秘密戰ヲ防ゲ (Guard Against Secret Warfare), Japanese home-front counterintelligence poster
A poster under the title 'Guard against secret warfare' shows a Rising Sun fan turning away a flurry of paper slips, each carrying one word: hoarding, individualism, communism, hedonism, grievance and discontent, strikes, rumour, worship of America and Britain. The slips treat these attitudes and behaviours as the weapons of a hidden enemy, so the labels do the work and no spy or act of spying is shown.
- Date
- 1940
- Period
- Second World War
- Made by
- Japanese wartime authorities (an organisational work; the poster names no issuer, and the Commons record dates it only 'approximately 1940')
- Region
- East Asia
- Country
- Empire of Japan
- Medium
- Poster
- Issuer type
- State
- Regime
- Showa Japan
- Leader
- Fumimaro Konoe
- Audience
- Domestic public
- Purpose
- Mobilize or secure compliance
- Themes
- Home front, Security and surveillance, War and the military
- Event
- Second Sino Japanese War
- Techniques
- Fear appealName-calling
- Source
- Unidentified Source blurred: contractors, cutouts, buried disclosure
- Source
- Wikimedia Commons (scanned from 'Testimony of Showa History' vol. 3, Gakken), retrieved September 29, 2026
- Rights
- Public domain (Japanese organisational work, c. 1940; 50-year term expired before 1996; per Commons)
Unknown Japanese issuer, c. 1940; scan from Gakken's 'Testimony of Showa History' vol. 3, via Wikimedia Commons
Text on the object
[title, top, read left to right] 秘密戰ヲ防ゲ [characters printed on the fan, upper] [illegible: possibly 國防] [characters printed on the fan, lower] [illegible] [paper slips flying at the fan, top to bottom, left to right] 買溜メ [illegible slip, upper left] 個人主義 デマ 共産主義 [partly legible slip, lower left: possibly 反國家思想] 不平不滿 ストライキ 享樂主義 流言 米英崇拜
[title] Guard against secret warfare [fan] [illegible: possibly 'national defence'] / [illegible] [slips] Hoarding; [illegible]; Individualism; Demagogic rumour (dema); Communism; [partly legible, possibly 'anti-national thought']; Grievance and discontent; Strikes; Pleasure-seeking (hedonism); Rumour; Worship of America and Britain
Read from a 500-px reproduction. The title and nine of the eleven slips are clear. The white slip at upper left and the fan's own characters are distorted by the fan's curve and are not guessed; the slip at lower left is a best reading and marked as such. Vertical slip text is given in reading order.
