anti-Japanese poster gallery on the anti-Japanese propaganda hub. Other company sheets of the kind include Douglas Aircraft's Jap Trap and Heppenstall's If You Worked as Hard and Fast as a Jap.