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 outrage was accelerated by the racism of the time.

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]