"Stay on the Job Until Every Murdering Jap Is Wiped Out!", Army poster ISD No. 148

What Are You Going to Do About It? Stay on the Job Until Every Murdering Jap Is Wiped Out! is a 1944 U.S. Army official poster, I.S.D. No. 148. A snarling Japanese soldier clubs a kneeling American captive under a newspaper clipping about a "March of Death" in the Philippines.

What the poster shows

Content note: the slogan uses an ethnic slur for Japanese people, and the picture is an atrocity scene. Both are given here as printed.

The archive describes a Japanese soldier, his face drawn in a snarl, bringing a rifle butt down on an American who kneels before him. More prisoners are marched past in a line behind. A torn newspaper clipping is laid over the scene. The transcription opens with a question to the reader and closes with the poster's answer.

What are YOU going to do about it?

5200 Yank Prisoners Killed
by Jap Torture In Philippines;
Cruel 'March of Death' Described

Other Thousands of Victims Were Filipinos; Captives Were Starved, Beaten, Bayoneted, Shot and Even Beheaded, Army and Navy Report

STAY ON THE JOB UNTIL EVERY
MURDERING JAP
IS WIPED OUT!

U.S. ARMY OFFICIAL POSTER

I.S.D. No. 148

The archive adds that scraps of neighboring headlines survive along the clipping's lower edge, and that the Government Printing Office imprint at the foot is too small to read.

Whose poster

This was not a private company's cartoon. The sheet calls itself an official Army poster and carries an I.S.D. number. The archive files it as aimed at the domestic public, with the purpose of mobilizing compliance; the slogan's "stay on the job" makes plain that the reader is a worker. Two other numbered Army sheets of 1944 are on this site: Ronald McLeod's Stay on the Job to Finish the Job, ISD No. 165, and Flagg's "Jap... You're Next!", ISD No. 198.

What is wrong with it

The clipping reports a war crime against prisoners, attributed in its own headline to an Army and Navy report. That is a grave charge, and the poster is entitled to put it in front of the public. This page does not test the clipping's figures; the archive does not either.

The slogan is the problem. It moves from the soldiers who did the killing to a racial word, and asks for every bearer of that word to be "wiped out." The government's own poster, in 1944, used a slur as the name of the enemy. The same year the Navy did the same in Your Enemy the Jap. The camps described in the Roosevelt administration essay, which held people by ancestry, were still open that year; the essay records that the last one closed in March 1946. The record does not show what this sheet did to anyone who read it. It shows what an Army office chose to print, and that was wrong. More sheets of this kind are on the anti-Japanese propaganda hub.