Racism in the Pacific Theater of World War II

It is said that the winners of conflict write the history. As a result, many of the acts and views of the winner are recast as the correct way to live. Racism and bloody atrocities are overlooked in the newly written history. In the Pacific Theater of World War II, the conflict between Americans and Japanese was more than just bloodshed and bombings it was also about race and social superiority.

In truth, one could say that the Pacific War was little more than a slugging match over which race and culture was superior. Americans held racist views of all Asians for decades, but these views became more focused on the Japanese as news of Japan's war with China began to filter through to the United States. America's hatred for the Japanese came full circle with the surprise attack on the American naval base at Pearl Harbor, Hawaii. The Japanese had long held a belief that they were the socially and racially superior race, a sort of "Asian Aryan" viewpoint.

The Japanese saw themselves as the saviors and leaders of Asia. The "Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere" was even engineered for the purpose of uniting the weak and inferior Asian ethnic groups under Japan's rule. The Japanese even categorized the various Asian races as "master races" and "servant races", with the Japanese as the superior "Yamato race". The racism found throughout the Pacific War was demonstrated not only in armies battling across the Pacific, but also in the home fronts of both the United States and Japan where propaganda cast the opposition as evil and sub-human. The Pacific War was a war where racism's hate finally had great weapons of death and destruction to deliver its message.

When the United States entered the Second World War it was forced to fight a war on two fronts. On one side was Hitler's Third Reich and on the other was the Empire of Japan. President Roosevelt reached an agreement to help the beleaguered Britain, so defeating Germany became the top priority, however the American public felt differently as quoted by author Michael Adams, "At the time, many Americans didn't fully understand the threat of Hitler; they wanted to beat the Japanese first because they hated them more (a 1942 poll found that 66 percent of Americans wanting the Pacific to have priority).[1]" The American people felt that Japan had committed an act of cowardice and terror by attacking Pearl Harbor and wanted to see the "Yellow Peril" eliminated completely. American soldiers would frequently receive letters from home asking them how many "Japs" they had killed so far and to "Kill another for the team". The American media reinforced this further and even created several noted stereotypes of the Japanese. Prior to Pearl Harbor the media had stereotyped the Japanese as subhuman and ape like, following Pearl Harbor and Japan's rapid expansion across the Pacific the apish sub-human Japanese became supermen. This is highly noted by author Michael Adams,

"Never characterized as simply human by their enemy, the Japanese went from being seen as subhuman before December 1941 to being seen as superhuman immediately after. In 1942, American and British Commonwealth troops collapsed before relatively small Japanese forces, which had acquired an almost supernatural status."[2]

When this "superhuman" Japanese stereotype is shown in propaganda posters he is usually shown to be a form of ogre and, as with most propaganda art from the Second World War, his face is based on that of then Japanese Prime Minister Hideki Tojo with an over-emphasis on his squinting eyes and the addition of buckteeth. The American public soaked up these images coming to believe the posters and films to be honest fact. This in turn brought further hatred down upon Japanese-Americans who were just as loyal to the U.S. as any other American; however the media failed to see it that way.

When it is said that American racism for the Japanese after Pearl Harbor covers all people of Japanese descent, it means just that. In the months following the events of Pearl Harbor and America's entry into the Second World War the American public rained down hatred on the Japanese-American population living along the US west coast, but the public was unable to use violence as a means of hatred by the American government. The US Government decided early on to move the population to internment camps under guard from the US military. Close to one hundred and ten thousand Japanese-Americans were uprooted by the government and transported to camps where they remained for the rest of the war.

While the camps were often cramped and not very healthy they were not a form of the concentration camps being used by the Nazi's to exterminate non-Aryan ethnic groups. The internment camps that the Japanese-Americans were transported were merely meant to prevent any of them who were loyal to Japan from spying on American cities and military buildup. These camps also ironically were able to prevent the general American public from taking violent action against the Japanese-Americans, as the sweeps and internment had taken effect so quickly that the violent fallout of Pearl Harbor was limited. However the Japanese-Americans were also denied citizenship and had their property seized. The Supreme Court even upheld the government seizure of Japanese-American property in 1944. The "melting pot" of American culture had rejected the Japanese-Americans and shunned their existence.

