Oldal 33 [33]
OCR
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 characteristics of the Japanese, exaggerated them and created the conventional comic image 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 covetous 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 features (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 Europeans (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 buggered 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 accusation in a world where the use of abusive images is universal. The conflict during WWII involving the Americans, Australians, British, Chinese 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 comparison with the harm inflicted on millions of slain, injured or humiliated individuals, 31
