1941 - Pearl Harbor & Anti-Japanese Propaganda in Popular Culture

Ga Rab Yoon

On a quiet Sunday morning of December 7, 1941, Japanese aircrafts flew over Pearl Harbor in Hawaii, a naval base of the United States. Soon, bombs dropped and the United States realized that Japan has attacked them. This surprise attack Japan conducted with about 353 aircrafts successfully inflicted some damage on the United States Navy; it was a part of Japan’s ambitious imperialist plans to control the pacific and Asia. However, it also led to the United State’s military involvement in the World War II, and also triggered the beginning of a nation-wide Anti-Asian sentiment—especially directed towards Japanese Americans who were living in the US.

Americans were shocked by the surprise attack. The shock however, soon turned into anger. Then, this anger was effectively redirected to Japanese Americans who had nothing to do with the attack, by propagandists. Japanese Americans had to endure unjust treatment from the government and also hatred from fellow Americans, which was often caused and amplified by American anti-Japanese propaganda that were employed in various forms of popular culture.

One form of propaganda was flyers that were made and distributed to people. “Jap hunting” was a popular term used at the time to express hatred of Japanese Americans, and fake licenses called “Jap Hunting License” also appeared, which urged people to put their hatred into action by hunting down Japanese Americans.

Posters were also used by anti-Japanese propagandists. In the posters, Japanese Americans were depicted as animal-like, and sub-human entities, or their facial features were exaggerated in order to insult them. A famous example of anti-Japanese propaganda posters is the Tokio Kid posters. These posters contained a villainous Japanese character with a treacherous grin on his face, expressing his happiness at things such as American workers wasting resources and slacking off.

Films, or movies were also used for propaganda by the government. Attack on Pearl Harbor also resulted in Japanese American internment, which was authorized by Executive Order 9066, signed by Franklin Delano Roosevelt on February 19, 1942. Executive order 9066 was to “exclude” any person from a military area, but it was primarily used against Americans of Japanese descent under the suspicion that they can be related to the wartime enemy. They were moved to certain locations called “War Relocation camps,” where they were locked up. About 70,000 Japanese Americans and 40,000 Japanese immigrants were interned in 1942. In order to legitimize internment, and for the ease of executing the process, movies such as Japanese relocation (1943), and A challenge to democracy (1944) were produced. In the films, Japanese Americans were labeled "potentially dangerous," and internment camps were portrayed as a positive place where safety, health, and opportunities were guaranteed. Even though they were films produced for the sake of Japanese Americans on the surface, it was obviously nothing more than a hypocritical anti-Japanese propaganda film which actually argued for sending off and isolating the "Japs."

"Some among [Japanese Americans] were Potentially dangerous..." (Japanese Relocation)

The release of the movie Pearl Harbor in 2001 caused many Japanese Americans to fear another outbreak of anti-Japanese sentiment because the movie was about the Pearl Harbor bombing, which was basically the starting point of anti-Japanese sentiment. Since the movie's content was very “patriotic” in nature, their fear was understandable. Personally, I saw the movie too, when it was released in the past. Fortunately, I don't remember Japanese people being portrayed like the Tokio Kid in the movie, nor did I see any occurrence of hate crimes against Japanese Americans that after the release. However, the fact that they're still afraid of a backlash after more than 50 years from the internment clearly shows how false propaganda and unjust government actions can leave such deep mental scars in the hearts and minds of people.

1948 - Sammy Lee - Breaking Stereotypes of Asian Athletes

Ga Rab Yoon

Sports is a large part of the popular culture, and it is also a powerful form of popular culture in many ways. It is rare to find someone who does not participate in, read, see, or hear about sports. We often go crazy about a sport star, and often identify ourselves with the star. Sometimes people even look like they’re going to a war, when they are cheering their favorite teams. Like this, sports is closely related to our everyday lives, and its power to spread ideas in popular culture is immeasurable. There is one individual who used the power of sports to prove to the people of the United States that stereotypes of Asian athletes are false—Sammy Lee.

Sammy Lee, or Dr. Samuel Lee was a Korean American, born on August 1, 1920 in Fresno, California. As a kid, he had an idea that he wanted to compete in the Olympics, but didn’t know in what category. When he found out that he wanted to do diving, he gained full support of his parents, but only under the condition that he will study and become a doctor. He was able to accomplish both. He became a doctor of medicine, earning his degree from USC in 1947 and back in 1942, he was already the first non-white diver to win the National Diving Championships held in the US. However, it wasn’t enough; he still wanted to compete and win in the Olympic games.


