WARS do not occur in a vacuum. To a large part, they are based on the cultures of the countries at war.

World War II in the Pacific laid bare the inherent racism of Western colonizers. Racism thrived enough to ensure that in the United States and Britain, the Japanese were more hated than the Nazi Germans.

The Allied Forces played the race card to the hilt using many propaganda methods. They were goaded by a growing Chinese lobby and vocal American trade protectionist businessmen who feared the entry into the U.S. of inexpensive Japanese goods.

As time passed, the intense propaganda campaign eventually helped cajole the American public into a pro-war, anti-Japan position. By 1939, historian Michael C.C. Adams writes, polls showed that more Americans favored military aid to China rather then to Britain or France.

The Japanese had become the villain of choice for Westerners.

Writer John Dower notes that during that time, publications that regularly featured Japanese atrocities gave little coverage to the genocide of the Jews. In fact, the Holocaust was not even mentioned in the "Why We Fight" –the (film) series Frank Capra directed for the U.S. Army.

Dehumanizing the Enemy

Japanese soldiers –and sadly also all Japanese—were commonly referred to and depicted as subhuman: insects, monkeys, apes, rodents, or simply as barbarians who had to be wiped out or exterminated.

American Legion Magazine's cartoon of monkeys in a zoo who had posted a sign reading, "Any similarity between us and the Japs is purely coincidental" was typical.

In 1943, a U.S. Army poll found that roughly half of all GIs believed it would be necessary to kill every Japanese on earth before peace could be achieved. Their superiors appeared to agree. Generals like the Australian Sir Thomas Blamey informed his troops that, "Beneath the thin veneer of a few generations of civilization, (the Japanese) is a subhuman beast."

We all know Dr. Seuss as the genius who wrote The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, How the Grinch Stole Christmas and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish – the books that teach our children to read, and to love to read. But the esteemed doctor also had a darker side, depicting Japanese as half animal creatures in his political cartoons, done during World War II.

http://www.tfaoi.com/aa/1aa/1aa291.htm

 GOADED by the propaganda, by December 1943 there were more troops and equipment in the Pacific than in Europe. Historians have also estimated that as much as 1,589 artillery rounds were fired to kill each Japanese soldier.

As a December 1945 Fortune poll revealed, American feelings for the Japanese did not soften even after the war. Nearly 23 percent of those questioned wished the U.S. could have dropped "many more (atomic bombs) before the Japanese had a chance to surrender."

This virulent brand of genocidal hatred resulted from a massive public relations effort to demonize the enemy in the Pacific and thus justify anything in the name of victory. One good example is when the New York Times (the newspaper of record) ran an ad that showed a flamethrower being used to kill Japanese. The ad bore the headline:

"Clearing Out a Rat's Nest."

Race antagonisms and ignorance culminated in the Allied forces acting out their predetermined role in a self-fulfilling prophecy: If a subhuman will fight to death like an animal, those fighting on "the side of good" were simply left with no alternative but to slaughter them unmercifully. Since Japanese soldiers were under pressure not to surrender and were often killed when they did, this became a self-fulfilling prophesy.

General Blamey later told the New York Times: "Fighting Japs is not like fighting normal human beings. The Jap is a little barbarian… We are not dealing with humans as we know them. We are dealing with something primitive. Our troops have the right view of the Japs. They regard them as vermin." This was quoted by the Times on the front page.

Eugene B. Sledge, author of "With the Old Breed: At Peleliu and Okinawa," wrote of his comrades "harvesting gold teeth" from the enemy dead. In Okinawa, Sledge witnessed "the most repulsive thing I ever saw an American do in the war" –when a Marine officer stood over a Japanese corpse and urinated into its mouth.

Depiction of Japanese rat caught in a trap, from Josh newsletter, no. 12 by the Inter-Services Public Relations Directorate, India, April 1944

(LHCMA Heard collection)

HORROR STORIES about Japanese atrocities abounded, and these fueled further the animosity. A large part of the stories were true, too: Of the 235,473 U.S. and U.K. prisoners reported captured by Germany and Italy combined, only 4 percent (9,348) died. In contrast, an astonishing 27 percent of Japan's Anglo-American POWs (35,756 of 132,134) did not survive.

Indeed, with the Rape of Nanking, the Bataan Death March, and incidents such as the time when the marines on Guadalcanal were ambushed by Japanese soldiers pretending to surrender, the list of Japanese war crimes was long and did not have to be embellished to stir up Allied fury.

At the same time, the Japanese themselves wrestled with their own brand of racism. They felt superior, and believed that they were tasked with elevating the "Yamato race" the "pure race", the "leading race" –unique among the races and cultures of the world. They also believed that this uniqueness made them superior.

Certain visual images, such as the sun, sword, cherry blossom, snow-capped Mt. Fuji, and abstract "brightness" and auspicious colors like red and white, were used as symbols of the purity of the Japanese spirit. Such intense cultural fixations on the notion of purity and the self contributed to a wartime record of extremely harsh and brutal behavior toward non-Japanese.

Still, in many ways the behavior of Allied soldiers fighting the Japanese and even of those rooting for them back home was the anticipated outcome of the deadly campaign to manipulate the feelings against the Japanese. But while predictable, the results were no less appalling.

In April 1943, Dower reports about a American mother who had petitioned authorities to permit her son to mail her an ear he had cut off a Japanese soldier in the South Pacific. She wished to nail it in front of her door all to see.

Life magazine even printed a photo of this brutality in its May 22, 1943, issue, showing a young American woman with a boiled Japanese skull sent home to her by her boyfriend overseas.

A former war correspondent in the Pacific, Edgar L. Jones, put it best when he asked in the February 1946 Atlantic Monthly: "What Kind of war do civilians suppose we fought anyway? We shot prisoners in cold blood, wiped out hospitals, strafed lifeboats, killed or mistreated enemy civilians, finished off the enemy wounded, tossed the dying into a hole with the dead, and in the Pacific boiled flesh off enemy skulls to make table ornaments for sweethearts, or carved their bones into letter openers.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nanking_Massacre

http://cpcabrisbane.org/Kasama/1997/V11n3/Henson.htm