Tue, Sep 5, 1944: propaganda movie

[warning: derogatory language] "I was a busy man over this week-end.  Friday evening we saw 'The Battle of China', a film in the 'why-we-fight' series.  It was the kind of thing which would certainly get us worked up about the war.  Pictures of Jap atrocities -- executions, persons with mutilated limbs, etc. - featured this propaganda movie.  Most horrible sight was a living man with half his neck hacked away.  The thing they tried to impress upon us is the fact that Japan by doing such has united China.  As has been the case with most countries, China has evolved from a geographic expression into a nation, because of a foreign war."

-- Letter from my father, Sidney DeVere Brown, Notre Dame, Ind., to his family, Bloomington, Kans., September 5, 1944. The word "Jap" appears regularly in my fathers' letters, in reference both to Japanese nationals and to Japanese-Americans.  I know in his later life, as a professor of Japanese history, my father was chagrined by his frequent use of the word in these letters.  In fact, when he transcribed some of these letters for publication, he always changed that word to "Japanese."  My father's liberal usage of the term reflects its common usage among non-Japanese Americans during World War II and before.  In fact, only a few U.S. newspapers chose to avoid the common slur.  Nowhere in my father's letters does he question the use of the term, even when he sympathizes with his Japanese American teachers unable to get housing because of racial prejudice.  To most Japanese Americans, the term was a biting insult.  As one Japanese American, Shosuke Sakai who immigrated to the United States as a seven-year-old around 1919, remembered: "They [white boys] used to call me a 'Jap.'  I remember, I used to get furious and start fighting back."  (Frank Chin, ed., Born in the USA: A Story of Japanese America, 1889-1947, 51; Daily Tulean Dispatch, November 6, 1942).