World War II Propaganda poster published in Australia in 1942. (Source)

Just another nerd.
World War II Propaganda poster published in Australia in 1942. (Source)
Seventy-five years ago, the United States Army Air Forces launched the single deadliest air raid of World War II when 279 B-29s dropped 1,510 tons of bombs on Tokyo over a period of almost three hours.
Estimates of the number of people killed in the bombing of Tokyo on March 10 differ. After the raid, 79,466 bodies were recovered and recorded. Many other bodies were not recovered, and the city’s director of health estimated that 83,600 people were killed and another 40,918 wounded. The Tokyo fire department put the casualties at 97,000 killed and 125,000 wounded, and the Tokyo Metropolitan Police Department believed that 124,711 people had been killed or wounded. After the war, the United States Strategic Bombing Survey estimated the casualties as 87,793 killed and 40,918 injured. The survey also stated that the majority of the casualties were women, children and elderly people. Frank wrote in 1999 that historians generally believe that there were between 90,000 and 100,000 fatalities, but some argue that the number was much higher. For instance, Edwin P. Hoyt stated in 1987 that 200,000 people had been killed and in 2009 Mark Selden wrote that the number of deaths may have been several times the estimate of 100,000 used by the Japanese and United States Governments The large population movements out of and into Tokyo in the period before the raid, deaths of entire communities and destruction of records mean that it is not possible to know exactly how many died.
Bake-Kujira–ghost whale–is a legendary ghost whale creature in Japan that “is supposedly a large ghostly skeleton whale and is said to be accompanied by strange birds and fish.”
According to Wikipedia, mochi is a
Japanese rice cake made of mochigome, a short-grain japonica glutinous rice. The rice is pounded into paste and molded into the desired shape. In Japan it is traditionally made in a ceremony called mochitsuki. While also eaten year-round, mochi is a traditional food for the Japanese New Year and is commonly sold and eaten during that time.
Mochi is apparently also occasionally deadly. According to an International Business Times report, during the 2015 New Year celebration, 9 people died in Japan from suffocating on the snack, and 18 people were hospitalized in Tokyo alone.
The sticky, glutinous dish can get stuck in the throats of those eating it–especially those who are very young or very old–causing people to suffocate.
This “How To Spot A Jap” comic was included in the U.S. Army’s 1942 “Pocket Guide to China,” which it distributed to soldiers who were being sent to fight in China. Milton Caniff, creator of the Terry and the Pirates comic strip, did the illustrations.
Instructing people on how to distinguish Chinese from Japanese people was apparently a common theme of World War II-era propaganda. For example, the December 22, 1941 edition of Life magazine ran a feature titled How To Tell Japs from the Chinese.