The Appalling Racism During the Conflict in the Asian Theater of World War II

THE APPALLING RACISM DURING THE CONFLICT IN THE ASIAN THEATER OF WORLD WAR II

By

Charles

Modern China and Japan

Karen Garner

December 13, 2006

"In the United States and Britain," According to Dower, "the Japanese were more hated than the Germans before as well as after Pearl Harbor. On this, there was no dispute among contemporary observers. They were perceived as a race apart, even a species apart -- and an overpoweringly monolithic one at that. There was no Japanese counterpart to the 'good German' in the popular consciousness of the Western Allies."

Beside the genocide of the Jewish, racism is still one of the larger ignored subjects of World War II. "Anti-Semitism was but one manifestation of the racism that existed at all levels in the United States and the United Kingdom." It is clear that the Allies were predisposed to racism even before fighting broke out with Japan, while criticizing Germany.

This analysis of Nazi racism by Western scientists and intellectuals was ironic, for it uncovered the hypocrisy of the Western Allies to the rest of the world. "Even while denouncing Nazi theories of Ð''Aryan' supremacy, the U.S. government presided over a society where blacks were subjected to demeaning Jim Crow laws, segregation was imposed even in the military establishment, racial discrimination extended to the defense industries, and immigration policy was severely biased against all nonwhites."

This racism built into the structure of American society caused the U.S. government after Pearl Harbor, to incarcerate tens of thousands of Japanese Americans commonly referred to as Japanese Internment or Japanese American Relocation.

John W. Dower War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 8.

2 Ibid., 3.

3 Ibid.

The Germans as well as the Japanese used the United States' racial inequalities against them during the war as well. "The Germans pointed to the status of blacks in America as proof of the validity of their dogma as well as the hollowness of Allied attacks on Nazi beliefs." The Japanese, "acutely sensitive to Ð''color' issues from an entirely different perspective, exploited every display of racial conflict in the United States in their appeals to other Asians (while necessarily ignoring the white supremacism of their German ally)."

Racism within Japan became apparent in the project of the East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere.

While the Japanese were viewed as liberators by many of the peoples of Southeast Asia, who had long suffered under the burden of Western colonial oppressors, and held hopes high those things would be better under the Japanese.

It was only as mounting loses and increasing strain on resources forced Japan to abandon its plans to develop Southeast Asia and revert to exploitative resource extraction, and as the Japanese continued to insist on their own racial dominance, that the other Asians in the "Sphere" came to see the Japanese for what they really were - yet another racist and abusive imperialist overlord with a hypocritical self-congratulatory beliefs of colonial justification.

4 John W. Dower War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 5.

5 Ibid.,7.

"As a symbol of Asian audacity, defiance, and Ð'- fleetingly Ð'- strength vis-Ð" -vis the west, the Japanese commanded admiration throughout Asia. As the self-designated leaders of the Greater East Asia Co-prosperity Sphere, however, they proved to be as overweening as the Westerners had been before them, and in many instances even more harsh: dominating the political scene, taking over local economies, imposing broad programs of Ð''Japanization,' slapping non-Japanese in public, torturing and executing dissidents, exploiting native labor so severely that between 1942 and 1945 the death toll among such workers numbered in the hundreds of thousands."

As part of its war drive, Japanese talked about the perceived need to liberate Asian countries from imperialist powers. In some cases they were welcomed when they invaded neighboring countries, driving out the British, French, and the American armies. In general, however, the ensuing brutality and racist beliefs of the Japanese led to their being considered at best equal to or more often, much worse, than Western colonists. The Co-Prosperity Sphere collapsed with Japan's downfall.

The racism slang words and visuals that existed during the war in Asia were frequently very graphic and disdainful. "The Western Allies, for example, consistently emphasized the Ð''subhuman' nature of the Japanese, routinely turning to images of apes and vermin to convey this. With more tempered disdain, they portrayed the Japanese as inherently inferior men and women who had to be understood in terms of primitivism, childishness, and collective mental and emotional deficiency."

6 John W. Dower War Without Mercy (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 7.

7 Ibid.,9.

For the Japanese, Dower states, "The formulaic expressions and graphic visual images which the Japanese relied on to distinguish themselves from others were, on the surface, quite different.

Their leaders and ideologues constantly affirmed their unique Ð''purity' as a race and culture, and turned the war itselfÐ'--and eventually mass deathÐ'--into an act of individual and collective purification. Americans and Europeans existed in the wartime Japanese imagination as vivid monsters, devils, and demons; and one had only to point to the bombing of Japanese cities (or the lynching of blacks in America) to demonstrate the aptness of this metaphor."

These controlling impressions of the enemy for the Allied as well as Japanese people are interesting on their own, however, it becomes even more curious when it is acknowledged that they all were fostered before and separate from the conflict in Asia. "The stereotypes and the explanations used to justify them really had little to do with Americans, Englishmen, Australians, Japanese, or other Asian nationalities per se. They were archetypical images associated with inequitable human relations