Japan Menances World Trade pamplet (1944)

The following very pretty pamphlet cover was printed in 1944 by the ‘Ministry Of Information’. It shows a black Japanese octopus with rising sun behind it with the caption: “Japan Menaces World Trade”. The Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives list it as a “leaflet on raw materials made unobtainable by Japanese conquest in the Far East, with pictorial statistics in black and red”¹. The “symbols of industry”² are more graphic than in the earlier l’etat monopoles of France, or monopolies of the USA. They appear to include: Tea, Rice, Textiles?, Tyres, Ingots of metal (gold?), Palm Trees?, Sugar, and some strange juicey pumpkin thing (coco, coffee?).

Notes

1. Liddell Hart Centre for Military Archives, Kings College,http://www.kcl.ac.uk/lhcma/cats/embleton/em50-01-.shtml (Accessed: 16th March 2009)
2. ibid.