Friendly or positive animal images may imply strategies of racialization, too. The racial imaginary, however, is not limited to the application of negative animal qualities to humans (bestialization). In effect, both human animals and nonhuman animals are degraded through these dehumanizing, bestializing depictions. Behind this strategy is the idea that to depict someone as an animal is to strip away their very humanness, their humanity. In the American animalization or bestialization of the Japanese enemy, Dower detects a general strategy of dehumanization. the most common caricature of the Japanese by Westerners, writers and cartoonists alike, was the monkey or ape.”3 To scores of millions of participants, John Dower reminds us, World War II was a race war.1 Among the many patterns of racial prejudice explored in his book War without Mercy, Dower discusses how the American media depicted the Japanese as animals: “A characteristic feature of this level of anti-Japanese sentiment was the resort to nonhuman or subhuman representation, in which the Japanese were perceived as animals, reptiles, or insects (monkeys, baboons, gorillas, dogs, mice and rats, vipers and rattlesnakes, cockroaches, vermin, or more indirectly, ‘the Japanese herd’ and the like).” 2 And yet, “without question.