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World War II Propaganda: Know your Enemy

Posted on 25. Oct, 2008 @ 11:01 am by harvey in Culture, Media, Society Views: 713

Propaganda was used by both the Axis and Allied powers to influence the hearts and minds of every actor and observer during World War II, and America was no exception.

After America declared war on Japan following the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, the military decided that a documentary on the new enemy, the Japanese, was needed in order to effectively educate the American soldiers and public about the Japanese, and to combat American isolationism to increase support for the war. The result was a meticulously created and highly effective piece of propaganda called Know Your Enemy: Japan that depicted the Japanese as a homogeneous people willing to fight to the end for the Emperor in their quest for world domination.

Know Your Enemy: Japan, was put together by the Hollywood director, Frank Capra. Frank Capra had made a series of other films for World War II as well, called Why We Fight. Despite the fact that planning for the movie began immediately after Pearl Harbor, the film was not completed and released until August 9th 1945, near the end of the war, and the day Nagasaki was bombed. Production of the film was tightly managed and it was revised multiple times for reasons such as seeming too sympathetic by depicting the Japanese as being completely controlled by the Emperor thus fighting the war against their will. Once the film was released, it was only shown for a few weeks, and was discontinued at the end of August 1945 after Japan surrendered.

The film was picked up again in the 1970s, and intensely studied. The documentary itself is considered to be a masterpiece. Know Your Enemy: Japan was put together using captured or confiscated Japanese film, scenes from publicly available Japanese TV shows or movies at the time, and other sources directly acquired from the Japanese themselves. Careful editing of these images of the enemy created a more convincing negative image of the Japanese than could ever be done with images created by the Americans themselves. From this film we can learn a lot about the American state of mind and attitude towards the Japanese during the war. In fact, I would say that you can learn a lot more about the Americans from this film than you can about the Japanese…

You can watch the entire approximately one-hour film on YouTube.

(The other sections are on YouTube as well – I’m sure you know how to find them!)

Interesting stuff!

- Harvey