Content note. This page shows Japanese wartime material as issued, including caricatures of Allied leaders and of Americans and Britons, and slogans that called Japan's war a liberation of Asia. They are shown for the record, with who made them and for whom. Showing an item is not endorsing it.
What was Japanese propaganda in WWII?
Japanese wartime propaganda was the posters, magazines, stamps, newsreels, leaflets and street signs issued by the Japanese government, army and navy, and by bodies they controlled, between the 1937 war with China and the surrender of 1945. Its audiences were three: households in Japan and Taiwan, the people of Manchukuo and the occupied territories, and Allied troops. Each got a different message from the same state.
At home: sacrifice, savings and the neighbourhood
The Imperial Rule Assistance Association's Aichi branch put a ship under air attack above four household rules for saving firewood, gas and electricity, so a chore borrows the standing of the fighting (Transfer). A 1944 poster by an unnamed issuer tells households that switching off the lights at midnight saves the power for hundreds of aircraft, a figure with no source (Card stacking).
Content note: Wartime Japanese magazine cover with a caricature of US President Franklin D. Roosevelt (exaggerated jaw, buck tooth, sweat drop). This object is shown as it was published. Why 
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"Luxury Is the Enemy!" (Tokyo, 1940), from the National Spiritual Mobilization Movement, stretches the word "enemy" to cover silk and restaurant meals (Semantic hijacking). A c. 1940 counterintelligence poster lists hoarding, individualism, communism and rumour as the slips of paper a hidden enemy throws at Japan (Name-calling).
For the April 1942 general election the Home Ministry, the Information Bureau and the Imperial Rule Assistance Association put a soldier beside the ballot (Transfer). In Taiwan, a 1939 poster prize-winner pairs a ballot, shrine streamers and warplanes under "Total Harmony on the Home Front" (Glittering generalities).
The Ministry of Communications issued a 1942 stamp whose map the Commons record identifies as the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere (Transfer), and a 1940 stamp inscribed hakkō ichiu, a phrase naming no testable aim (Glittering generalities).
The monthly Manga (Tokyo, August 1943) drew Roosevelt flushed and sweating (Name-calling). A Navy-commissioned film, Momotarō: Umi no Shinpei (1945), dressed a monkey and a dog in sailor uniforms to attach a folk tale to the navy (Transfer).
Content note: Colour poster of smiling children of three peoples with flags, issued to promote the Japan-Manchukuo-China relationship under Japanese occupation. This object is shown as it was published. Why 
Manchukuo: the state Japan founded in 1932
A 1935 poster, presumably for the Manchukuo State Council, shows three children and doves above "Japan, China and Manchukuo Cooperate; Peace Under Heaven", a slogan with nothing testable in it (Glittering generalities). The Concordia Association's Jinzhou headquarters issued text-only leaflets in 1936.
Content note: Text-only leaflet urging readers to kill Communists ('If you do not kill the Communists, the Communists will surely kill you'). This object is shown as it was published. Why 
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One says "Japan and Manchukuo are like brothers", presenting the two states as equals (Glittering generalities).
Another gives the reader a kill-or-be-killed choice about Communists (Fear appeal).
Occupied Malaya and Java
The occupation administration in Malaya told residents to learn Japanese, pictured as a movement several communities were joining (Bandwagon). In Java the military administration's Propaganda Department (Sendenbu) published Djawa Baroe.
Its June 1943 page "Japan controls the seas" states a settled fact over warships (Bandwagon).
The same issue carries a cartoon of Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek in a pratfall (Name-calling). A Java poster asks families to tend jatropha, voiced through a cheerful local family with no issuer named (Plain folks).
For the opposing side
The collection's Japanese leaflets include a 1945 sheet to Americans on Okinawa that cites claimed carrier losses and promises the special attack corps will sink their vessels (Fear appeal). The American side of the same war is on the sibling page Anti-Japanese posters, under the same technique definitions.
What the collection does not hold
- Not here: posters from Japan proper held at the Hoover Institution, the Imperial War Museum or the Japanese national archives; most of these items come from Wikimedia Commons scans and museum photographs.
- Thin coverage: Korea, Burma, the Philippines and French Indochina under Japanese rule by poster; and Japanese-language posters on conscription, the "comfort" system or the occupation's forced labour.
- Scale: Japanese state production and its distribution figures are not measured here, so nothing is claimed about reach compared with other belligerents.
Sources and further reading
Sources
Each item in the grid carries its own source and rights note, mostly Wikimedia Commons (PD-Japan tags), the Koninklijke…
Each item in the grid carries its own source and rights note, mostly Wikimedia Commons (PD-Japan tags), the Koninklijke Bibliotheek and NIOD, and the Tropenmuseum. Context: Barak Kushner, The Thought War: Japanese Imperial Propaganda (University of Hawai'i Press, 2006); John W. Dower, War Without Mercy (Pantheon, 1986).
