The Yellow Peril (also Yellow Terror and Yellow Spectre) was a racist color-metaphor that is conceptually integral to the xenophobic theory of colonialism; that the peoples of East Asia are a danger to the Western World. As a psycho-cultural vision of the menacing East, the Yellow Peril was more racial than national, a fear derived, not from concern with a specific source of danger, from any one country or people, but from a vaguely ominous, existential fear of the vast, faceless, nameless horde of yellow people opposite the Western world. As a form of xenophobia, the Yellow Terror represents the white race's fear of the rising tide of colored people from The Orient. Culturally, the Yellow Peril is represented in “the core imagery of apes, lesser men, primitives, children, madmen, and beings who possessed special powers”, which are cultural representations of non-white people that originated in the Græco-Persian Wars (499–449 BC), between Ancient Greece and the Persian Empire; centuries later, the Western imperialist expansion then included East Asians to the phrase Yellow Peril. In 1895, Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany invented the phrase Yellow Peril, in effort to interest the other European empires in the perils they faced in their invasions of China. To that end, the Kaiser of Germany used the Japanese military victory in the Russo-Japanese War (1904–05) to evoke racialist fear among the white peoples of Western Europe, by misrepresenting Imperial Japan as an ally of China, who jointly would overrun the Western world. The sinologist Leung Wing Fai explained the fantastic origins of the phrase and the underlying racialist concepts: “The phrase Yellow Peril (sometimes Yellow Terror or Yellow Spectre) — coined by Kaiser Wilhelm II of Germany, in the 1890s, after a dream in which he saw the Buddha riding a dragon, and threatening to invade Europe — blends Western anxieties about sex, racist fears of the alien Other, and the Spenglerian belief that the West will become outnumbered and enslaved by the East”. The American historian Gina Marchetti defined the psycho-cultural perception of a menace from the peoples of Asia as “rooted in medieval fears of Genghis Khan and the Mongolian invasions of Europe, the Yellow Peril combines racist terror of alien cultures, sexual anxieties, and the belief that the West will be overpowered and enveloped, by the irresistible, dark, occult forces of the East”; thus, in 20th-century geopolitics, the Western-world perceptions of Japanese imperial militarism then included ethnic-Japanese citizens of the U.S. to the term Yellow Peril.

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