THE MEDIA AND JAPANESE AMERICAN STEREOTYPING
In contrast to ideologies of American communities being portrayed as great melting pots, Americans have historically aligned themselves along racial and ethnic divisions. This has flourished in stereotypes of practically all non-majority members in the media. Japanese-Americans have been no exception. Characterizations of Japanese-Americans in the media often fail to make distinctions between Japanese, Japanese-Americans, Asians and Asian Americans. Consequently, attitudes towards Japanese-Americans have been heavily influenced by portrayals of all Asians.
The first Asians to come to America in significant numbers were Chinese laborers. The early depictions emphasized slant-eyes, buckteeth and yellow skin. This representation reinforced the notion of “otherness.” Anti-Asian bias was a major reason behind immigration exclusion acts directed first at he Chinese, then the Japanese. Rather than the media acknowledging the difference between Asian cultures, American representation of Asians often borrowed indiscriminately from all cultures. All the dozens of Asians and Pacific Island cultures are lumped together into one homogeneous group identity. Even the Korean and Vietnamese women in the late 1950’s-70’s were commonly called “Mama San” despite the Japanese American origins of the term. Characterizations of Japanese-Americans (and all Asians) in the media of the 1920’s and 1930’s as “vicious, rat-like sneaks, part of a world-wide “yellow peril” appears to have been one of the reasons for the internment.
Amy Kashiwabara in “Vanishing Son: The Appearance, Disappearance, and Assimilation of the Asian-American Male in American Mainstream Media (1996) states “The visceral hatred of the Japanese inevitably tapped into yellow peril sentiments before the turn of the century which had been directed mainly against the Chinese”. In early movies, attached to the assignation of being Japanese came the implication of duplicity, violence and untrustworthiness appearing as Japanese traits, thus, sending the message that Asians, particularly Japanese men could not be trusted, no matter how Americanized they seem. This furthered the notion that Japanese-American men were even more dangerous than unassimilated ones because they could deceive people into trusting them. Persistent in early media was the idea of the diabolical Japanese that continually plotted the destruction of America in general and white women in particular. The 1946 film, “The Yellow Menace,” showed attempted Japanese domination. The 1940’s images on film were rife with scenes of Japanese torturing and abusing white people. The majority of Americans in the ‘40’s were intimately introduced to the Japanese in the context of war and violence at the movies, newspaper editorials, propaganda posters (*scan example) and later on in the 1950’s on television. Films from 1942 included “Prisoner of Japan,” “Remember Pearl Harbor,” and “ Secret Agent of Japan.”
The stereotype created of Japanese men as military foes combined nationalism with racism. Since their physique has always been considered small, the danger from the Japanese was perceived to come from the Japanese Superman, possessed of uncanny discipline and fighting skills. Films, often punctuated with racial slurs, were quick to paint Japan’s treachery in battle, its brutality, and disregard for international rules of war. These stereotypic images carried over to Japanese-American men outside the context of the war. Pearl Harbor and the war years enabled Hollywood to revive the yellow peril characteristics and the fear of miscegenation. By the end of the war, Americans had learned to associate brutality and treachery with a Japanese face.
Caricatures of the Japanese were found in the cartoons of the period. Warner Brothers, Looney Tunes, created a duck version of “The Jap” who had glasses, buckteeth and cries “oh sorry, sorry, sorry” (with slurred r’s). They also created “Tokio Jokio” and “Bugs Bunny Nips the Nips.” The buck-toothed Japanese became a standard cartoon figure. Max Fleischer created a Popeye the Sailor cartoon entitled “You’re A Sap, Mr. Jap”, which is a song Popeye sings over and over. This cartoon showed the Japanese deceiving Popeye, causing him to cry out righteously: “Double-Crossing Japansies”
The portrayal of women during this period fared no better. The common stereotype was the “Dragon Lady,” “Geisha Girl,” and “Tokyo Rose,” who had a penchant for White men, dressed in tight dresses, bodies on display. They are sly, cruel, exotic sex objects, or subservient and hardworking. Shirley Geok-Lin Lim, in “Feminist and Ethnic Literary Theories in Asian American Literature” comments on how “the image of Japanese-American women usually remains on the margin, invisible, mute or constrained to limited stereotypic images of passion.” The media played on these stereotypes to sell misleading images to audiences, who wanted entertainment that was different from their normal lives and were willing to see and accept anything exotic. The stereotypes of Japanese and Japanese-American women were pervasive in the media because the media perpetuated these stereotypes through their portrayal of Japanese and Japanese-Americans. Unfortunately, for some, they still carry over in the perceptions of the American people.
Japanese-Americans are challenging the stereotypical images of the past and have made a voice for themselves in American society. They are fighting against the persistent racism and sexism against themselves by establishing a unifying identity as Americans and monitoring the media’s representations. Although ethnic stereotyping is less common today than it was in the last century, it persists. The images are not so obviously offensive; consequently, many people do not recognize them as stereotypes.
