I know my professors would freak if I used the term "Jap" in a serious article. It is considered a racial slur.
Write Don and complain (gold@gwe.net). Being a bigot never seemed to disqualify Robert Byrd from being taken seriously. Spend less time trying to disqualify his opinion because you disagree with the words a 75 year old man uses to describe the Japanese. Spend more time understanding his attitude towards those who write revisionist history.
Obviously your professor didn't live during WWII when the Japs were the Japs. And lots of us folks who lived during that time still consider it an appropriate appelation.
During the war, just about every single man in the Army, Navy and Marine Corp used the term "Jap". The news media used the term all the time.
But now it isn't politically correct. Grow a pair and tell your professors to get bent.
I'm sure your "professors," wherever they hold forth, are the final arbiters for political correctness. You have learned your lessons well my child.
For the record, I have known many WW II veterans who fought in the Pacific, and many of them don't/didn't use the term "Jap." They used the more descriptive "Nipponese M---F---ers."
Have a good one, kid.
It's all in the context. You wouldn't call someone a racist for using the term Brit for a Britisher, but I've heard anti-British Irish use it as a term of invective. In their context, Brit a derogatory word. I use Brit, but my wife is from Britain, and it's a common term for me with no nasty implications. People like the writer of this article might mean to use Jap as a derogatory appellation, but it isn't necessarily so.
Those who were attacked by the Japanese lived through something we never had to live through. They have emotions we don't have.
I know my professors would freak if I used the term "Jap" in a serious article. It is considered a racial slur.
You are wrong -- dead wrong. You and your professors have never lived through a total war, as WW-II was, where the very existence of the the US as a nation and the lives and liberties of all the world's people were at at stake. I grew up listening to the stories of both veterans and civilians who did.
The Allied forces and their civilian support (which included damn near every man, woman, and child in the Allied countries) had to be unified in the effort to win on every front. The hearts, minds, and souls of everyone had to be 100% committed to the war effort, and a great part of that commitment was recognizing the the enemy as the enemy, and not as a distant cousin with whom one is having a temporary tiff. Japanese enemy were called "Japs" during the war; German enemy were called "Krauts". There were probably some other more or less flattering terms used, but the point is that the enemy is unambiguously differentiated from "us" and our "Allies". Many of those who lived through those years continued to use terminology from the war years. It was more a case of History, than one of racism.
Some PC pantie-waists existed around those times, but were roundly ridiculed into oblivion, shamed into silence, or occasionally locked up or worse for their treasonous actions.
You may very well experience such a "total war" before you get much older. You, and many, many others, will be changed significantly, forever, win or lose.