This Incident Surprised me...!

This is Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss.

Dr. Seuss was an American author.

Most of you probably know him as the writer of some of the most popular children’s books of all time, like The Cat in the Hat, Green Eggs and Ham, The Grinch, and The Lorax.

But what some people don’t know is that Dr. Seuss was a political cartoonist during World War 2.

During the war, he drew more than 400 cartoons for newspapers in New York, USA.

These cartoons were made to praise and support the American war effort in WW2.

Because of this, many of the cartoons were horribly racist towards America’s enemies in WW2, especially the Japanese.

Here are some examples:

By today’s standards, these cartoons are… pretty shocking and offensive to Japanese people.

But in 1953, 8 years after WW2 ended, Seuss visited Japan, where he met and talked with some of its people and saw the horrible aftermath of the atomic bomb dropped on Hiroshima.

Soon after this visit, Dr. Seuss realized how wrong and offensive he had been in his depiction of the Japanese in his wartime political cartoons.

So, he apologized in the only way he could:

He wrote a children’s book.

In 1954, Dr. Seuss published Horton Hears a Who.

The book is about an elephant that has to protect a city of tiny people who live on a speck of dust.

There is one line in the book that shows how Dr. Seuss’s views towards Japanese people had changed:

“A person’s a person, no matter how small.”

And if that wasn’t enough, he even dedicated it, “My Great Friend, Mitsugi Nakamura of Kyoto, Japan.”

Because he’s one of the most famous children’s book authors of all time, I was very surprised to learn that he wrote one of his books to apologize for being racist in the past.