Oldal 32 [32]
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30 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 attacker 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 innocent, 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 human being, the snake in the grass that strikes unexpectedly with poisonous fangs when least expected or the large snake that encircles, squeezes, suffocates and swallows. 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 German humour. The Japanese later hit by American bombs were in the main far from
