Dower establishes that the Pacific War was a race war, with Americans hating the Japanese far more intensely than the Germans.

Japan's invasion of non-independent Asian nations exposes the racial contradictions of European colonialism and sparks Western fears of Pan-Asian unity.

The US military commissions Hollywood director Frank Capra to produce a series of documentary orientation films for American troops.

Capra's first film Prelude to War frames the entire conflict as a moral struggle between the free world and the slave world.

The Japanese government produces the soldier's booklet Read This And The War Is Won to prepare troops for the Southeast Asian invasion.

Historian Allan Nevins argues in a wartime essay that no enemy in the entire war was as deeply detested by Americans as the Japanese.

The attack on Pearl Harbor becomes the defining symbol of Japanese treachery in American popular consciousness.

President Roosevelt signs Executive Order 9066, forcibly relocating over 110,000 Japanese-Americans into internment camps in the American interior.

Geoffrey Gorer publishes a highly influential academic analysis linking Japanese wartime aggression to early childhood toilet-training practices.

The Japanese government issues a declaration framing the war as a moral mission to establish a new world order of proper place.

The Momotaro folk legend is adapted into wartime films casting the Anglo-Americans as demons and Japan's war as a divinely ordained purification mission.

Japan's secret 8-volume Global Policy document reveals the true racial hierarchy underlying the Co-Prosperity Sphere's rhetoric of Asian liberation.

Japan's military defeat becomes inevitable by 1944, yet racial hatred on both sides drives the merciless conflict to continue for another full year.

Japan's surrender triggers a paradoxical and rapid transformation from hated enemy to Cold War ally as racist hostility is redirected toward the Soviets.

Rising economic competition in the late 1970s causes wartime racist code words and imagery to resurface on both the American and Japanese sides.

Dower opens by establishing that the Pacific War was fundamentally a race war, with Americans hating the Japanese far more intensely than they ever hated the Germans. He traces how Hollywood propaganda, Japanese government booklets, and the shock of Pearl Harbor all deepened and weaponized existing racial hatreds on both sides. Academic voices like Geoffrey Gorer reinforced negative stereotypes of the Japanese even under the guise of scholarly analysis, while wartime policies like Japanese-American internment showed racism translated into law. Japanese imperial documents revealed that the Co-Prosperity Sphere's rhetoric of Asian liberation masked a rigid racial hierarchy with the Yamato race at the top. The book closes by showing how the same flexible racism that fueled the war was quickly redirected at the Soviets after Japan's surrender, only to snap back against Japan itself when economic rivalry emerged decades later.

The core argument: how racism shaped the entire Pacific War.

Racial stereotyping of the Japanese predates the war, rooted in centuries of mutual cultural encounter, distrust, and perceived otherness.

Capra's Why We Fight documentary series wins an Academy Award and is distributed internationally with soundtracks in multiple languages.

Capra's completed film Know Your Enemy—Japan is pulled from distribution in 1945 because the atomic bomb has already fallen on Nagasaki.

The Japanese government produces The Way of the Subject for the civilian population, framing Western powers as centuries-long aggressors pursuing world domination.

Dower reveals that both sides' wartime propaganda exposes far more about each nation's own self-image and insecurities than about the actual enemy.

American troops and commentators consistently classify the Japanese as more treacherous than the Germans, with no cultural equivalent of the 'good Japanese.'

After Pearl Harbor, rumors spread among Americans that Germany must have orchestrated the attack, since many believed Japan incapable of such military sophistication.

Anthropologist Margaret Mead articulates the minority academic position that all human beings share a basic humanity, directly challenging racial hierarchy assumptions.

The fictional character of the Insidious Dr. Fu Manchu becomes the cultural personification of Yellow Peril, depicting an Asian genius weaponizing Western technology.

Author Pearl Buck warns that entrenched white racial prejudice risks becoming a self-fulfilling prophecy by pushing Asian peoples to unify against the West.

Anti-Chinese immigration and naturalization laws become a diplomatic embarrassment for the US government as China becomes a vital wartime ally against Japan.

African American soldiers articulate a 'double victory' demand, explicitly linking the fight against Japanese racism abroad to the fight against segregation at home.

Japan's post-WWI request for a racial equality clause in the League of Nations covenant is rejected outright by the Western powers.

