Your Enemy the Jap, Navy industrial sheet, 1944

Your Enemy the Jap is a 1944 poster of the U.S. Navy, Industrial Incentive Division, signed Hotchkiss, USNR. It tells readers Japan is still building planes and ships, and it uses the title's slur as the name of the enemy (NARA 516253).

What the sheet said

This one is closer to a briefing than to a joke, and it still leads with the slur. The archive's transcription includes counts. They are the poster's counts, not a later almanac.

YOUR ENEMY the JAP

Despite our air victories, the Japs are producing planes FASTER than we can destroy them. The QUALITY of their planes is IMPROVING!

Japan still has a powerful fleet — 10 to 13 BIG BATTLESHIPS, 10 OR MORE LARGE AIRCRAFT CARRIERS, many small carriers, hundreds of other warships.

The Jap is a fanatical fighter. His motto is "WIN OR DIE." There are 4,000,000 of him under arms, with 2,000,000 more ready if needed.

Numbers, then a pronoun

"Japan still has a powerful fleet" is a claim about a state. "The Jap is a fanatical fighter" turns the state into a single body and a slur. The motto "WIN OR DIE" is in quotation marks on the sheet. The archive does not attach that motto to a named Japanese document on this record. It is what the Navy poster says the motto is.

Industrial incentive posters ask a yard to work faster. A factual order-of-battle estimate can serve that ask. The estimate here is not sourced on the sheet to a named intelligence report. Treat the numbers as the poster's numbers. The gallery entry is US anti-Japanese posters.