War Without Mercy
WAR WITHOUT MERCY: RACE AND POWER IN THE PACIFIC WAR by John W. Dower. New York:
Pantheon Books, 1986, xii, 399 pp., illustrated, $22.50, ISBN 0-394-50030-X.
Reviewed by Jack Wikoff
Following the surprise Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the American people
reacted violently with fear and anger at the suddenly ominous power of the Japanese
nation. The forms this rage took in the portrayal of the enemy in political
cartoons, propaganda films, popular songs, and psychological studies often presented
the Japanese variously as apes, bats, octopuses, vermin, giants, rapists, midgets
and children. Paralleling this we find that the Japanese, in their crusade to
drive the Anglo-Americans from the Pacific, portrayed the enemy as demons, cannibalistic
ogres, gangsters, Napoleonic megalomaniacs, and even dandruff.
The changing perceptions of the Allied and Japanese protagonists of the Pacific
theatre of World War II are the subject of John W. Dower's superbly researched
and documented book. Divided equally into discussions of the propaganda methods
and perceptions of both sides, War Without Mercy also contains a section
of illustrations with fourteen American and British and fifteen Japanese political
cartoons.
It is Dower's central premise that racial fear and hatred were major factors
that determined how both sides, Japanese and Anglo-American, precieved and dealt
with the respective enemy, the "inferior other." Dower makes this
clear in a telling passage of the introductory section:
In this milieu of historical forgetfulness, selective reporting centralized
propaganda, and a truly savage war, atrocities and war crimes played a major
role in the propagation of racial and cultural stereotypes. The stereotypes
preceded the atrocities, however, and had led an independent existance apart
from any specific event. [p .73]
In the section entitled "the War in Western Eyes" the author surveys
in great detail the development of stereotypical images of the Japanese, especially
in American sources. the Japanese were often repersented in a depersonalized
manner as the "Jap hordes" although the wartime population of Japan
was only 73 million.
Behind such a characterization was the nightmare fantasy of the "Yellow
Peril" fostered in part by the "Fu Manchu" novels of Rohmer.
Real or not, the fear that the billion-strong masses of the Orient would pour
into Australia, New Zealand and the western United States was foremost in Anglo-American
minds. Japanese propagandists themselves made use of this in a leaflet which
depicted a teeter-totter with figures representing seven Asian nations weighing
down one end while Roosevelt and Churchill are seen flying off the other end.
The caption reads "Greater East Asian War: One Billion Asians against Anglo-Americans"
(illustrated on p. 248 of Propaganda:The Art of Persuasion: World War II, by
Anthony Rhodes, NY: Chelsea House, 1976).
Prior to Pearl Harbor and the extraordinary military success of Japan in 1942,
notably the seizure of Singapore from the complacent British, the Anglo-Americans
had failed to take the Japanese seriously. They rated the Japanese as poor and
unintelligent fighters, incapable of flying advanced aircraft, unable to build
quality battleships, and incapable of the invention of new weapons or methods
of battle. In the months following the outbreak of war, the Allies swung to
the opposite view, exaggerating the fanaticism, willingness to die, and mysterious,
"occult," Oriental qualities of the Japanese soldier. This shift can
be seen through the large number of portrayals of Japanese as apes. In a January
1942 issue of Punch, monkeys with helmets and machine guns are drawn swinging
through vines, underlined with a quotation from Kipling's Jungle Book (War
Without Mercy, p. 183). By 1943 the Japanese were increasingly represented
in cartoons as gigantic, savage gorillas (pp.184,187). Six months after the
April 18, 1942 Doolittle-led B-25 raid on Tokyo, three captured airmen were
tried and executed. The American people reacted in a paroxysm of anger and one
especially graphic and now famous cartoon depicted an apelike subhuman labeled
"Tojo" crouching with blood-dripping mouth and hands over a body labeled
"Murdered American Airmen" (illustration on p. 45 of Faces of the
Enemy: Reflection of the Hostile Imagination, by Sam Keen. San Francisco:
Harper & Row., Pub.,1986.)
Yet another extraordinary representation of the enemy as an animal may be found
on the December 12, 1942 cover of Colliers, painted by Arthur Szyk, which depicts
a Japanese Officer as an huge bat with fangs and pointed ears carrying a bomb
inscribed with skull and crossbones. This creature wears a plumed cap and full
dress uniform with swastika-emblazoned epaulets. The swastikas no doubt were
meant to reveal that the "Japs" were able students of the "Nazis."
The author of War Without Mercy devotes one chapter, "Primitives,
Children, Madmen," to both popular and high-brow psychiatric analyses of
the Japanese character. A study by Geoffrey Gorer, the English social anthropologist,
entitled "Themes in Japanese Culture" was recapitulated in Time magazine
under the title "Why are Japs Japs?" Other articles in American publications
were given such titles as "Jap Cruelty Traced to Childhood," "Jap
Bullies," and "How to Tell Japs from Chinese.
Popular American songs proclaimed "There'll Be No Adolf Hitler nor Yellow
Japs to Fear," "Until That Rising Sun Is Down," and "We're
Gonna Have to Slap the Dirty Little Jap."