After Japan's surrender, military defeat is reinterpreted domestically as proof that Japan's own military leadership, not the emperor, required national purification.

A Japanese government official in 1982 publicly attributes Japan's manufacturing superiority to its racial purity compared to the 'mongrelized' United States.

Dower shows that deep racial stereotypes of the Japanese existed long before the first shot was fired, embedded in popular culture, academic scholarship, and government policy on both sides of the Pacific. Capra's documentary films and the Japanese government's civilian publications each constructed an image of the enemy that revealed far more about each nation's own anxieties than about the actual foe. Western scholars like Margaret Mead pushed back against racial hierarchy, but figures like Geoffrey Gorer reinforced it in academic language, while popular fears like Yellow Peril were dramatized in fiction. Racial discrimination against Chinese immigrants in America became a liability once China was needed as an ally, just as African Americans drew explicit parallels between anti-Asian racism abroad and segregation at home. The book closes by noting that even after the war's end, racist thinking never truly disappeared but simply found new vessels, as demonstrated by a Japanese official's 1982 claim that racial purity explained Japanese industrial superiority.

Propaganda, academic racism, and the domestic front of the race war.

Ba Maw, initially a vocal champion of Pan-Asian solidarity, becomes a scathing critic of Japan's brutality and racial pretensions toward its Asian neighbors.

A 1942 Imperial Japanese Army document formally classifies Asian peoples into master races, friendly races, and guest races, reserving the supreme rank for the Yamato race.

Capra's propaganda film interprets Commodore Perry's forced opening of Japanese ports as evidence of Japan's uninterrupted and innate drive toward militarism.

The 16th-century theological debate over Native American humanity establishes the Great Chain of Being as the enduring intellectual foundation for Western racial hierarchy.

Japan conquers Formosa in 1895 and Korea in 1910, establishing itself as an imperial power that deliberately mirrors European colonial expansion across Asia.

Robert Louis Stevenson observes fellow passengers treating Native Americans and Chinese with identical contempt as 'despised races,' revealing the deep roots of linked anti-Asian racism.

The Japanese concept of gyokusai emerges, reframing death in battle as heroic purification of the soul and making surrender morally unthinkable for Japanese soldiers.

The first Portuguese traders arrive in Japan in the 16th century and are perceived as ambiguous demonic outsiders who bear useful gifts but practice witchcraft.

Japan expels nearly all Europeans in the 1630s, beginning centuries of strict isolationism that deepens its later hostile perception of Western outsiders.

Japanese wartime cartoonists depict President Roosevelt with two small devil's horns, using a single visual cue to mark him as a demonic being.

The Japanese animated film Momotaro—Divine Troops of the Ocean explicitly identifies Hawaii as the Island of Demons, transforming a beloved folk legend into direct war propaganda.

The Global Policy document sets a state-directed target of growing Japan's population to 100 million by 1960 through marriage counseling and racial improvement programs.

The Global Policy document designates Koreans and Formosans as racially suited only for heavy physical labor, exposing the brutal caste system beneath Co-Prosperity rhetoric.

Emperor Hirohito is not tried for war crimes after Japan's surrender, with MacArthur's occupation framing the military leadership rather than the emperor as solely culpable.

A Republican politician at the fortieth anniversary of WWII's end publicly declares that America is still at war with Japan and losing.

Dower traces the deeper intellectual and cultural roots of Pacific War racism, beginning with early European-Japanese contact and the ancient Western philosophical framework of the Great Chain of Being that classified all peoples into a fixed hierarchy. Japan's own imperial conquests mirrored European colonialism, and its wartime ideology of racial purity drew on mythology, Shinto spirituality, and a Confucian concept of proper place to assert the Yamato race's divine right to rule. Japanese propaganda translated this worldview into vivid imagery, depicting Anglo-American leaders as literal demons while using the beloved Momotaro legend to frame the war as a sacred cleansing mission. Internal government documents went far beyond the Co-Prosperity Sphere's liberatory rhetoric, coldly assigning racial roles and planning population growth to sustain Japanese supremacy. The book ends by revealing that racism's true power lies in its flexibility: the same ideology that fueled a merciless war could be inverted after defeat, redirected at new rivals, and resurrected decades later whenever competition demanded a new enemy.