Introduction
Keywords: World War II in Asia, World War II propaganda, Film and war, Asia-Pacific War, Japan and World War II
Over fifty million men, women, and children were killed during World War II (1939-1945), making it the bloodiest war in history. As a result of this massive global conflagration, empires fell, new nations arose, civil wars began, migrations started, and a new international order was established. The Asia-Pacific War (1937-1945) between Japan and the Allied Powers was no exception to this and memories of the war still arouse deep passion and anger in many East Asian nations.
While histories of the Asia-Pacific War have tended to document the battles, air raids, atrocities, troop movements, and war material, there has been less work on the importance of propaganda and its effects on the battlefield. In his path-breaking book, War Without Mercy, John Dower argued that World War II was a race war and that exclusivist attitudes toward race as shown in Japanese and American visual propaganda shaped the brutality of the Asia-Pacific War (Dower, 4).
Dower and others have focused on the ideological messages put forth in media regarding “why we fight,” how war and the enemy were represented, how heroism was defined, and what racial and gender tropes were at work, among other things. These then can be compared to documents such as interviews, diaries, memoirs, and other material depicting the lives of soldiers and civilians in order to analyze how these messages operated on the battlefield and in daily life. More broadly, historians can also draw broader conclusions on the nature of racism, sexism, nationalism, and xenophobia, since war often illustrates the most extreme effects of these phenomena. Thus, for example, while Dower concludes that exclusivism and dehumanization governed racial discourse during the war, recently the historian Takashi Fujitani, in his book Race for Empire, has argued that there was another form of racism operating in Japan and the United States—what he calls “polite racism.” By analyzing Japanese and American policies and visual culture, Fujitani shows how each government mobilized its minority populations (Koreans and Japanese-Americans respectively) for total war with the constant promise of full citizenship and rights, while at the same time relegating them to second-class citizen status. Thus, whereas Dower illustrates a “vulgar racism” of subjugation, exclusion, and dehumanization, Fujitani shows techniques by which governments incorporated minority populations through techniques of inclusion and involvement.
In these and other ways, media and visual culture from the wartime era offer a vivid window into the mindsets of people at the time and may shed light on forms of racism and nationalism today.
This module was inspired by John Dower's class, "World War II in Asia: Cultures of War," at MIT and his project, Visualizing Cultures.