Part III of War Without Mercy is titled "The War in Japanese Eyes"
and begins:
During the war, the Japanese routinely referred to themselves as the leading
race (shido minzoku) of the world. Like their American and Commonwealth adversaries,
they called on a variety of metaphors, images, code phrases, and concepts
to affirm their superiority - ranging from expressions that demeaned non-Japanese
to elaborate affirmations of their own unique qualities. [p. 203]
Dower analyzes in great detail the Japanese view of themselves as a race and
nation, more homogeneous, pure, and separate than others. That the "Rising
Sun" was used as a symbol of a purifying force can be seen from a cartoon,
reproduced in War Without Mercy, from the January 1942 issue of the Japanese
periodical Manga. As described by Dower:
The purifying sun of Japanese glory dispels the "ABCD" powers. America
and Britain are thugs (the crown of Jewish -- "J" -- plutocracy
is falling from America's head). China is a sprawling figure with Chiang Kai-shek's
face -- and a stubby tail, a bestial mark often attached to the Nationalist
Chinese. All that remains of the Dutch is a wooden shoe. (p. 192)
The alliance with Germany and Italy made a propaganda campaign of overt anti-white
racism somewhat impractical. Furthermore, Japan's history of rapid and often
enthusiastic Westernization while resisting colonialization by western powers
largely precluded such a propaganda approach. Nevertheless, the Japanese were
not above making comparisons of the Japanese and European races.
An argument was offered in another popular book on racial issues that was also
published in Tokyo in 1944. Readers of A History of Changing Theories about
the Japanese by Kiyono Kenji were again reminded of ... physical features
which on the contrary placed the Europeans closer to the monkeys and other animals
than the Japanese; Kiyono offered this ... list: "high" noses, hairiness,
relatively long arms, lower brain-to-body-weight ratio, thick fingers, and strong
body odor of the sort associated with the generative function in certain animals.
(p. 219)
Although the Japanese leaders proclaimed a desire for the attainment of a Greater
East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere uniting the nations of the region, it was clear
that Tokyo was to be the dominant economic and military center. A disparaging
view of other Asians is seen in the portrayals of them as darker-skinned "natives,"
"half-naked and implicitly half-civilized."
The most common device used to portray Europeans in Japanese cartoons of the
era is that of the demon. Thus we see the Amerian president and British prime
minister drawn with horns and claws. Another cartoon from Manga depicts a head
of rice bristling with bayonet blades reminiscent of samurai swords, impaling
three American flyers falling from a burning bomber. The flyers are drawn with
long pointed noses, skinny bodies, and tails.
The Japanese people were urged by their leaders to work for the good of the
group; the nation was more important than the selfish desires of the individual,
a theme illustrated by a cartoon of a Japanese woman purging her head of "Anglo-Americanism,"
the dandruff "being combed out is identified as extravagance, selfishness,
hedonism, liberalism, materialism, money worship, individualism, and Anglo-American
ideas" (p.191).
In 1981 the discovery of a volume of war-time documents in a used-book store
in Tokyo 1ed to the unearthing of the full six-volume, 3,127-page report, completed
July 1, 1943, entitled Investigation of Global Policy with the Yamato [Japanese]
Race Nucleus, in the archives of the Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare.
This unusual and valuable document is the subject of one excellent chapter.
Dower elucidates the Japanese equivalent of "blood and soil" and hierarchic
patterns of thinking, but only lightly touches on the similarities between National
Socialist and Japanese racial, economic, and political theories. One of the
few failings of War Without Mercy concerns the author's occasional superficial
remarks about Japan's National Socialist ally. Dower is properly skeptical of
the flood of atrocity stories which attributed nearly every conceivable brutality
to the Japanese, but accepts uncritically all the cliches and myths about alleged
German atrocities that were the staples of Allied propaganda. Particularly telling
is the following paragraph:
Apart from the genocide of the Jews, racism remains one of the great neglected
subjects of World War Two. We can gain an impression of its importance, however,
by asking a simple question: when and where did race play a significant role
in the war? The query may seem to border on the simplistic, but it turns out
to have no simple answer -- not even for the Holocaust. As has become more
widely acknowledged in recent years, the destruction of European Jewry itself
was neither an isolated event nor a peculiarly Nazi atrocity. The German extermination
campaign was not limited to Jews but extended to other "undesirable"
peoples as well. At the same time there occurred a "hidden Holocaust"
-- that is, a conveniently forgotten one -- in which the annihilation of the
Jews was actively supported by French and Dutch citizens, Poles, Hungarians,
Romanians, Slovaks, Ukrainians, Lithuanians, and Latvians. It is now also
well documented that anti-Semitism in the United States and Great Britain
prevented both countries from doing as much as they could have to publicize
these genocidal policies or to mount a serious rescue campaign. (p. 4)
Dower acknowledges that the fighting in the Pacific was especially brutal with
each side frequently killing captured enemy soldiers rather than taking prisoners,
and that the collecting of body parts of enemy dead for mementos was commonplace.
He also discusses the cruel Japanese treatment of whites and Asians in concentration
camps and the United States' internment of 110,000 Japanese/American citizens.
We are told in a footnote (page 357) that the above-mentioned Investigation
of Global Policy with the Yamato Race As Nucleus contains several hundred
pages on Nazi racial policies and "the Jewish problem." Yet, other
than providing two illustrations (pages 192 and 194) of Japanese cartoons which
include anti-Jewish caricatures, Dower does not touch on the Japanese attitude
to the Jews. A discussion of Japanese anti-Jewish and pro-Muslim policies and
a more even-handed comparison of the brutal Pacific battles and those of the
Eastern Front would have been welcome. Also, a somewhat larger sampling of political
cartoons would have been helpful to convey the wide variety of images and metaphors
used in propaganda of the era
Overall, War Without Mercy is a thoroughly documented work and breaks
much ground in the study of the propaganda of the war in the Pacific. It is
to be hoped that in the future many of the World War II Japanese writings about
the West cited by Dower will be available in English translation. This can only
assist in building greater understanding between East and West and may help
to prevent future conflicts.
