Jap hunts: Difference between revisions

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[[Image:JapaneseAmericanGrocer1942.jpg|thumb|right|250px|A Japanese American unfurled this banner the day after the Pearl Harbor attack. This [[Dorothea Lange]] photograph was taken in March 1942, just prior to the [[Japanese American internment]].]]

After the [[Pearl Harbor]] attacks, much anti-Japanese paraphernalia and propaganda surfaced in the United States. An example of this was the so-called "'''Jap hunting''' license", a faux-official document, button or medallion that purported to authorize "open season" on "hunting" the Japanese, despite the fact that over a quarter of a million Americans at that time were of Japanese origin. Some reminded holders that there was "no limit" on the number of "Japs" they could "hunt or trap". These "licenses" often characterized Japanese people as sub-human. Many of the “Jap Hunting Licenses”, for example, depicted the Japanese in animalistic fashion.<ref>Boggs, Jeremy. Open Season. 06 Mar. 2004. 15 Oct. 2007. <http://clioweb.org/openseason/index.html> </ref>

These documents may illustrate the extreme anger which many Americans felt following the Imperial Japanese [[sneak attack]] on Pearl Harbor; the Imperial Japanese-ordered [[Bataan Death March]] of U.S. and Filipino POWs, in which many died; the utter disregard that the Imperial Japanese showed towards the Western practices of treating prisoners of war humanely; the widely-documented abuse of captured Allied female nationals as "[[comfort women]]", or sexual slaves, by the Imperial Japanese Army; the use of Allied POWs as slave labor on starvation rations; and the periodic reports of Imperial Japanese atrocities upon the Chinese, such as the [[Rape of Nanking]], or acts such as the Imperial Japanese Army, including the [[contest to kill 100 people using a sword]] in China, or the actions of [[Unit 731]], including the [[vivisection]] of Allied POWs. This anger was certainly accelerated by the racism of the time, but arguably had a basis in Imperial Japanese actions, which were ethically, by Western standards, massively depraved and few steps above utter barbarism.

Against Japan, Americans often saw themselves fighting a "nameless mass of vermin."[http://books.google.se/books?id=pDW4YNkmvZYC&pg=PA98&lpg=PA98&dq=%22nameless+mass+of+vermin%22&source=web&ots=z3fNAPTwNn&sig=arJYZRC2cysKsDBkorfWR5vgZXg&hl=sv#PPA98,M1]