Japanese culture was a world away from that of America, yet in the Second World War the two shared a common trait. In America the Japanese were degraded as subhuman or superhuman. In Japan, Americans and Europeans were cast as devils and demons that existed to destroy the Japanese people. The Japanese government controlled media helped to reinforce this view in younger generations through the use of age-old nursery rhythms and folktales that had some of the words changed. The Japanese people believed this demonizing of Americans even further when US forces began to terror bomb Japanese cities during the war. The Japanese believed that they were the pure "master race" of Asia and as such the Japanese government and people continuously believed that they were the protectors and leaders of Asia. The Japanese refer to themselves as the "Yamato race", this most likely comes from the name of the dominant Japanese ethnic group which is also Yamato. The Japanese people relied on the government for information and since the government controlled the media, the civilian population was only told about Japanese victories in the war and the defeats and atrocities of their enemies. However not all Japanese supported the war, a number of well-known authors and politicians among others vehemently opposed the war. However these citizens were unable to counter their government's stance due the military's control of the government and also the severe penalties that were brought down on those who openly criticized the Japanese leadership and/or the war.

The American soldiers, sailors and airmen who fought in the Pacific War were spurned on into the fight with "a rage bordering on genocidal"[3]. American soldiers frequently shot surrendering Japanese soldiers and American airmen admitted to gunning down Japanese pilots who had bailed out of their aircraft and were hanging helplessly in their parachutes. Servicemen would frequently boil the heads of dead Japanese soldiers and send it to their families back home in the states as souvenirs. Japanese fingers, gentiles and ears were frequently cut off and dried as a keepsake by American servicemen. American soldiers would urinate in the mouths of dead Japanese and also play games tossing a coin or other item into an open Japanese skull. American soldiers would frequently use their rifle butts to remove the gold fillings from both living and dead Japanese soldier's teeth to the horror of the few Japanese-American servicemen who served in the Pacific as translators. Many Japanese soldiers saw these acts as further proof of their enemies being demons, though ironically Japanese soldiers had committed many of these same acts against Allied forces early on in the war. Japan was, as many believed, reaping what it had sowed.

American racism and hatred for the Japanese had become so great that many slogans and beliefs held by servicemen and even their commanding officers were touted as the finest ever thought of. Perhaps the most famous of these slogans is that of Admiral "Bull" Halsey who not only declared that by the end of the war Japanese would only be spoken in Hell but would also frequently exclaim, "Kill Japs, Kill Japs, Kill more Japs!"[4] This belief was almost universal in the American military during the Pacific war. In 1943 a poll done by the U.S. Army found that almost half of all soldiers believed that it would be necessary to kill off all Japanese before a lasting peace could be achieved.[5]

The Japanese military probably committed more acts of racism in the Pacific war than any other group. The Japanese military was renowned for their indiscriminate acts of butchering innocent women and children during their campaign in China, as well as numerous acts of rape and mass execution. Whatever atrocities committed by American servicemen during the Pacific war were, it was an almost guaranteed fact that the Japanese had committed the act in at least dozen much more horrific ways.

The Japanese military is also credited with, as put by author John Dower, "...transported prisoners in densely packed "hell ships," starved and beat their prisoners, performed vivisections on them, emasculated them, decapitated them, crucified them, burned or buried them alive, nailed them to trees, used them for bayonet practice."[6] What is probably considered to be one of the greatest acts of hatred and racism toward Allied POWs is the Bataan Death March.

Following the surrender of the U.S. Army fortress of Corregidor, which was the last bastion of resistance to the invading Japanese army in the Philippines, the surviving American and Filipino soldiers were forced to march approximately one hundred miles to a prisoner-of-war camp. During this march many of the POWs died from exhaustion, malaria and from a lack of food and water. Japanese troops executed anybody who fell behind and in some cases they would bayonet or shoot one of prisoners without any reason other than not being Japanese. Nearly ten thousand American and Filipino troops died on the death march.

The Japanese military probably believed in the idea of the Japanese people as the "master race" of Asia too literally. The list and details of the racist atrocities committed by Japanese troops is more terrifying and horrific than every single horror film ever conceived of in the history of cinema combined. The majority of these atrocities were committed against the Chinese whom the Japanese viewed to be a subhuman and unworthy race. The worst case of racist violence recorded during this time period would no doubt be a tie between the Rape of Nanking and the atrocious acts of "science" committed by the covert Unit 731.

