Operation Fantasia: A World War II Plan To Scare The Japanese With Glowing Foxes
Public DomainA Japanese scroll depicting a group of kitsune, supernatural foxes said to bewitch humans.
Japan is a richly spiritual nation. More than 87 million people in the country are associated with Shinto today, and shrines dedicated to various deities can be seen all over the country. Japan is also known for its folklore, particularly the legendary creatures known as yōkai. One yōkai that makes frequent appearances in folk stories is the kitsune, a supernatural fox known to play tricks and sometimes bewitch people.
During World War II, these folk beliefs nearly became a tool for the United States to wage psychological warfare on the Japanese people. The plan, Operation Fantasia, came about after William “Wild Bill” Donovan, the leader of the Office of Strategic Services, told his scientists to figure out how they could “outfox” enemy soldiers in the Axis powers.
OSS psychological warfare strategist Ed Salinger took this advice a little too literally. Since he used to run a business in Tokyo, he was somewhat familiar with Japanese folklore, including the kitsune. And he thought Americans should take advantage of this belief to scare the Japanese into defeat.
One version of Operation Fantasia went as follows: Fly fox-shaped balloons over Japanese villages to frighten the local populations. To accompany the balloons and add to the overall effect, it was proposed that soldiers would also play instruments that imitated fox cries, thus fooling the Japanese people into believing that they were being attacked by kitsune.
It shouldn’t need to be said, but this entire plan was deeply rooted in racism. Look no further than Salinger’s own memo outlining the idea, in which he writes, “The foundation for the proposal rests upon the fact that the modern Japanese is subject to superstitions, beliefs in evil spirits and unnatural manifestations which can be provoked and stimulated.”
In essence, Salinger’s plan hinged on the notion that Japanese people were more gullible than Western folk. Salinger seemed to think that the average Japanese person believed in yōkai, beyond the realm of folklore.
The balloon and whistle plan was ultimately cast aside in favor of a different plan to capture live foxes in China and Australia, spray-paint them with glow-in-the-dark paint, and release them in Japan. To see if this would actually scare the Japanese, as they hoped, the OSS decided to put the plan to the test by releasing 30 painted foxes in a park in Washington, D.C.
People who passed by the glowing foxes were indeed frightened, and so it seemed like Operation Fantasia might be somewhat successful. The other issue, however, was how they would get the foxes into Japan. The OSS decided to drop the foxes into the Chesapeake Bay near the shore and see if they swam to the land. By some miracle, this actually worked — except, once the foxes arrived on land, most of the paint had washed off.
Salinger proposed several other versions of Operation Fantasia, including having Japanese citizens who were sympathetic to the Allied cause pretend to be possessed by fox spirits, but none ever made it past the planning stage. The OSS ultimately canceled the secret government project, largely because it was impractical at best and outright foolish at worst.
