Introduction

Soon after the attack on Pearl Harbor, a variety of “Jap Hunting Licenses” emerged and circulated throughout the United States. The licenses declared it “open season” on hunting the Japanese in the United States and abroad. Many of them reminded holders that there was “no limit” on the number of “Japs” they could “hunt or trap.”

The increase in anti-Japanese propoganda—in comic strips, animated cartoons, posters, and magazines—makes it apparent that “open season” had indeed been declared on anyone of Japanese descent. Thus, while the U.S. fought a war with Japan in the Pacific, the U.S. also fought a war on the homefront against anyone who “looked” or “acted” Japanese. The ammunition for the homefront war, however, involved distorted images and broad, unabashedly racist characterizations.

This website contains materials from American popular culture that depicted the Japanese in a variety of racist and derragorty ways. The site is divided into five sections. Background provides a brief discussion of the geneaology of anti-Japanese sentiment and its emergence from other contexts. Uncivilized includes materials that characterize the Japanese as uncivilized hoardes. Animals illustrates the ways in which the Japanese were depicted as a variety of animals. Predators discusses how propaganda depicted the Japanese as sexual predators preying on defenseless white women. Finally, Curiosities takes a look at how the Japanese were seen as scientific oddities to be examined and documented by Western science.