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Anti-Japanese?

My father and several of his friends fought in WWII in the Pacific against the Japanese , so I heard a lot of hate filled stories about the "little yellow monkeys" as they called them. In the 50's , TV and movies here in the US called them "dirty Japs" and they were always evil. When the Navy sent me to Japan for 2 years in 1970 , young military men I served with still called them "slant eyes" and couldn't wait to leave Japan. I went the other direction and fell in love with Japan and studied hard to learn Japanese. I fell in love with a young Japanese girl and planned to marry her. When I wrote home about getting married , I was told "if you marry a "dirty Jap" , DON"T COME HOME. So , I guess you can say I ran into a lot of negative things . As a side note , my Japanese girlfriend refused to move to America , so no marriage. I'm now 70 years old and I still say the 2 years in Japan were the best 2 years of my lifetime. JREF has always been my connection to Japan and I'm very thankful I found it. If you wonder why I didn't stay in Japan , I was bought up to love guns , shooting , and hunting in the Maine woods and just could not give that up. Posters like the one I posted below were quite common in the 40's and 50's.

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30 years ago? During the 80s?
Yes. A low point of that era was this murder of a Chinese-American (who was mistaken for a Japanese).

My first car was a little Nissan and if I went to a Detroit auto manufacturer for business purposes, I had to park in a different parking lot.
Also I couldn't park in the driveway of one of my best friends whose dad worked for General Motors. I had to park in the street.
 
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My father and several of his friends fought in WWII in the Pacific against the Japanese , so I heard a lot of hate filled stories about the "little yellow monkeys" as they called them. In the 50's , TV and movies here in the US called them "dirty Japs" and they were always evil. When the Navy sent me to Japan for 2 years in 1970 , young military men I served with still called them "slant eyes" and couldn't wait to leave Japan. I went the other direction and fell in love with Japan and studied hard to learn Japanese. I fell in love with a young Japanese girl and planned to marry her. When I wrote home about getting married , I was told "if you marry a "dirty Jap" , DON"T COME HOME. So , I guess you can say I ran into a lot of negative things . As a side note , my Japanese girlfriend refused to move to America , so no marriage. I'm now 70 years old and I still say the 2 years in Japan were the best 2 years of my lifetime. JREF has always been my connection to Japan and I'm very thankful I found it. If you wonder why I didn't stay in Japan , I was bought up to love guns , shooting , and hunting in the Maine woods and just could not give that up. Posters like the one I posted below were quite common in the 40's and 50's.View attachment 32097
When you were studying in Japanese, did you study alone or took up class?
 
At the time , the University of Michigan offered a great course with 2 big books and 7 inch reel to reel tapes for free. About 1 month after I arrived , I met a young Japanese bartender who spoke a little English and wanted help to learn more. I made a deal with him to teach me Japanese and I'd teach him English. A while later I ended up working at the same bar with my new teacher ; I was a bouncer for the bar . About the same time , my Navy base where I worked was too over crowded and paid me to live off base. I ended up getting a big apartment with my Japanese teacher , his girlfriend , his younger brother and girlfriend and my girlfriend. Using Japanese with all of them and at the bar was a big help with learning more Japanese. Also , my girlfriend spoke no English at all. The one thing I never tried to learn though was Kanji , I didn't need it in Fukuoka because English signs were everywhere and many Japanese spoke some English because of the big base there.

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In WWII era let's not forget the Japanese internment camp. Some Japanese Americans in my family were interned, the last one of those passed away 2 years ago. Keep in mind all their property got taken as well.
Some would not teach their children Japanese to try to prove they were American. Some of those children in my family who grew up were called names like Buddha heads even into the 1980s. The local urasenke tea ceremony teacher was also interned. My Japanese tutor of some years even got a couple phone calls in the 90s saying ching chong chink go back to Vietnam or some crap (she was Japanese) not sure how they chose her owner of an import store or randomly going down the phone book looking for foreign names. On the other hand my Japanese teacher came from a Christian pro west family who had some problems with the (Japanese) police harass them for their yokomoji books and such. They were in the Tokyo area and when bombed had to trade kimono for food and such. After the war my teacher (a teen) worked for the Americans who called her chibi or some such as I recall and were very friendly. They encouraged her to go to university in the US, she did so studying home economics (a university major for women at the time) and made friends and met a Japanese here in the US and stayed. So she had a lot of good experiences in addition to the less common racism which was just hurtful comments.

My uncle served in Japan in the 70s and brought me back a hakama and such for me for shichi-go-san though I am white.

In the 1970s made in Japan meant cheap junk as far as products went.

Back in the 80s Japan was in a bubble and buying a lot of American property and things. Some were a bit fearful of Japan's economic power at the time. The True Story Of The 1980s, When Everyone Was Convinced Japan Would Buy America

In the early 1980s a popular book became a TV series called Shogun which had a big influence on me. I watched some anime as a child in the 70s and 80s I did not really know was Japanese at the time. I dated a half Japanese girl in Junior High and High school (80s) and my family thought well of her. A sister married a nikkei. I later went to Japan and got married over there to a Japanese.

I'd say things really started to change in the 90s we saw a sushi boom, anime boom, game boom, and currently a ramen boom. japan become cool. Japan also became a maker of high quality cars and electronics however Korea is also good quality and cheaper so they are eating into the market of products.

Coronovirus caused some weird things. My brother in law and his wife and kids are in New York for work and started to get some nasty comments about bringing the disease. They still love the US. Their return got delayed so there are still there now. Coronovirus did cause what I expect to be a short term spike in racism towards asians but we have not seen that locally from what I have seen in the local japanese school survey (my son goes to a Japanese supplimentary school as will my daughter)

So basically I have observed racism affecting people I care for, I had none myself towards Japanese. For the most part japanese are now "cool".
 
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