The Savior of the Darker Races (1942), Charles Alston's cartoon for the OWI

The Savior of the Darker Races is an Office of War Information cartoon by Charles Alston dated August 22, 1942. A caricatured Japanese soldier with a halo-like disc, a broken chain and a bloodied dagger stands on ground labeled China, Korea and Manchuria, mocking Japan's claim to liberate Asian peoples (NAID 535657).

What the sheet prints

Content note: the central figure is a racial caricature of a Japanese soldier. It is described here as drawn.

The figure is a Japanese soldier drawn as a caricature, with round glasses and protruding teeth. Over his head floats a disc like a saint's halo. In one hand is a chain, snapped; in the other, a dagger with blood on it. Under his boots the ground is labeled with three places. The title sits in quotation marks, which is the point of the drawing.

"THE SAVIOR OF THE DARKER RACES"

alston

CHINA · KOREA · MANCHURIA

AUG 22 1942

Who made it

The artist is Charles Alston, who signed it in lower case, and the drawing is dated August 22, 1942. It belongs to the Office of War Information's cartoon artworks, now in Record Group 208 at the National Archives. The same series holds Alston's 1943 panel on Joe Louis. The archive's note says the Office of War Information issued it for the Black press. The record does not say which papers ran it.

How to read it

The cartoon makes a real argument. Imperial Japan presented its expansion as the liberation of Asian peoples from Western rule. The places under the soldier's feet, China, Korea and Manchuria, were lands Japan had taken or was fighting to hold. The halo and the broken chain repeat the claim; the bloody dagger answers it. That is a fair political point, made by putting the enemy's slogan next to its record.

The drawing then undercuts its own argument. The face is the standard wartime racial caricature, the same glasses and teeth found on far cruder 1942 sheets such as Save Your Scraps to Bomb the Japs. A cartoon about the hypocrisy of a government did not need to mock the features of a people. The caricature turns a criticism of Tokyo's policy into a picture of Japanese people in general, and that slide from a government to a people is the one the site's internment-propaganda page follows at home. This page does not claim the cartoon caused anything; it shows the habit.

Both things are on the paper: a sharp point about empire and a racist face. The page records both.

See the anti-Japanese propaganda hub and the Office of War Information index, and the OWI domestic branch study for the office that held these drawings. The Roosevelt administration essay places the Office of War Information beside Executive Order 9066, signed the same year as this cartoon.