Know Your Enemy: Japan - Impact

Impact

The film’s main purpose was to keep the fighting spirit alive in the United States and to spur on the final push against the Japanese. However, the film’s release date turned out to utterly destroy its value. Released on August 9, 1945, Know Your Enemy: Japan came out three days after the bombing of Hiroshima and on the same day as the bombing of Nagasaki, which ultimately ended the conflict between the U.S. and Japan. General McArthur decided to withhold the film from the troops and he recommended that it not be released to the public . The bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were a turning point for American foreign policy in the Pacific, and when policy switched from war to negotiation, a movie persuading the American people to continue fighting became undesirable.

The historian John W. Dower comments that the film “was a potpourri of most of the English speaking world’s dominant clichés about the Japanese enemy, excluding the crudest, most vulgar, and most blatantly racist." The film thus "captured the passions and presumptions that underlay not only the ferocity of clash in Asia and the Pacific, but also the sweeping agenda of reformist policies that the Allied powers subsequently attempted to impose upon defeated and occupied Japan.”