# Anti-Japanese propaganda

Anti-Japanese propaganda, in this edition, means United States posters and official wording from the World War II years that cast Japan, or people of Japanese ancestry, as the enemy. The pages below start with Tokio Kid and the poster gallery. How that differed from anti-German sheets is a question on this page, not a separate article.

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  Anti-Japanese propaganda
  Anti-Japanese propaganda, in this edition, means United States posters and official wording from the World War II years that cast Japan, or people of Japanese ancestry, as the enemy. The pages below start with Tokio Kid and the poster gallery. How that differed from anti-German sheets is a question on this page, not a separate article.

The United States government and American companies printed a large pile of sheets, from 1941 into 1945, that asked civilians to work, save, and hate with Japan as the target. This hub collects the ones rewritten here. It does not claim to be every poster in the National Archives. The gallery is the broader free set, with the identifier on each card. Essays are the pages that argue.

## Where to start

Tokio Kid is the named plant series, three Douglas-related sheets from 1942. This Is the Enemy is Office of War Information Poster No. 76, 1943, and it does not belong to this topic as a Japanese caricature: the plate is a swastika armband and a Bible. It is linked so the shared title is not quietly moved. The anti-Nazi reading of that sheet, and the US posters around it, is anti-Nazi propaganda. Dr. Seuss is a gap with one real object: a carpool cartoon credited to his drawing, not the PM cartoons, which are not in the snapshot. Internment propaganda is the government's wording on exclusion, not a history of the camps.

The person the wartime press called Tokyo Rose is not a poster. She is Iva Ikuko Toguri D'Aquino, convicted of treason in 1949 and pardoned in 1977. That case study is the place for the trial dates and the pardon list.

## How was anti-Japanese propaganda different from anti-German propaganda?

On the objects this edition actually holds, the difference is the picture. The 1943 OWI sheet titled "This is the enemy" stands for Nazi Germany with a swastika and a stabbed Bible. It has no face. The Tokio Kid sheets and much of the gallery stand for Japan with a racial caricature and a slur printed as dialogue. Anti-German material in the First World War, including the Halt the Hun essay already on this site, used its own ethnic insult a generation earlier. That is a cousin, not a twin. A full statistical comparison of every anti-German and anti-Japanese sheet is not what these pages are. The question can be answered from the sheets linked here without pretending the sample is the whole war.

German American organizations are not a section of this hub. British "careless talk" posters are not either. Security sheets that mention Tokio only as an eavesdropper are in the gallery when the title says so, and they are still security sheets.

## What was wrong, said plainly

Fighting the Japanese empire was a war against a state. Drawing that state as a verminous race, and then using the same ancestry to order citizens out of San Francisco, were failures of a different kind. The first is a lie about people. The second is a use of state power without the hearing the Constitution is for. Both are in the record linked above. Neither requires a reader to pretend the attack on Pearl Harbor did not happen, or that wartime production rules were all illegitimate. A republic can build airplanes and still refuse a poster that teaches the crew to despise a race.

  United StatesTokio Kid, poster no. 7141942 · Name-calling, TransferUnited StatesTokio Kid seriesUnited StatesThis Is the Enemy, 19431943 · Scapegoating, Transfer, Fear appealUnited StatesUS anti-Japanese postersUnited StatesDr. Seuss cartoonsUnited StatesInternment propaganda

Canonical: https://americanpropaganda.org/topics/anti-japanese-wwii/