Nanking, (also spelled Nanjing), was the capitol of nationalist China. Japanese forces captured it in December of 1937 during the Second Sino-Japanese War, (this conflict would spill over into the Second World War). Shortly after its capture Japanese troops began to run rampant through out the city brutally raping and killing Chinese citizens wherever they went. Women of all ages from young children to eighty-year-old grandmothers were regularly stopped and gang raped, sometimes repeatedly, by Japanese soldiers. After raping them the Japanese soldiers would shoot or bayonet their victims so they wouldn't be able to tell anybody. Many more Chinese women were rounded up to serve as "comfort women" in Army brothels. Chinese men of all ages were rounded up and executed in a variety of ways, usually on the pretext that they were Chinese soldiers or simply just because they were Chinese.

The Chinese men were buried alive, shot en masse, used for bayonet practice, nailed to posts and run over with a tank, set on fire, and in one instance they were targets of a contest between two Japanese officers to see who could behead one hundred Chinese men with his katana first, the Japanese media called it a "friendly contest". Nearly three hundred thousand Chinese were victims of this racist and unprovoked act. The Chinese survivors were cared for in an International zone under the charge of a German Nazi and other Westerners who were living in Nanking at the time. However, this did not stop Japanese soldiers from kidnapping hundreds from the zone as well as continuously harassing and nearly killing him and the other Westerners who were in charge of the safe zone. The Japanese soldiers only saw people who were not Japanese and were therefore inferior to them.

Aside from the continuous killing and raping that the Japanese rained down on the "inferior" Chinese people would be the experimentation done by the notorious Unit 731. Unit 731 was a biological warfare research unit located in Japanese held Manchuria outside of the city of Harbin. Japan was not a party to the Geneva Convention ban on biological warfare and as a result was technically not subject to international law. Japanese military leaders figured that if bio warfare was being banned, then it must make for a good weapon. Almost nine thousand Chinese soldiers and civilians would die from laboratory tests done by Unit 731, which was disguised as a water purification unit, at its Harbin compound. The Japanese apparently saw the Chinese as a disposable race for these purposes. Unit 731 subjected their prisoners to bubonic plague, cholera, anthrax, and many other diseases.[7] Unit 731 also did many medical experiments on their Chinese subjects as well. Many were shot, frozen, burned, and had their bones broken just to see the kind of damage that could be done to the human body and what the body's reaction to this damage was. Some were autopsied while still alive in an attempt to see the body's organs at work. Unit 731 also released disease-infested animals into Chinese villages and cities and also poisoned wells. Chinese prisoners were even made to march about in fields contaminated with poison as Japanese scientists and military leaders observed the effects. The list of atrocities committed by Unit 731 against the Chinese goes on and on.

Racism and war, hatred and war, racism and hatred; these themes go hand-in-hand throughout history. In the Second World War these themes defined what the Pacific theater was. The atrocities committed by both Japanese and American servicemen were done for practically the same reason. The Japanese believed that they were superior to all Asian races and to the Western imperial powers in Asia. Americans believed the white man to be superior to all colored races but most importantly to the "monkey men", the Japanese. The home fronts of both the United States and Japan illustrate how the government propaganda machine worked to cast the enemy culture as one of barbarians that threatened the peaceful well being of the other.

Japanese soldiers brutally slaughtered Asian natives that they believed to be inferior and treated enemy POWs with contempt and brutality. American forces were much more tolerant and kinder towards the "inferior" Asian races but treated Japanese POW's in the same manner as the Japanese had treated western POW's. The Pacific war is no different from that of the conflict in Europe where the Nazi belief in the superiority of the Aryan race led them to attempt to overrun most of Europe.

Russian and German forces along the Eastern front of the European theater also committed a number of the same atrocities committed in the Pacific war. Racism exists as a part of war and one will not exist without the other. The Pacific War is a prime example of how rampant racism contributed to the unnecessary and pointless deaths of many hundred thousand Chinese, Filipino, American, European, and Japanese citizens. Many of these dead people might or might not have been innocent, but their deaths were all for the same pointless reason.

[1] Michael C. C. Adams "The Best War Ever: America and World War II" Ch 1 pg. 6

[2] Michael C. C. Adams "The Best War Ever: America and World War II" Ch. 2 pg. 61

[3] John W. Dower "War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War" Ch..3 pg 36

[4] John W. Dower "War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War" Ch. 3 pg. 36

[5] John W. Dower "War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War" Ch. 3 pg 53

[6] John W. Dower "War Without Mercy: Race & Power in the Pacific War" Ch. 3 pg. 52

[7]http://www.ww2pacific.com/unit731.html