memes

I'm from Seattle, a place where many Japanese Americans immigrated to before the war.

... During the war, they were rounded up, shipped to concentration camps on the other side of the state (in a desert), and basically all of their homes and business property/possessions were seized and sold off during the war, and while they were released aome years after the war ended, they were seriously discriminated against for decades afterward.

I obviously can't speak for all Japanese people, but yeah, Japanese Americans I've known find 'Jap' to be a slur. There's a good amount of newspapers and even US propaganda films shown to either the military and/or the public, and other media, that use the term 'Jap' alongside rascist cariacatures...

Dr Seuss, more widely known as an author/illustrator of childrens books, actually drew a good amount of these racist cariacatures.

A likely NSFW example

This was a poster, an advertisement for a war bond, drawn by Dr Seuss

The even worse slur... is something I'm not even comfortable typing out... basically, similarly shorten Nippon (which is a name of 'Japan' in Japanese, along with Nihon) to only the first syllable.

That one is an even more severe slur and was commonly used during the war. It's basically as severe, rude and disrespectful as the n-word with a hard r to refer to Black people.

If you want to use a 3 letter abbreviation for Japan, I'd suggest JPN.

No idea, really. See my other reply to daggermoon.

Worth pointing out that for the rest of the world this is often hard to navigate. Americans have a reputation for excessive self-censorship based on pearl-clutching, with "the F word" or "p*rn" or censoring nipples.

So sometimes actual strongly hateful or dehumanising language gets dismissed as another example of oversensitity.

Yeah, it is an easy mistake to make. Generally abbreviations/diminutives for nationalities are insulting (Brit excluded)