“My Japan” American Propaganda Film

I loved that video.
Please post more like it if you have them.
One reason I like the videos so much is that it reminds me of one of my favorite songs of the era by Perry Como!

…Say, whatever happened to the Japanese?
Haven’t you heard?
Slip me the word!
I got it from a guy who was in the know’
It was mighty smoky over Tokyo!
A friend of mine in a B-29 dropped another load for luck,
As he flew away, he was heard to say:
“A hubba-hubba-hubba yuk yuk!”

I really love that song.
Maybe I can make a montage video of it for YouTube?

The thing is– in a historical ontext– that is actually a very accurate description of the Militarist Japanese of the time. Most held views very much like those in the above film (Albeit not so brutally stated– it IS, after all, a US spin on the ideas for a wartime audience) and DID feel that they were destined to win– sort of.

Actually, by the time that film was released, it’s was more speaking of 1943 attitudes in Japan than 1945. By then, most of the military was fairly aware that chances of victory were no longer certain. (True, they had never BEEN certain, but Japan at the start of the war had– as so very very often has been the case throughout the history of conflict and the modern age– misread the USA’s response.) However, that would be exactly the type of propaganda that the Japanese military would feed to the masses– that the US was “weak” by nature, that we’d never go all out, and that we were a paper tiger… which WAS, at the start of the war, an article of faith in most of the Japanese military.

It ia also true that the Japanese had, in the military at least, a rather different attitude towards death than Americans do. The Kamikaze was not merely a “plane with a pilot inside” as an earlier poster described– one of the most terrifying examples was the Oka, which was quite litterally a flying, human piloted BOMB. Kamikaze means “Divine Wind”, and was very much NOT a random attack– you had to be a special pilot to even be ALLOWED to pilot one of these suicide missions.

It’s entirely a cultural matter– but the above is,, if rather western in it’s spin– actually, again, rather accurate of the militarist thinking in Japan at the time– and they were the ones solidly in charge until the Atomic Bomb and the Emperor Showa finally deciding to overrule the military.