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[My father was a WW2 veteran. He served on convey patrol in the North Atlantic, guarding against the U-Boats. I never heard him same anything bad against Germans.

But he hated the Japanese. For that reason I never bought a Japanese car while he was alive. He would have disowned me. I suspect Pearl Harbor made the difference.]

Gotta wonder how much of that was prejudice. It’s not like he had any personal experience with fighting the Japanese, let alone war atrocities. The general sense then was that Orientals were inferior. They weren’t supposed to be able to inflict a bloody nose on a white country. For Germany to do so was fine - Germany was a major power with an illustrious military tradition. And, of course, they were fellow white people. Whereas the Japanese were just a bunch of servile flunkeys.

This isn’t some random musing. For better or worse, it was a very different milieu with attitudes very different from today’s. Until the 1940s, for instance, Asian Canadians weren’t allowed to vote. A significant part of the debate over a universal draft there revolved around of letting them have the franchise.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_of_1944#Background
[Opposition to conscription was not limited to Quebec. In British Columbia, where alarm over the “Yellow Peril” was a major issue, many were opposed to conscription, fearful that conscription of Chinese-Canadians and Japanese-Canadians would lead to Asian-Canadian demands for the right to vote, to which the white population of British Columbia were adamantly opposed.[15]]

Non-whites were viewed as inferior, vaguely subhuman. For the Japanese to accomplish what they did was like getting beaten up by a tribe of baboons. There was an element of humiliation - that monkeys had somehow overcome human beings. Even war propaganda depicted the Japanese as monkeys.

https://cwp.missouri.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2012/03/wwii_propaganda.jpg

> Gotta wonder how much of that was prejudice. <

I would say none. I think it all traces back to the sneak attack on Pearl Harbor. The nature of the attack really shook people up. In a way, it’s like 9/11. Many people who had no opinion about Islam before 9/11 certainly had one after 9/11.

I would also add that my father never racist terms used when discussing the Japanese. He simply hated them. And he never said a single bad thing about China or the Chinese. So nope, it’s not a racist thing. It’s a Pearl Harbor thing.