War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War

It wasn't long after the United States entered the war that the Hollywood director, Frank Capra, was asked to put together a "series of orientation films for viewing by American troops" (15). The documentary films that Capra produced have come to be recognized as classics of wartime cinematic propaganda. The films were given the collective title of Why We Fight. The films were popular, one even winning an Academy Award for best documentary. They were also distributed internationally with "soundtracks in French, Spanish, Russian, and Chinese" (16).

Capra extensively used captured or confiscated enemy newsreels, propaganda films, commercial moves, etc., to create what would become the unspoken motto of the documentaries: "Let the enemy prove to our soldiers the enormity of his cause—and the justness of ours. […] Let our boys hear the Nazis and the Japs shout their own claims of master-race crud and our fighting men will know why they are in uniform" (16). In the first film of the series, Prelude to War, the theme was that the two worlds, the American and the Japanese, were locked in mortal combat, the free world versus the slave. One scene depicted the Japanese army marching down Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC. Later, such free-floating imagery would be turned against other enemies. Not one Axis nation was featured more than another in Capra's films. What was most conspicuous, however, were the black and white representations of the Allied powers and the Axis powers.

Capra had produced one film that was removed from circulation in 1945 called Know Your Enemy—Japan, because by the time the film was released, the atomic bomb had already fallen on Nagasaki. However, the film is now seen as a masterpiece of propaganda: "[I]t has been praised by cinema buffs as technical tour de force, the corning accomplishment of over three years spent refining the propagandist's craft" (18). One of the reasons the film took so long to create was the controversy about whether the film should focus on the Japanese people or their leaders. Some draft scripts were tossed aside by the War Department as possibly evoking "too much sympathy for the Jap people" (19), the focus being on a normal populace victimized by its leaders. In the end, the greatest emphasis was placed on Japanese obedience, homogeneity, and their sense of a divine mission.

Japanese history was used to illustrate most of clichés held by the English-speaking world for the Japanese, e.g., their samurai past, disciplined killers ready to give their lives for their lords. The Japanese mind was said to be encaged within the Shinto religion, which was being perverted by the modern state and their belief in the divinity of the Emperor. The failed invasion by the Japanese of the Korean peninsula in the late 16th century was used as evidence of the innate Japanese desire for conquest. In critiquing the period when Japan opened itself to Western trade (albeit by force from United States naval officer, Commodore Mathew Perry), the film interprets this time of Japan’s political change—movement toward parliamentarianism and away from the feudal system—as a "cruel joke" (21), citing that militarists still controlled Japan. It was highlighted that "the individual was thoroughly subordinated to the state" (21). The concluding frames to the film, however, convey that the end of the war is near, depicting a vast American fleet closing in on the Japanese mainland.

On the Japanese side, the government supplied a 70-page booklet, a major work to act as a blueprint for the Japanese soldier in understanding why he was fighting. The booklet, entitled Read This And The War Is Won, was composed before the Japanese invasion of Southeast Asia. The booklet explained "not only how to behave in a tropical environment, but also why the Japanese had to fight there" (23). Another piece of Japanese produced propaganda entitled The Way of the Subject was designed for the general population but contained similar contextual elements for the one written for the soldiers. In the Way of the Subject, it was the non-Axis Western powers that were bent on global conquest and domination, something that they had been engaged in with much success for centuries. Similar to the Western understanding of Japanese history, the Japanese viewed Western history as replete with "destructive values, exploitative practices, and brutal wars" (24). Thus, it was Japan that was engaging in a war to liberate "East Asia from white invasion and oppression. In the final analysis, this was a 'struggle between races'" (25). It wasn't only the history of colonialism in Asia that the Japanese evoked when informing their peoples and soldiers about the enemy; the Ministry of Education posed two simple yet rhetorical questions that remained effective through to the end of the war: "How were American Indians treated? What about African Negroes?" (26).

Both sides' propaganda can be seen as a mixture of "truths, half-truths, and empty spaces" (27). By reflecting their own beliefs of themselves in how they viewed the other side, the propaganda reveals more about the nations themselves than it does about their intended subject. For example, the depiction of the Japanese as militaristic, repressive, and irrational was juxtaposed to the Anglo-Americans’ belief that they themselves were the opposite: "fundamentally peaceful, democratic, and rational" (29). Such ideas, of course, did not correspond to reality. A good example of this is found by analyzing The Way of the Subject. Despite the rhetoric of the Japanese being a homogenous and harmonious society, they were not; the rhetoric proves how the Japanese ruling classes were trying to convince the people that they were or should become so. Thus, many of the ideas Westerns held about the Japanese were exactly the things the ruling class themselves wanted the Japanese people to be.

Ultimately, it was the desire for each side's propagandists to illustrate the other as being completely different, in a negative way, to themselves, and "on neither side did the propagandists offer much ground for the recognition of common traits, comparable acts, or comparable aspirations" (32).

American historian Allan Nevins, who won the Pulitzer Prize twice, stated in an essay about WWII that "no foe has been so detested as were the Japanese" (33). The closest thing that came near it, he argued, were the Indian Wars. No one at the time would have argued with that. In fact, commentators routinely stated that the Japanese were more hated than the Germans simply because the Japanese "were uncommonly treacherous and savage" (33). From this arises the question: Why were the Japanese seen as being more treacherous than the Germans? From the Japanese point-of-view, the Allies were the true barbarians of the modern world.

There was a racial component inherent in the way the Allies viewed the Japanese. Even though Nazi atrocities were reported, there was still the distinction of “good and bad Germans” (34). This classification did not exist for the Japanese. Also, even though scholars of the Holocaust have been able to repeatedly demonstrate that evidence of the extermination of the Jews was at hand, the Allies downplayed the information until the camps were liberated after the war. For the Japanese, however, the suffering of the Allies at their hands was personal rather than felt through the tribulations of a population not their own. The Japanese had humiliated the Anglo-Americans repeatedly in the Pacific theater in the early years, and this played a part in their being more detested. Pearl Harbor came to symbolize Japanese treachery.

Underestimation of the enemy existed on both sides. The Japanese believed the Americans would be too soft to fight back and that after such a stunning defeat at Pearl Harbor, they would sue for a peaceful settlement. However, the exact opposite occurred, and the American thirst for revenge bordered on the genocidal. It was difficult for the Americans to believe the Japanese capable of such an attack. Afterward, rumors and theories abounded that the Germans orchestrated the attack.

Each side condemned the other for atrocities, and by the end of the war, many Allied observers concluded that the meaning of what an atrocity was had become a moot point in a war filled with savagery and wholesale slaughter.