Only thirty years before the release of “Lady Snowblood,” several million New Yorkers cheered a vast patriotic parade that streamed up Fifth Avenue for eleven hours in June 1942. The evident highlight was a float depicting a big American eagle swooping down on a herd of yellow rats. As historian John Dower has observed in War Without Mercy, this caricature captured the essential symbolic features of racist characterization of the American stance toward Japanese people – the strong individual versus an undifferentiated pack of vermin denied any acknowledgement of humanity – an embodiment of the iconic image of the yellow hordes of Asia.
Abundant contemporary imagery of rats, insects, monkeys or vipers was publicly invoked as justification for exterminationist rhetoric advocating wholesale slaughter of the Japanese. “Rodent Exterminator” was stenciled on helmets of many Marines during the 1944 invasion of Iwo Jima. The collection of body parts as trophies from dead (and living) Japanese was so commonplace that personnel returning from the Pacific theater were routinely screened for trophy possession prior to embarkation. In 1943 the magazine Leatherneck published a photograph of Japanese corpses with an uppercase headline reading “Good Japs,” while the following year Life published a full-page photograph of an attractive blonde posing with a Japanese skull. Another photograph showed Japanese skulls as ornaments on American military vehicles. Contemporary Japanese reaction was to view such material as indicative of the American character. For their part, officially sanctioned American perspectives endorsed notions that the Japanese were mad or crazy with a perverse wish to die, and deserved the death brought to them by Americans.
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