themselves as “Rodent Exterminator”t0 and actual contact with the enemy as “clearing out a rat’s nest.”11 At home on the West Coast shop windows contained signs announcing the sale of fictitious “Jap Hunting Licenses”12 The Japanese became simply “a nameless mass of vermin.”13Overall the child and simian metaphors, both intended as a reflection on moral stature, possessed a quality of flexibility as wartime conditions changed. The prewar image of a backward, technologically unadvanced nation was shattered by events in 1941. Pearl Harbor and other early Japanese successes forced the Americans to re-evaluate their view of Japan as simply less successful humans. The representation of Japan as a nation of under-achievers could no longer be applied in wholesale fashion and American interpretations adapted accordingly. The child ‘grew up,’ at least in physical, if not moral terms. The image used on the cover of this paper is a prime example. The Japan presented here is a far cry from that of Images 4 and 5. The roles have been reversed; it is now the US that must resort to trivial and ineffectual efforts as suggested by the caption.This increase in corporal dimensions was not associated with an increased or improved morality. In Image 10 Geisle may have dropped the simian metaphor but Japan is still presented as a monster. In deed, a Japan that is far more dangerous than that shown in Image 9. It is interesting to note that after Japan dispelled the myth of incapability that the American view allowed for simultaneously conflicting views. On the one hand the Japanese had become super-human, larger than life. On the other, they were shown as being less civilised in light of their military and technological prowess.The wartime perceptions of Japan that were held by Americans were rooted in pre-existing themes such as the “Yellow Peril” and observations of the visual d...
