War Without Mercy
After the sudden surprising attack from Japan on Pearl Harbor, the Americans reacted violently with fear and anger at the power of the Japanese nation. The Americans used political cartoons, propaganda films, popular songs, and psychological studies to portray Japan and Japanese, they often presented the Japanese variously such as apes, bats, octopuses, vermin, rapists, and children and so on. On the other hand, Japanese portrayed their enemy as demons, cannibalistic ogres, and gangsters. The most common device used to portray Europeans in Japanese cartoons of the era is that of the demon.
The major factors that the author mentions are the racial fear and hatred. It determined how Japanese and American perceived and dealt with the respective enemy. There is a passage clearly tells the circumstance happened at the time. "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 existence apart from any specific event" (Dower 73).
In the second part of the book, it describes about the various media displays of racial dehumanization towards the Japanese. The author explains that the racial patterns basically rooted in the American culture and it is influenced deeply. Japanese were strongly portrayed as an inferior race to the Anglo-American. It is not only apparent racism exists in the U.S., but also throughout the war, U.S. military officers and soldiers carry this racism into battle. By the way, U.S. military leaders maintained racial fears of early Japanese victories against Western powers because the world may be united under Japan after the race war between the "Orientals" and the "Occidentals" (Dower 6).
After the Pearl Harbor attack and military success over Japan by dropping the atomic bomb at Hiroshima and...
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