Music is used in American World War II films in several ways as a vehicle for anti-Japanese propaganda, offering new perspectives on musical exoticism at it relates to representing the Japanese people and Japanese music. The goal of World War II propaganda films, produced by Hollywood and the U. S. Government, was to convince soldiers and civilians of the necessity of fighting the evil enemy. The Japanese enemy was constructed using Orientalist stereotypes, including musical stereotypes drawn from European music, Orientalist signs for Japan, and actual Japanese music or imitations thereof. Russian immigrant film composer Dimitri Tiomkin used Russian concert music, particularly excerpts of The Rite of Spring, to accompany scenes of Japanese violence in several films he scored, drawing on primitivist associations with that repertoire. Other films rely on a stable of musical tropes to evoke the Japanese enemy including loud, low brass instruments, pentatonic scales, and gongs. These tropes were adapted primarily from music associated with Native Americans in Hollywood westerns. World War II propaganda films are also remarkably intertextual, with shots and even full scenes repurposed several times. Depictions of Japanese folk music are generally confined to films meant to instruct G.I.s on Japanese culture—a necessarily distorted image of it—and are rarely heard in Hollywood films. Anti-Japanese propaganda, shaped in large part by Orientalist music, had a lasting effect on American perceptions of Japanese people and culture after the war, even as Hollywood attempted to counter these messages in the following decades.

Works: Frank Capra (director), Alfred Newman (musical director): score to Prelude to War (314-18); Dimitri Tiomkin: score to The Battle of China (318-21), score to Know Your Enemy—Japan (318-21); Alfred Newman: score to The Purple Heart (344-347)

Sources: Wagner: Der Ring des Nibelungen (314-18); Stravinsky: The Rite of Spring (318-21); Modest Mossorgsky: Pictures at an Exhibition (318-19); Yoshiisa Oku and Akimori Hayashi: Kimigayo (344-47)

Index Classifications: 1900s

Contributed by: Matthew Van Vleet