How much evidence exists to support the idea that Americans were hugely racist to the Japanese from around the 1940's? any suggestions on books specifying in this area?
The best example that comes to mind is this article from a Time Magazine article back during the early stages of the war, titled "How to Tell Your Friends from the Japs."
Aside from being hilarious, note how all the descriptions of Japanese people are negative, from "Chinese, not as hairy as Japanese," to having facial expressions that are "more positive, dogmatic, arrogant." Even the pictures convey a certain view: the Chinese are portrayed as a happy teacher and a content peasant: the Japanese as an angry soldier and a condescending samurai.
Also note in the document that the Chinese correspondent wore a badge saying "Chinese Reporter-NOT Japanese-Please," which should give you an idea that Chinese people really preferred to not undergo the same sorts of trials the Japanese were at the time.
Perhaps the biggest irony is that just a few years before, the portrayals of Japanese and Chinese people were reversed.
Certainly many US citizens were racist during WWII. I would be careful describing an entire nation as racist, as there would rarely be an entire nation that held exactly the same opinion on a topic. There are other experts here that I hope will chime in with their own explanations of this topic, but one doesn’t need to look very hard to find evidence of racism on a large scale during WWII. I could point to any number of books on WWII in which the topic is mentioned. The discussions of racism in Robert Leckie’s books is somewhat interesting. His one volume history of the war Delivered from Evil takes a broad overview of the subject, while his memoir Helmet for My Pillow is a much more intimate portrayal of his own feelings during the war.
The piece of evidence I would like to submit is a bit different, though. Warning: the below video is highly offensive. It contains racial stereotypes and offensive images, as well as offensive language. Do not watch this at work, near children, or in any other sensitive environment. Here is a link to Tokio Jokio, a Looney Tunes cartoon from 1943. This is one of a large number of propaganda films released during the war. In it, the Japanese are depicted as being short, nearsighted, having buck teeth, fawningly polite, and technologically inept. The ‘advanced air raid siren’ is two Japanese poking each other with sharp objects and howling. The ‘minesweeper’ is a Japanese sailor on the front of a ship, using a broom to ‘sweep’ for mines. The manned torpedo pilot screams to be let out of his machine. Throughout, the Japanese are mocked and derided. Hitler, Mussolini, and Lord Haw Haw are also lampooned. While the Rudolph Hess joke of sending a postcard from prison while saying ‘wish you were here’ is moderately humorous, the entire cartoon is highly offensive.
This is just one example. There are thousands more. It is a shameful part of US history.
As you are also looking for a book suggestion: War Without Mercy by John Dower. I used it as a text book for a class some years ago about the use of "The Other" to define the in group, and it is a really facinating look at the racial undertones of the war in the Pacific. If this is a topic you want to read about, I can't think of a better place to start.
To quote Amazon's blurb:
War Without Mercy has been hailed by The New York Times as “one of the most original and important books to be written about the war between Japan and the United States.” In this monumental history, Professor John Dower reveals a hidden, explosive dimension of the Pacific War—race—while writing what John Toland has called “a landmark book . . . a powerful, moving, and evenhanded history that is sorely needed in both America and Japan.”
Drawing on American and Japanese songs, slogans, cartoons, propaganda films, secret reports, and a wealth of other documents of the time, Dower opens up a whole new way of looking at that bitter struggle of four and a half decades ago and its ramifications in our lives today. As Edwin O. Reischauer, former ambassador to Japan, has pointed out, this book offers “a lesson that the postwar generations need most . . . with eloquence, crushing detail, and power.”
