Japanese, the

Terms for the Japanese have reflected the catalysts of war and economic competition, both comparatively recent. Prior to the nineteenth century, geographical and cultural distance and the complete lack of contact between Japan and Britain limited lexical borrowings to titles like shogun, tycoon , and mikado . Japan and its peoples remained shrouded in an Oriental mystique. Very much the same applied to relations between Japan and the United States. However, two radical developments changed perceptions, attitudes, and vocabulary. The first was the importation of indentured Japanese labor into California from the 1840s, a process which accelerated after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882. The second was the devastating, unprovoked attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941.

By 1930 there were 140,000 Japanese in the United States. Prior to World War II, the most common nickname was skibby , dating from about 1910 and probably derived from Japanese sukebei , meaning lechery or lewdness. Allen suggests that it “might have been heard as a salutation of prostitutes” (1983, 60). The abbreviation Jap was common, recorded from the 1850s, but not always offensive: “Ladies’ short silk waists, made of plain colored Habutai Jap silk,” ( Montgomery Ward Catalog 1895). According to H.L. Mencken, prior to 1941, American-born Japanese objected vigorously to the designation (1963, 373). From the same era came brownie (ca. 1900) and slant-eye from the 1930s, neither of them specifically applied to the Japanese, but clearly part of the process of ethnic insults.

After Pearl Harbor, memorably described by President Franklin D. Roosevelt as “a date which will live in infamy,” the Japanese population became stereotyped as the treacherous enemy within the gates and were interned in camps for the duration of the war. The word field rapidly expanded with new terms of abuse, notably the verbs to jap and to pull a jap , meaning “to take by surprise.” “The fellows at Pearl Harbor were caught napping by the Japanese japping” was the caustic comment by W.C. Fields in his autobiography, By Himself , published the following year (1942, 186). In street slang the verbal senses to jap , meaning “to sneak” and “to ambush one’s rivals” survived for several decades after the war. The contemptuous abbreviation Nip (from Nippon , the Japanese name for Japan) seems first recorded in Time magazine (January 5, 1942) referring to “three Nip pilots” (20). Tojo , the name of the Japanese premier, Hideki Tojo, who ordered the attack on Pearl Harbor, became slang for a Japanese soldier among American and Australian forces.

As the entry for Hollywood shows, the film studios entered into the war effort seriously, producing several propagandist films with titles like Menace of the Rising Sun and Secret Agent of Japan , driven by highly inflammatory scripts. For decades the Hollywood depiction of the Japanese was that of a treacherous, devious, inscrutable alien. Typical of stereotyping, peoples with similar appearance are conflated, in this case the Chinese and others from the Far East, all of whom were labeled as gooks . From 1942 chink , previously used of Chinese, started to be applied contemptuously to any East Asian person. A hostile generalization by Edith Cresson, the French prime minister in 1991, alleged dehumanization in the Japanese corporate structure: “Ants … little yellow men who sit up all night thinking how to screw us” (L’Estrange 2002, 313). This remark provoked outrage and protests in Japan.

Two quotations reflect changing attitudes in the United States. General Norman Schwarzkopf recalled: “When I was in elementary school [during World War II] the worst thing you could call anyone was a Jap ” (CBS, May 8, 1995). Yet in The Death of Meaning , George Zito recorded that “the students I interviewed [ca. 1970] could not understand why Jap was understood as a term of opprobrium for the Japanese, since it simply abbreviated the name” (1993, 66).

The involvement of British and Australian troops in the war against the Japanese naturally increased the currency of jap and nip . The dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima was reported in the British Daily Express with the terse front-page headline “Japs told ‘Now quit’” (August 7, 1945). Nip also appeared in British armed forces slang: the RAF journal of 1942 referred to “the Nip pilots” and generated various puns on the saying “there’s a nip in the air.” In Australian English anything completely unacceptable is, in ironic idiom, something “you wouldn’t give to a Jap on Anzac Day,” that is during the celebrations ending the war. South Africans, having had less direct contact with the Japanese, have no hostile semantic reflectors. In general during the postwar era both names have lost their emotive quality.