However, he had many troubles along the way to compete in the Olympics, because 1940 and 1944 Olympics were canceled due to World War II. Overall, it took him 16 years to compete in the Olympics, but he finally did it. In 1948, Lee won his gold medal in the 1948 Olympic game in London. He was the first Asian American to win a gold medal for the United States. Later in 1952 Olympics, he won again, making him the first diver to win two gold medals in a row.


Lee’s achievement was ground-breaking and also stereotype-breaking. The typical stereotype of an Asian was that they cannot do good in sports—that they’re simply incompetent athletes by nature. Lee also talks about this issue in one of his interviews, as he says that “Sixty years ago, they said you had to be Caucasian, slender and tall to be a diver…" However, Lee’s gold medals, proved this stereotype to be a false idea, twice in a row. The best part was that it was an Olympic game, which must have been broadcasted to the whole nation. It must have helped to debunk the stereotypes of Asian American athletes in many American minds.

Another significance of Lee’s achievement is that he also helped Americans to acknowledge Asian Americans as genuine, or authentic Americans, too—that they are not forever-foreign, or alien. Logically, Lee had to be an American who won the gold medal for America, not an foreign/alien Asian. If Americans suggested the otherwise, the gold medal would have been someone else’s. Plus, I am sure that many Americans felt very happy at the time, and I think Lee was able to also emotionally unite Asian Americans and the rest of the Americans under the same roof, under happiness.

Lastly, he also educated the ignorant public about the difference in the Asian countries. He says that “other people didn't know what a Korean was (…) they said, ‘You were [either] Japanese, [or] Chinese.’” He “wanted to show my fellow Americans that we, Koreans, had a place in American society.” In fact, many Korean Americans were proud, and they certainly felt like they were more acknowledged when he won the gold medals. He was a source of hope and encouragement for not only Korean Americans but other Asian Americans as well. As I am a Korean myself, I too, feel the same way.

1952 - Sei Fuiji v. California - A Journey to Land Ownership

Ga Rab Yoon

Law is perhaps the most powerful form of popular culture that impacts us in our everyday lives. Most of the times, laws are made based on the collective ideas or norms of the society. However, the sad truth is that these laws are not always the most ethical, or correct laws. It shows that majority is not always right. In fact, it clearly shows how mass thinking can be a cancerous phenomenon in our society. Back in the days, white supremacy was the norm, as the whites were the majority and others were minorities. Laws were made based on these majority racist ideas that one group of race is superior than the other. Asians were also a victim of this idea, and one type of these racist laws that caused hardships to Asian immigrants were Alien Land Laws.

Until in the 1950s, In California, as well as in many other states, immigrants of Asian ancestry could not own land and property. It was because of Alien Land Laws. The first law of the kind was the California Alien Land Law of 1913, which prohibited “aliens ineligible for citizenship” from ownership of property or lands. Asian Americans were of course, ineligible aliens, and every Asian non-citizens were affected by this law. It was difficult, if not impossible, to be eligible to naturalize and become a citizen, because racial prejudice was common at the time. Usually, it was free white people, who were really eligible for naturalization. These types of laws didn’t stop in California—other states soon adopted similar laws to their states soon after. Of course, there were many tries to overturn this decision, such as Terrace v. Thompson (1923), Porterfield v. Webb (1923), Webb v. O’Brien (1923), Frick v. Webb (1923), and Cockrill v. California (1925). However, all these tries failed.

Overturning the Alien Land laws were not so easy, because of the deeply rooted prejudice, which looked at Asians as “orientals.” Asian Americans were the yellow peril. More and more of them kept coming to United States, and they were now trying to take away “our” land from us. We had to stop them. What do we do? We make racist laws and enforce it very hard. With the already-negative images of Asian Americans getting worse with World War II and Anti-Japanese sentiment, It seemed like there was no room for the decision to be overturned, but…

Finally, in 1952, in a Supreme Court case of Fujii v. State of California, the Alien Land Law that existed in California was overturned. Sei Fujii was an ineligible Japanese alien, in the state of California. He basically argued that because of the United Nations charter protects “fundamental freedoms without distinction as to race” to the citizens of member countries, he, as a citizen of Japan, had the right to own land, which was a fundamental freedom in his mind. The issue was upon the power of local laws vs. the power of treaty. The conclusion was that treaty does not supersede local laws in this case. However, in the process, the court found that the California Alien Law violated the 14^th amendment, which is about civil rights and personal liberties. Thus, it was ruled unconstitutional and Asian immigrants were granted the right to own property in California. Asian immigrants finally had more room to breathe in.