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Constructing Images of the Other in Peace and War
snake-like but mere hapless civilians, including children, incinerated in deliberately
created fire storms.
The American cartoonists also took what they saw as the different facial charac¬
teristics of the Japanese, exaggerated them and created the conventional comic im¬
age of the Japanese male who has ultra-big teeth and huge spectacles and is yellow
(Dower 1986: 189; New Yorker War Album 1943). He often carries a bloody knife.
‘The ugly ‘Jap’ even appears in official government posters warning citizens against
careless talk that might unwittingly reveal information of use to an enemy, urging
citizens to save scrap metal and raw materials and urging production workers to be
more conscientious and punctual Judd 1972: 120). He was a rather more vivid
enemy than the familiar German or Italian also seen in the New Yorker War Album
(1943) and a more distant kind of Other whose face could more easily be distorted.
It was a war without mercy on either side (Chang 1998; Dower 1986).
Latter-day politically correct critics have called these images ‘racist’. Maybe.
Perhaps we should ask a Korean to adjudicate. It is certainly the case that there
was a racial antipathy to the Japanese in America and it led to the utterly unjust
and pointless deportation of most of the Japanese-Americans living in California
to distant internment camps and to the eager theft of their property by the covet¬
ous citizens of that state (Tateishi 1984). But the Soviets had independently used
this image of the myopic, buck-toothed Japanese enemy (Efimov 2005: 46, 49,
59), even when there was no formal war between them and Japan, whereas the
race-obsessed German allies of the Japanese who saw themselves as the tall, blonde,
straight-nosed, unbespectacled ‘Aryan’ master race did not. It was about which side
the Japanese were on and that is all. Also American posters depicted their Chinese
ally in a positive way (Judd 1972: C20; see also Martha Sawyers wartime poster of
a Chinese family) and their cartoons are reflexive about Chinese appearance while
American leaflets dropped in China give American airmen somewhat Chinese fea¬
tures (Philippe 1982: 260).
The Japanese for their part have a long tradition of producing images of ugly,
burly, hairy, red-haired and heavy curly-bearded, pink-faced, clumsy, uncouth Eu¬
ropeans (Bryant 2005: 83; Clark et al 2013: 396-402). In general these images are
merely bemused mockery but in wartime the mockery can turn nasty. An example
of this nastiness can be seen in the portrayal by an unknown Japanese artist during
the Russian-Japanese war of 1904—1905 of a hapless Russian soldier being bug¬
gered by a sword-wearing Japanese officer, the ultimate humiliation of the defeated
(Clark et al 2013: 477). Mocking the face of the Other cuts both ways. To single
out Westerners as being the unique producers of ‘racist’ images is itself a racist ac¬
cusation in a world where the use of abusive images is universal.
The conflict during WWII involving the Americans, Australians, British, Chi¬
nese and Indians fighting against the Japanese was bitter, merciless and full of
atrocities. The images did not cause this; they merely reflected it and by compari¬
son with the harm inflicted on millions of slain, injured or humiliated individuals,
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