Off topic, but I just watched the excellent 1955 movie starring Spencer Tracy “Bad Day at Black Rock.” It was a rather heavy handed theme about anti-Japanese treatment after WW 2, but good nonetheless.
That was a huge theme in post WWII movies. The war in the Pacific was flat out racist and hate-filled to a degree Europe never imagined. The Japanese were still a fanatic medieval monarchy and took things to a level of brutality and cruelty unimaginable in the ETO. Beheadings of prisoners, rape, murder, torture, etc. In Nanking the German Nazi Ambassador was sickened by what he was seeing. That’s right, even actual nazis were shocked by them.
When we hit islands the common lingo was that the island was infested with vermin, monkeys, lice, etc.... and the battles were fought to the last Jap with maybe 10 or 15 survivors standing there shell shocked. And we only took them alive for intel value. Guys sent home ashtrays made out of Jap skulls, gold teeth, you name it. They our men watched as Japs even committed suicide to get at them.
That was the most bitter war we have ever fought when it come to outright hate.
So after the war we had quite a pickle on how to turn it all off. We wanted to have a cooperative Japan and the USSR was looming.
Right about then you see Hollywood churn out a raft of “Japanese are actually kinda nice now” kind of films.
Bad Day at Black Rock, Teahouse of the August moon, Bridges of Toko Ri and many others.
BTW, interesting aside about Bad Day at Black Rock. Lee Marvin was the leading bully in the film. In WWII he was a Marine PFC and was wounded on Saipan.