The Jap Way: Cold-Blooded Murder (1943), the Army sheet on the executed Tokyo raiders

The Jap Way: Cold-Blooded Murder is a 1943 U.S. Army official poster (I.S.D. No. 101). A photograph of two Japanese soldiers leading a blindfolded American airman is overprinted with a newspaper headline on the execution of Tokyo air raiders, and the sheet asks workers to keep up production. The headline uses an ethnic slur.

What the poster prints

Content note: the headline uses an ethnic slur, and the photograph shows a blindfolded airman being led away. Both are quoted and described here as printed.

The archive describes a halftone photograph of two Japanese soldiers holding a blindfolded American flyer by the arms. Over it sits a mock newspaper clipping with several headlines. Some subheads are cut off or too small to read in the scan and are marked illegible.

The Jap way -

COLD-BLOODED MURDER

Japs Execute Group

of Tokyo Air Raiders

Bonds Will Avenge Them!

U. S. Brands Act 'Murder;' Retribution Is Promised

We'll make them pay

if you keep up

PRODUCTION

U.S. ARMY OFFICIAL POSTER

I.S.D. No. 101

Who issued it

The sheet calls itself a U.S. Army official poster and carries the number I.S.D. No. 101. The archive's copy is at the Library of Congress. The record does not name an artist, does not identify the airman in the photograph, and does not say where the photograph came from. This page does not either.

How to read it

The execution of captured airmen, as the clipping reports it, was a crime. A government may tell its people about a crime committed against its soldiers, and it may ask them to work harder because of it.

The wrong is in the first three words. "The Jap way" takes an act by particular men and turns it into the nature of a whole people. The archive tags this as name-calling and fear appeal. The slur does the name-calling, and the photograph does the fear. Together they tell a factory worker that the enemy is not a government that ordered an execution but a race that kills by habit. That was false. It was also a label that did not stop at the enemy's border; the site's internment propaganda page follows it to Americans of Japanese ancestry at home.

The closing ask is ordinary: keep up production. It did not need the slur to make its point. A sheet from the same year, the Doolittle payroll sheet, uses the same news for bonds. Both belong with the anti-Japanese propaganda hub and its poster gallery. The Roosevelt administration essay discusses that payroll sheet and notes that not every item in the poster file was a government product.