Yellow Peril

Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror) was a color metaphor for race, namely the theory that East Asian peoples were a danger to the western world. In the words of the American historian John W. Dower: "the vision of the menace from the East was always more racial rather than national. It derived not from concern with any one country or people in particular, but from a vague and ominous sense of the vast, faceless, nameless yellow horde: the rising tide, indeed, of color." Dower described "the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers", which had their origins in the wars between the ancient Greeks and Persians, and which the Yellow Peril theory later associated with East Asians.