About this project
In 1943, World War II's Pacific Theater — the major theater of battle between the Allied forces and the Japanese Empire — had been underway for a year.
The two sides had engaged in several bloody battles by this point, and racist, nationalist policies were adopted by the highest levels of government, including the United States's incarceration of Japanese Americans in concentration camps.
To make matters worse, the U.S. had in 1942 begun its Manhattan Project, the research and development venture that produced the world's first nuclear weapons.
It was in this context that Ernest Dudley Chase, the prolific illustrator from Massachussetts, created 'Japan, the Target: a Pictorial Jap-map.' The map depicts Japan as a literal target, encircled by an overwhelming number of combat bombers and seemingly doomed to a catastrophic fate.
Just two years after the map's creation, the United States deployed atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, killing as many as 225,000 civilians.
Map hosted at the Norman B Leventhal Map & Education Center. Read more here.