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October 12, 1995
[SSJ: 333] Japan, WW2 & UK media
From: Alan Harrison
Posted Date: 1995/10/12
[Moderator's note: analytical debate and academic insights are welcome on the
questions of how and whether the media shape common perceptions of former
belligerent nations.]
The fiftieth anniversary of VJ Day has been the hanger on which much
anti-Japanese racism has been hung. The treatment of British prisoners- of-war
has been the issue which has predominated in British media coverage. Former
prisoners of war are pressing for £14,000 compensation and a formal apology.
(The sum of money is based on that awarded by the United States government to
Japanese-Americans who were interned during the Second World War.) The role of
the British and American governments in imposing treaty terms upon Japan is
rarely mentioned, and certainly not widely understood in Britain.
Tabloid newspaper coverage has been strident and ignorant. On the same day, the
"Daily Mirror" and the "Sun", vying in their hatred of "the Japanese", claimed
respectively that "there is no word for apology in Japanese" and that Japanese
has twenty-odd ways of apologising. The former newspaper didn't print a letter
which I sent drawing its attention to page 23 of the Collins-Shubun dictionary!
Racist terminology is routinely used to refer to Japanese people: no newspaper
in Britain would use the word "nigger", for example, unless quoting the speech
of a racist, but the tabloids do not hesitate to refer to Japanese people as
"Japs" or "Nips". (In fairness, the same papers, especially the "Sun", use less
than liberal language about other Europeans: following some minor disagrement
between the British and French governments, the "Sun" carried the headline "HOP
OFF YOU FROGS".)
The more thoughtful press has reported worrying incidents of insults directed at
Japanese people, usually young women born twenty or thirty years after the war.
The Japanese community in Britain is, of course, small, and there is no
equivalent of the Japanese-American presence in California.
Among veterans' organisations, attitudes have varied from a minority who favour
reconciliation, through a large number who avoid overt racism and see their
demands for compensation and an apology in terms of justice, while confessing
that they cannot feel comfortable in the presence of Japanese people, to those
who are virulently racist, including the man who described the Japanese as "the
cruellest race on earth".
As in America, public opinion tends to generally more accepting of Germans. It
is quite common to meet elderly people who refuse to buy Japanese goods, but I
have not yet met anyone who similarly refuses to buy a Volkswagen or a
Telefunken radio. I have difficulty in attributing this difference to anything
other than racism, with the additional element in Britain of the Japanese armed
forces' having treated captured British troops like "natives" in parts of the
former British empire.
Alan Harrison
University of Wolverhampton
Approved by ssjmod at 12:00 AM