American Propaganda
Tokio Kid Say: Oh So Joyful for Mishap, 1942 US poster: Under the lettering 'Tokio Kid say', a fanged, bespectacled

Tokio Kid Say: Oh So Joyful for Mishap (Douglas Aircraft poster)

Tokio Kid says a mishap helps the enemy

Jack Campbell's 1942 Tokio Kid sheet for Douglas Aircraft says a mishap delights the caricature. NARA 535321. The slur stays in the quote.

Techniques named on the archive record

Name-callingTransfer
Date
1942
Made by
Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., Santa Monica ('Tokio Kid' plant-poster series); artist Jack Campbell
Medium
Poster
Country
United States
Regime
Roosevelt Administration
NARA
NARA 535321
Source
Identified Openly sourced: the speaker is who they say they are
Source
U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA 535321, local id 179-WP-1471), via Wikimedia Commons , retrieved October 2, 2026
Source
Public domain in the US (published 1942 without a copyright notice); NARA: No Copyright - United States U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA 535321, 179-WP-1471)

Object, image, and catalog record from the FRAME archive. Text on this page is CC BY 4.0. Image rights are as the archive records.

Full record at propagandaarchive.org

Tokio Kid Say: Oh So Joyful for Mishap is a 1942 poster by Jack Campbell for Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., Santa Monica. It says a plant mishap means "one more less now fighting Jap" (NARA 535321).

What the sheet said

The imprint names the company and the artist. The joke is an injury. Workers in the background crowd a fallen man, and the caricature keeps a tally.

TOKIO KID SAY-

OH SO JOYFUL FOR MISHAP- ONE MORE LESS NOW FIGHTING JAP

THANK YOU

JACK CAMPBELL

W.P. 233 PUB. BY DOUGLAS AIRCRAFT CO., INC., SANTA MONICA, CALIF., U.S.A.

The series

This is one of three Tokio Kid sheets written up here. Poster no. 714 is about the production "E." Poster no. 812 is about rivets on the floor. Campbell's name is on this mishap sheet. The archive also holds his "Jap Trap" conservation poster, NARA 515862, which uses a rat instead of the Kid. The campaign page is Tokio Kid.

What it got wrong

A factory that hides accidents is a bad factory. The honest sentence is that a hurt worker is a person, and the company owes a guard, a report, and a fix. This sheet spends its ink on an enemy's grin. It calls the injured man "one more less now fighting," as if the payroll were a rifle company and the stretcher a gift to Tokyo.

The slur in the speech bubble is the poster's word for a race. The United States was at war with the Japanese empire. It was not at war with a caricature, and it was not at war with the Japanese Americans who, that same year, were ordered away from the coast. Safety rules do not need that confusion. Douglas could have printed the rule without the dagger.

Sources

  • FRAME object record, Tokio Kid Say: Oh So Joyful for Mishap, 1942. Artist Jack Campbell. Douglas Aircraft Company, Inc., Santa Monica. NARA 535321, local id 179-WP-1471. Rights as recorded: public domain in the US (published 1942 without a copyright notice); NARA: No Copyright - United States.