Shadow across the rising sun: Jim Berryman's 1960 question mark over Japan

A Washington Evening Star cartoon by Jim Berryman, dated 17 June 1960. A Japanese flag on a pole stands on a map of the Japanese islands, and its shadow falls across the sea as a large question mark. Held in the Senate's Berryman collection at NARA (NAID 5743284).

What the cartoon shows

One object and its shadow. The archive describes a Japanese flag on a pole, planted on a map of the Japanese islands. The flag's shadow stretches across the sea and takes the shape of a large question mark. The drawing has one label besides the signature.

JAPAN

JIM BERRYMAN WASHINGTON STAR

Dated 17 June 1960

Jim Berryman drew it for the Washington Evening Star, and the record dates it 17 June 1960. The original is in the Records of the U.S. Senate at the National Archives, in the series of Berryman's political cartoons (series NAID 5730852). FRAME classes the source as identified, files the audience as the domestic public and the purpose as warn or inform, and places the cartoon in the Cold War during the Eisenhower administration. Its themes are security and surveillance, and war and the military.

A question with no enemy drawn

The archive reads it as an argument that Japan's future was uncertain. It tags the drawing fear appeal and calls that a weak fit: the shadow is a warning image, and no particular harm or remedy is shown. That is a careful reading, and this page keeps to it. The record does not say what event the cartoon answered, and this page does not supply one.

What stands out is what the drawing leaves out. The archive's description names no people, no faces, no figure standing for the Japanese nation. The country is a map and a flag, and the doubt is a shape. A reader is told to worry, but not about whom or what.

That restraint is worth noticing beside the American wartime images of Japan. Much of what the anti-Japanese propaganda hub gathers stood for Japan with a racial caricature and a printed slur. This cartoon, by a private newspaper artist under his own name, treats Japan as a country whose direction matters to Americans, and draws the question without drawing an enemy. Other Berryman cartoons on this site include It's Time to Lay This Needle Aside! and the Faubus landslide.