Propaganda and the Perception of the Enemy
What This Theme Explores
In Grenade, Propaganda and the Perception of the Enemy asks how fear and power distort human vision until people no longer see individuals—only monsters. Through the dual perspectives of Hideki Kaneshiro and Ray Majors, the novel probes who benefits when governments weaponize rumor and language, and who pays the price. The book suggests that propaganda’s greatest success is not in winning battles but in collapsing moral judgment, making cruelty feel inevitable or even righteous. Ultimately, it argues that the “enemy” is a fantasy built to justify harm, while the truth—messy, human, and shared—persists beneath the slogans.
How It Develops
The story opens with unambiguous indoctrination. A commander’s speech instructs Okinawan boys to expect “American devils,” teaching Hideki that mercy is a lie and survival depends on refusing to be taken alive. Across the ocean, Ray is steeped in soldierly shorthand that reduces Japanese people to a single slur, while brief official materials hint—uneasily—that Okinawans are victims caught between forces. In these early chapters, propaganda simplifies war into a moral cartoon, positioning both boys to mistake myth for reality (Chapter 1-5 Summary).
Reality promptly fractures that cartoon. Hideki witnesses Japanese forces deride Okinawans as primitive and expendable, even as those same civilians, terrified by rumors of American brutality, leap to their deaths. Ray sees how fear scrambles the categories of enemy and friend: civilians become indistinguishable from combatants, and he’s pushed to fire on refugees. These events pull both boys into a moral fog where the rhetoric of “us versus them” no longer maps onto what their eyes see (Chapter 31-35 Summary).
By the end, propaganda’s scaffolding collapses. Hideki recognizes that fear—not nationality—turns people into monsters, while Ray’s growing collection of photographs replaces faceless enemies with families and names. Their climactic meeting exposes two terrified boys, not archetypes, and Hideki’s memorial of pictures for the dead on all sides refuses the very idea of an “enemy,” insisting instead on shared grief and responsibility.
Key Examples
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Japanese indoctrination made intimate: Lieutenant Colonel Sano terrifies schoolboys into seeing Americans as sadistic predators.
“American devils, whose only purpose is to kill you and your families...” The extremity of his claims prompts civilians later to choose death over capture, showing how propaganda doesn’t just fortify soldiers—it weaponizes the public’s imagination, producing tragedies it then cites as proof it was right all along (Chapter 6-10 Summary).
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The American “rule for survival”: Big John Barboza reduces combat to a preemptive trigger pull.
“A Jap’s a Jap, Majors… Shoot them before they shoot you.” This blunt credo keeps Ray alive but also narrows his vision, making doubt feel deadly. Even when official guidance briefly acknowledges Okinawans’ victimization, frontline vernacular overwrites nuance with a habit of dehumanization.
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Turning allies into targets: Japanese soldiers call Okinawans dojin, “primitives,” a slur that licenses exploitation and violence.
“If you dojin could defend your own stupid island, I wouldn’t even be here!” The insult is propaganda turned inward, proving that once a system normalizes dehumanization, it rarely stops at enemies—it erodes empathy everywhere (Chapter 21-25 Summary).
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Counter-propaganda and its limits: American leaflets explain how to surrender, trying to unspool fatal myths about capture. Hideki crumples his leaflet with disgust, a small but revealing act that shows how narratives, once embedded, outlast the facts that contradict them (Chapter 11-15 Summary).
Character Connections
Hideki begins as a believer in official stories but is forced into witness. Seeing Japanese troops sacrifice Okinawans—his people—shatters the neat moral binary he’s been handed. His eventual choice to honor the dead from every side is not naïve forgiveness; it’s a deliberate refusal to let fear define who counts as human.
Ray arrives with a soldier’s stark categories, but his habit of collecting photographs from the fallen works like a quiet counterspell. Each image interrupts propaganda’s flattening force, confronting him with birthdays, mothers, and girlfriends—evidence that the enemy had a life beyond the battlefield. Ray’s shift is less a conversion than an accumulation of dissonant details that he can no longer ignore.
Sano and Big John embody propaganda’s two modes: the official sermon and the survival rule. Sano’s rhetoric mobilizes boys through grandeur and terror, sacralizing death so it can be demanded. Big John’s maxim strips war to reflex, making moral hesitation feel like a threat. Together they show how institutions and individuals reinforce a culture where dehumanization is both policy and coping mechanism.
Symbolic Elements
The photographs: Ray’s and then Hideki’s collections turn the faceless into the particular. Where propaganda insists on the category “enemy,” the photos insist on names and relationships. Hideki’s final wall of images—American, Japanese, Okinawan—rebuilds the moral world propaganda dismantled.
The labels “Devil” and “Jap”: These words are not descriptions; they are tools. By collapsing a person into a monster, the terms anesthetize conscience, making atrocities feel like procedures. The book’s attention to language underscores how killing often begins with naming.
The grenades: Given to schoolboys as one to throw and one to die by, they literalize propaganda’s logic: better to destroy than be seen as less than loyal. Their fragile pottery construction exposes the hollowness of that logic—dangerous in purpose, brittle in substance. When Hideki leaves his last grenade behind, he rejects the story that only death can be honorable.
Contemporary Relevance
In an era of algorithmic feeds, psy-ops, and viral misinformation, the novel’s warnings feel urgent. Digital platforms make it easy to circulate caricatures and hard to encounter the stubborn complexity of real lives; fear, outrage, and certainty are engineered features, not bugs. Grenade invites readers to resist the seduction of simplified enemies by seeking primary voices, preserving nuance, and remembering that empathy is not a luxury in conflict—it’s a safeguard against committing the very harms we fear.
Essential Quote
“American devils, whose only purpose is to kill you and your families…”
Sano’s line encapsulates propaganda’s method: replace uncertainty with a totalizing story that leaves no room for exceptions, context, or mercy. The absolute claim authorizes absolute responses—suicide, massacre, betrayal—by preemptively declaring humanity on the other side impossible. The rest of the novel methodically disproves this sentence, not with counter-slogans, but with faces, choices, and grief.