Japanese Reaction
News that President Roosevelt had been given a bone letter opener by a congressman were widely reported in Japan. The Americans were portrayed as “deranged, primitive, racist and inhuman”. This reporting was compounded by the previous May 22, 1944 Life Magazine picture of the week publication of a young woman with a skull trophy. Edwin P. Hoyt in "Japan’s war: the great Pacific conflict" argues that two U.S. media reports of Japanese skulls and bones being sent home were exploited by Japanese propaganda very effectively, and this coupled to the Shinto religion which places much higher emotional value on the treatment of human remains, contributed to a preference to death over surrender and occupation, shown, for example, in the mass civilian suicides on Saipan and Okinawa after the Allied landings. According to Hoyt, "The thought of a Japanese soldier's skull becoming an American ashtray was as horrifying in Tokyo as the thought of an American prisoner used for bayonet practice was in New York."
Read more about this topic: American Mutilation Of Japanese War Dead
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