Race and the Pacific Theater
How Americans viewed the Japanese during World War II
Popular Misconceptions of Japan
We are all too familiar with Pearl Harbor's destruction at the hands of the treacherous Japanese Imperial Navy; popular films and television specials have made this image hard to forget. Yet a much more misunderstood aspect of the Pacific War is how Americans perceived their mortal Japanese enemy. I've tried to select a representative work of history to illustrate this important facet of the war.
The Pacific Theater: A War Without Mercy
In the first half of his engaging comparative study of Japanese and American racial perceptions during the Pacific War, John Dower illuminates the ways in which Americans stereotyped and demonized their Japanese foes. Not content to limit his analysis to either World War II or the Japanese, Dower draws on centuries of Western thought in an attempt to show that hierarchical views of race, rather than being a product of the war and its consequent propaganda, were actually long imbedded in European and American cultural discourses of non-white peoples. By dehumanizing the Japanese, Americans tolerated the basest cruelties and harshest measures against them, while racially biased commanders at the strategic level developed operations whose implementation observant critics would later constitute as war crimes.
Pseudo Science during World War Two
Capitalizing on the surprise attack at Pearl Harbor, American policy makers launched a bitter campaign of denunciation and condemnation to rally Americans to the war in the Pacific. As anthropologists, historians, journalists, and ex-foreign service officers all hurried to offer their analyses of the “Japanese mind,” Dower is correct to point out that racist tendencies and pseudo-scientific trends permeated nearly every level of U.S. culture. As the goal of these investigations was to better understand the Japanese in order to more effectively defeat them in war, it is ironic that well-meaning intellectuals more often than not impeded cultural understanding by reinforcing dangerous stereotypes. To his credit, Dower shows how these absurd Western visions of the Japanese led to disastrous mishaps at even the strategic level, exemplified by the sinking of the Prince of Wales and the Repulse, two formidable British warships whose officers remained convinced of Japan’s ineptitude right up to the moment they were attacked: “Those Japs can’t fly. They can’t see at night .” [1]
Racial Stereotypes of the Japanese
Perhaps the greatest achievement of War Without Mercy is that it points to much larger trends in Western views of “The Other,” while still focusing on Japan. For example, while Congress praised Chinese nationalists for their brave resistance against the Japanese, there remained harsh and hypocritical restrictions on Chinese immigration to the U.S. Those who did manage to eke out a poor existence in America were often cast in the same racist stereotypes as the Japanese, and as the author notes, there is a case to be made for exceptionalism with regard to American views of strictly non-white peoples, since even the most bitter opponents of the Nazis could still draw on romanticized images of “Good Germans” who had been led astray by ideologues like Hitler.
Race and Strategy in the Pacific Theater
Contrarily, there existed no comparable image of a “Good Japanese,” leading to some of the most heinous denunciations of the Second World War by U.S. planners: Lieutenant General John DeWitt, commander of the Western Defense Command, went so far as to proclaim that the Japanese as a race should be “wiped off the face of the map.”[2] With this outlook, the firebombing of Tokyo and the eager dropping of two atomic bombs on civilian populations could be justified by those who viewed the Japanese as subhumans fit only for extinction.
[1] John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (Pantheon Books: New York, 1986), 101.
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