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Christie Davies
cardinals (Sorel 1978). It once again became a class image of the labourer or the
peasant. Apes can be benignly comical human beings as well as savages, in marked
contrast to snakes, spiders, vampire bats, sharks or creatures with tentacles who are
not our favourites at the zoo in the way the gorilla or the orang-utan is.
Vampires and Snakes: Ihe Japanese in WWII
During WWI the Japanese had been among Britain, France and America’s allies
against Germany and were depicted favourably in cartoons (Bryant 2006: 42) but
on December 7, 1941, they suddenly attacked Pearl Harbour in Hawaii without
a declaration of war. It was a clever, well-planned tactical operation (Schom 2004:
126-132) and it did great damage to the American fleet. In Tokyo crowds cheered
at the news of the successful attack. The Americans had been trying to strangle with
economic means the Japanese war effort in and against China, a war that was now
four years old and where a war situation had developed not necessarily to Japan s
advantage; they had become bogged down in that huge country (Furuya & Chang
1981: 652-698). The American leadership should have realised that this threat
and provocation would lead the Japanese to retaliate with a pre-emptive attack and
indeed American intelligence had received many accurate warnings of it. Yet they
were utterly unprepared and they saw the bombing of their fleet as the ultimate
in treachery (Dower 1986: 11), as an ‘act of infamy’. Hatred of the Japanese at¬
tacker covered up their own incompetence. The Japanese were now represented
in cartoons not only as club wielding apes, representing a brutal but open, visible
and direct enemy, but by a bomb dropping vampire bat, the bat that bites the in¬
nocent, unknowing sleeper in the night (Cover of Colliers magazine, December 12,
1942). The monstrous ape is a distorted human being but the vampire enemy is
a feared alien creature, a not-at-all-human, an inhuman, anti-human beast. When
the Americans hit back and in turn bombed the Japanese, their own bomber was
depicted in a poster as a brave, heroic eagle, dropping bombs on a Japanese snake.
‘The snake is a sinister, cold-blooded creature without legs, the antithesis of a hu¬
man being, the snake in the grass that strikes unexpectedly with poisonous fangs
when least expected or the large snake that encircles, squeezes, suffocates and swal¬
lows. The serpent is the sly deceiver “more crafty than any other wild creature that
the Lord God had made” (Genesis 3:1) the creature that persuaded Eve to pick
the fruit that led to first human beings being evicted from the Garden of Eden.
By contrast when shot down Japanese airmen are depicted as apes trying to paddle
an inflatable life raft; they are laughable and almost human and invite a degree of
sympathy as well as derision. The Japanese shown as monkeys are made to seem
inferior (Dower 1986: 182-187) but not necessarily hateful.
We should also remember that Pearl Harbour looked quite different to the
Japanese themselves and to their German allies. It was represented in Lustige Blitter
as a blow of the sword, that symbol of the upright warrior but done with true Ger¬
man humour. The Japanese later hit by American bombs were in the main far from