What I find striking in their propaganda (the anti-China stuff does seem to me to be pretty racially loaded, though) is how similar the depictions of Roosevelt are to the German depictions. The Germans made him look like a Jewish banker trope, basically, and the Japanese did basically the same except with a few more monstrous qualities. I wonder if the propagandists from the Axis had some kind of common strategy.
Anti-Chinese propaganda seems to have been a quite confusing affair as it attempted to show Japanese as superior to Chinese while at the same time support the cause of Pan-Asianism. Regarding other Asian nations, the issue was probably slightly different as it was easier to show Japanese as liberators. Thus propaganda often took a more paternalistic stance towards occupied people.
When it comes to similarities between propaganda from Germany and Japan, that is propably mostly a coincidence. Japan and Germany were fighting separate wars and there was not enough contact between them to create such similar propaganda strategies.
Dunno if coincidence or not, but apparently in East Asia even today, caricatures of westerners usually depict them with huge noses.
That is a common stereotype at least in Japan. "Common" in the sense that you sometimes stumble upon it, but it's not something you hear or see every day. I have never personally experienced any comments about Western noses personally while in Japan, though I have seen the stereotype used in advertisements and seen comments in internet from the people who have heard comments regarding noses.
The enemy in the Japanese propaganda was typically the generic ‘other’ yes. Not infrequently depicted as being out to rape white WAllied women.
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An interesting thing about works like these is that although they claim to depict awful actions by the enemy, their main intention is quite clearly to fulfill sexual fantasies of their readers.
One of the many difference with the European theater is that a select few Germans the WAllied populations got to see speak on an almost weekly basis on the newsreels and became household personas to the public in a way that didn’t happen with WW1 Germans nor WW2 Japanese.
Hollywood and the Pentagon saw the potential in cultivating the well known WW2 German personas into images to emotionally attach the WAllied public to the war and not just Hitler.
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So you had posters and magazines of Japanese troops coming to rape American women. While at the same time you had posters up of a big budget movie of a fictional French Jewish woman who comes down to Egypt to seduce Rommel for help in getting her brother out of a Concentration Camp in Poland.
They helped to crank up the public hatred of the Japanese to the end of the dial and then some, but they managed to make the European/African theater more emotionally compelling and relatable to the public.
Interestingly, the Japanese war-time cinema rarely depicted Americans directly often referering them just as an "enemy" or something similar. When Americans were attacking, it was often seen more akin to some natural catastrophe. Chinese had a much more prominent place in Japanese films of the period in general, both as enemies and allies.
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