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of the Japanese to keep fighting. There are surely many explanations for this, but prominent among them is a plainly racial consideration:the superman image was especially compelling because it meshed with the greatest of all the racist bogeys of the white men—the specter of the Yellow Peril.
    Hatred toward the Japanese derived not simply from the reports of Japanese atrocities, but also from the deeper wellsprings of anti-orientalism. Time magazine’s coverage of the American response to Pearl Harbor, for example, opened on this very note. What did Americans say when they heard of the attack, Time asked rhetorically. And the answer it quoted approvingly as representative was, “Why, the yellow bastards!” Time’ s cover portrait for December 22, 1941, depicting Admiral Yamamoto Isoroku, who planned the Pearl Harbor attack, was colored a single shade: bright yellow. At one time or another almost every mainstream newspaper and magazine fell into the color idiom, and yellow was by far the dominant color in anti-Japanese propaganda art. Among the music makers, we already have encountered Tin Pan Alley’s revealing counterpoint of Hitler and the “Yellow Japs.” Other song titles included “We’re Gonna Find a Fellow Who Is Yellow and Beat Him Red, White, and Blue” and “Oh, You Little Son of an Oriental.” In some American pronouncements, the Japanese were simply dismissed as “LYBs,” a well-comprehended acronym for the double entendre “little yellow bellies.”
    Spokesmen for Asian Allies such as China were aghast at such insensitivity, and the war years as a whole became an agonizing revelation of the breadth and depth of anti-Asian prejudice in the United States. In the very midst of the war these revelations prompted a yearlong congressional hearing to consider revision of the notorious “Oriental Exclusion Laws”—the capstone of formal discrimination against all people of Asian origin. What the Japanese attack brought to the surface, however, was something more elusive and interesting than the formal structures of discrimination: the concrete fears that underlay the perception of a menacing Orient.
    Since the late nineteenth century, when the Yellow Peril idea was first expressed in the West, white people had been unnervedby a triple apprehension—recognition that the “hordes” of Asia outnumbered the population of the West, fear that these alien masses might gain possession of the science and technology that made Western domination possible, and the belief that Orientals possessed occult powers unfathomable to Western rationalists. By trumpeting the cause of Pan-Asianism and proclaiming the creation of a Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere, Japan raised the prospect that the Asian hordes might at last become united. With their Zero planes and big battleships and carriers, the Japanese gave notice that the technological and scientific gap had narrowed dramatically. And with the aura of invincibility that blossomed in the heat of the early victories, the Japanese “supermen” evoked the old fantasies of occult oriental powers. All this would be smashed in August 1945, when Japan capitulated. And it would all resurface three decades later when Japan burst on the scene as an economic superpower and other Asian countries began to emulate this “miracle.”
    Racism also shaped the Japanese perception of self and other—again in patterned ways, but patterns different from those of the West. History accounts for much of this difference. Over centuries, Japan had borrowed extensively from India, China, and more recently from the West, and had been greatly enriched; and it acknowledged these debts. And over the course of the preceding century, the Japanese had felt the sting of Western condescension. Even when applauded by the Europeans and Americans for their accomplishments in industrializing and