No doubt many in the U.S. after WWII felt this about Japan. After all, how could a bunch of backwards savages who flew suicide attacks with planes, who fought against all odds, who had never had anything resembling a democracy hope to have one?

Especially when racism was much more widespread in the United States.

Here's a description of an article from Life magazine in 1941, telling how to distinguish between friendly Chinese and enemy Japs:

With the help of LIFE, however, the task is made much easier. As the original article explains:

In the first discharge of emotions touched off by the Japanese assaults on their nation, U.S. citizens have been demonstrating a distressing ignorance on the delicate question of how to tell a Chinese from a Jap. Innocent victims in cities all over the country are many of the 75,000 U.S. Chinese whose homeland is our stanch ally. […] To dispel some of this confusion, LIFE here adduces a rule-of-thumb from the anthropometric conformations that distinguish friendly Chinese from the enemy alien Japs. (81)

As in the warplane article, the magazine teaches its readers how to differentiate between Japanese and Chinese people, with what Foster terms "instructive, easily interpreted / diagrams/photographs." These photographs are marked with crudely notated facial features in a manner that an anthropologist might compare an ape and a gorilla. Furthermore, Foster identifies how the article’s "helpful captions / denote distinctive bones structures and facial features." Under LIFE’s photograph of General Hideki Tojo, the caption not only offers to differentiate between the two racial groups through anthropological information, but it also states, "An often sounder clue is facial expression, shaped by cultural, not anthropological, factors. Chinese wear rational calm of tolerant realists. Japs, like General Tojo, show humorless intensity of ruthless mystics" (81).

Perhaps even more instructive are cartoons from WWII, including "Bugs Bunny Nips The Nips" (1943), in which Bugs battles buck-tooth Japanese on a deserted island, and "You're a Sap, Mr. Jap" (1942), in which Popeye battles the Japanese.

The point is, there was mainstream racism towards Japanese in WWII, and no doubt a much larger segment of the population that doubted the efficacy of trying to democratize Japan.

And yet, sounder minds prevailed. The naysayers were quieted. It took seven years to establish a functioning democracy and get their economy on its feet.

It was done there, and democracy can take root anywhere. But it takes will, and it takes patience.