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| Directed by Margaret Palmer |
| Canada, 1942 (documentary, 21 minutes, black and white, English) |
| Also known as "Les Nazis jaunes" |
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Film Description: "An anti-Japanese propaganda film produced during World War II." -- National Film Board of Canada (source) |
| Film Credits (partial): | |
| Written by: | Stuart Legg |
| Produced by: | Stuart Legg |
| Narrator: | Lorne Greene |
| Music: | Lucio Agostini, Louis Applebaum |
| Production Company: | National Film Board of Canada / Office national du film du Canada |
"The Mask of Nippon [...] used all the considerable skill and power characteristic of the series [The World in Action] to produce a message of hate worthy of Joseph Goebbels. 'The soldiers of the rising sun are little men,' booms Lorne Greene, narrator of the series, 'two faced; with a modern and progressive surface thinly hiding their savage and barbaric double character!' It was wartime and anything went, but the appeal of the film was clearly racist; in interesting contrast with the mild and reasonable manner in which similar films treated our Caucasian enemies."
-- Ronald Blumer
(source)
"The Canadian mosaic was not a melting pot and [Robert] Lower [director of the 2014 documentary Shameless Propaganda] acknowledges how 'outsiders', that is to say, non-Anglo-Saxon Canadians, were portrayed in NFB [National Film Board of Canada] films during this period. Images of backward Slavs were shown ritualistically walking in religious processions; prevailing anti-Semitic attitudes (including [John] Grierson's own) were upheld at the Film Board; and Asian-Canadians were simply not portrayed at all except for Japanese-Canadians who were derided or shown smiling in internment camps that were named 'relocation districts'. The film Mask of Nippon (1942), a documentary to show the evil Japanese at work to conquer the world is exceedingly racist. In fact, the translation of its French title is Yellow Nazis. Lorne Greene's narration mercilessly spews hateful slurs over images that are essentially benign, thus creating a dichotomy between what we hear and what we see given that the image is used as simple background to the rhetoric."
-- Oksana Dykyj
(source)
"[The footage in The Mask of Nippon] of Japanese soldiers brutalizing a crowd of Chinese civilians [...] was the most atrocity-filled war footage ever shown to Canadians. The crowd scene, the burying alive of prisoners, the woman, and the bayoneted child were in fact staged, taken from a Chinese-made propaganda film and inserted as actuality footage along with segments of the Magee film [John Magee's footage from the Nanking Atrocity]. Mixing black (staged) and white (authentic) propaganda was allowable if the result articulated the true larger picture. The narration made reference neither to Nanking nor to the provenance of the footage. The evocative impact of soldiers bayoneting the child remained indelible as audiences would have absorbed the whole as 'authentic'. A number of stills from the staged sequences continue today to be used, (probably unknowingly), as actuality photographs from Nanking."
-- Gary Evans
(source)
"[The World in Action series did not] hesitate to bring the grim, if not revolting, reality of war to the screen. In The Mask of Nippon [...] captured enemy footage depicts a Japanese soldier throwing a child in the air and catching [the child] on his bayonet."
-- William Goetz
(source)
"[In The Mask of Nippon] the Japs are painted in such strong colors that one is somewhat suspicious of the entire film as being a propaganda hymn of hate. We must of course fight this enemy, but must we hate them so intensely? And what of after the war? Does the hatred stop then?"
-- Philip T. Hartung [1942]
(source)
"Besides their sometimes overbearing tone, the main weakness in the films [of the Canada Carries On and The World in Action series] is that the commentary plays the dominant role. Images are used simply to illustrate the verbal argument. The images often represent deceptively what is being said in the commentary. For The Mask of Nippon, for instance, shots of Japanese swimmers in a long-distance competition are used to represent Japanese navy swimmers preparing to sabotage British ships somewhere in the Far East."
-- D.B. Jones
(source)
"The Mask of Nippon employs the logic of mask and true nature, which is a tactic to integrate the imperial images of Japan into the role of war enemy against Canada. By setting up this dualist framework, the film claims that, although the individual bodies of the Yamato-race appear to have become civilized, their true savage nature has never ceased to exist. Therefore, they can't be assimilated into Western civilization. In this way, The Mask of Nippon not only supported Canada's involvement in the war against Japan, but also authorized the segregation and displacement of Canadians of Japanese origin in Canada."
-- Chikako Nagayama
(source)
"By some ironic stroke of fortune, the same disorderly program at the Globe includes [...] the latest issue of the excellent World in Action series. Taut and timely, Mask of Nippon opens with a series of lacerating shots of Japanese atrocities in China and then proceeds to analyze the quality and method of the enemy we face across the Pacific. In a tightly dramatized style it tells some of the facts which it is essential for us to know in dealing with a mortal peril."
-- New York Times [1942]
(source)
"John Grierson, the NFB's film commissioner as well as the head of the Wartime Information Board, envisaged a series for domestic and international audiences that would present the global strategy of the war [The World in Action]. [...] Grierson went to Hollywood and met with Charlie Chaplin and Mary Pickford of United Artists (UA). He convinced them of the importance of distributing these films. [...] As with [the Canada Carries On series], some of the films were versioned into French and released in Quebec and New Brunswick as Le Monde en Action. The films in this series were the first Canadian films to receive extensive exposure throughout the world and more specifically in the United States."
-- Albert Ohayon
(source)
"In 1943 and 1944, attitudes to Japanese in Ontario 'fluctuated' according to the state of the war or reports of atrocities in Asia. Ottawa's propaganda efforts did nothing to ease hostility. For example, late in 1942, a National Film Board production, The Mask of Nippon, portrayed the Japanese as a race that 'could practise deceit and treachery in such a manner that their every action held a double meaning.'"
-- Patricia E. Roy
(source)
"The Tivoli also shows an excellent picture of the Japanese, giving an insight into the fanaticism and self-abnegation of the Nipponese. The Mask of Nippon was distributed by the National Film Board, Ottawa, under auspices of the director of public information. It is thus a propaganda film, but one forgets this as the spiritual backgrounds of Japan's rise to a modern power is pictured. The film was taken in Japan and it might be interesting to know how the National Film Board obtained it, for it reveals the whole story of a nation preparing to grasp at world domination."
-- Saskatoon Star-Phoenix [1942]
(source)
"Up in Canada the government producers of the World in Action series continue to amaze the audiences with the pungency and vitality of their documentary records of a world at war. American distribution for these excellent shorts, made under the guidance of John Grierson and Stuart Legg, is gradually widening, and they should eventually be seen in every city and town throughout the country. For in telling Canada's story, they tell ours too. This becomes particularly clear in the three latest films to be released here: Inside Fighting Russia, Inside Fighting China, and The Mask of Nippon. The scene above is from the last film, one of many scenes designed to show the dualism of the Japanese character, which can countenance worship with equal fervor at the shrines of warlike and bucolic gods."
-- Theatre Arts [1942]
(source)
"The Wartime Information Board scorned only one ethnic minority: the Japanese Canadians. At the same time that government propagandists were persuading English Canadians that ethnic Canadians could be loyal to their adopted land, the National Film Board documentary The Mask of Nippon was portraying deceit and duplicity as integral elements of Japanese national character."
-- John Herd Thompson
(source)
"Every aspect of The Mask of Nippon is well calculated to accentuate the long-plotted and skillfully executed infamy that shook the civilized world a year ago today."
-- The Washington Post [1942]
(source)
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