Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

by Daniel James Brown

From the earliest days of Asian immigration in the nineteenth century, first print media and later Hollywood had promoted the notion of a “Yellow Peril”—an unrelenting wave of Asian immigration that threatened to overwhelm and destroy not just the United States but the entire western world. Particularly from the 1880s onward, editorial cartoons in major newspapers routinely depicted Asian figures as rodents, cockroaches, snakes, and other vermin swarming ashore on American beaches. Magazine covers offered up lurid images of sinister Asian men with long fingernails ravaging white women or seducing them in dingy opium dens. Beginning in 1929, Hollywood brought Americans the specter of the evil Fu Manchu, bent on destroying the western world. Soon a host of other unsavory Asian characters, either servile and cringing or inscrutable and threatening—and almost always played by white actors—were regular fare in American movie houses.