Pictures of the Enemy: Fifty Years of Images of Japan in the American Press, 1941–1992

"Japan," noted author and columnist Pico Iyer, "is a product of our imagination, and the country that we see is only the one we have been trained to see" (Iyer 76). In the 50 years since the American entry into World War II, the American press has been the pre-eminent institution directing what the American public sees of Japan and the Japanese. The "reality" of Japan has been mediated through the press; the press has both documented events and been the prime instrument of assigning meaning to them. Images of Japan in American mass-market periodicals have created a fictional country. These images have been selective presentations of people, events, places and ideas. If not outright "inventions," they have been constructed ideological fabrications aimed at consolidating, perpetuating and extending the belief system of the United States. The print media has as much "interpreted" Japan and the Japanese, as "reported" on the international climate vis a vis Japan. Images of Japan in the American press confirm that American images and representations of the "Other"-of "foreign" countries and "different" races, for example-are typically efforts by a dominant power group to impose clarity and order on an essentially complex and chaotic world. Photography, graphics (illustrations, cartoons and charts) and articles on Japan and the Japanese in fifty years of mass-market news and general-interest magazines and major market newspapers show that the American press has consistently constructed an image of Japan as the "Other," where the extent and type of "Otherness" has been determined by the American press's sense of comfort about the place of the United States in the global arena.1 "Relations of power inescapably color the ways in which we perceive ourselves in relation to others," Elizabeth Fox-Genovese has stated (25). The more strained the social, political and economic conditions under which "We," the United States, meet the "Other," Japan, the more the representations of the "Other" rely on stereotypes. American relations with Japan have been strained since Commodore Matthew Perry's ships entered Tokyo harbor in 1853.2 And certainly, as detailed in this paper, relations between the United States and Japan since Pearl Harbor have been colored by that cataclysmic social, political and economic event. The communications revolution of the past 50 years has made surprisingly little difference in the amount of stereotyping. Said Joel Dreyfuss, the former Tokyo bureau chief of Fortune magazine, "Japan is the most important country in the world that Americans don't understand.... Maybe because Japan has become the first nonwhite country we are forced to deal with as an equal, we have explained away the challenges to our stereotypes by creating new ones: no longer considered an immature third world nation, Japan is now seen as a mystical blend of a 2,000-yearold culture and modern management" (Dreyfuss 8). Many stereotypes about Japan have persisted through the years, and as New York Times critic Vincent Canby has written, "propaganda freezes interest in a culture that, just possibly, may have a great deal to teach us" (Canby H1). Japan, a country far away, across the broad Pacific, with a distinctive people and culture, has typically perplexed Americans and the American press; it has been the most mysterious nation in the mysterious Orient.3 Near the end of the Second World War, Newsweek magazine argued, "Americans find it hard to understand such remote peoples as the Chinese, Indians, and Arabs." But in "dealing with" Japan, Newsweek believed, "Americans-and all other nationalities for that matter-are up against an absolutely unique nation. The mental and moral climate of Japan is...utterly different from any other in the world" (Pakenham "Mentality" 48). Fifty years after that comment remarkably little in that assessment has changed. The thoughtful Atlantic Monthly ran an article by journalist James Fallows entitled, "The Japanese Are Different from You and Me" (Fallows 35). …