Early in World War II, I was interviewed by a major in Army intelligence. His mission was to decide whether I qualified to be a Japanese language officer.
“You qualify,” the major said, “except for one thing. You don't know a word of Japanese.”
He said he would defer my service for three months so that I could return to Stanford for Japanese 101. If I passed, I would move on to an Army language school for more training. If I survived that, I'd go to another language school for still more training.
Stanford, Harvard, Columbia and Princeton began offering Japanese incubator courses during World War II to prepare servicemen for the Army's new language schools. Japanese 101 in 1943 was the humble beginning of formal study of Asian languages at Stanford. Today the University has an entire department dedicated to Asian languages. The Army's interest in Japanese began only a few months before December 7, when Capt. Kai Rasmussen and Lt. Col. John Weckerling made it clear that—in the event of war with Japan—the Army would need interrogators, translators and interpreters.
That captain enlisted 60 nisei, second-generation Japanese-Americans who spoke both Japanese and English. (Before the war's end, there would be 6,000 military linguists, many of whom were released from internment camps to enlist.) Why, then, would the Army want me and my Japanese 101 classmates as language officers when there were thousands of nisei who could help with little training? Based on the faulty premise that Japanese-Americans might be disloyal, the Army reasoned that they could not be trusted as intelligence officers. Nisei could serve in the Pacific Theater, but only under non-Japanese American officers who spoke Japanese. The catch—there were almost no such officers.
Mr. Atchison, Miss Kopf and Miss Kim did manage to force-feed me enough Japanese at Stanford to get me admitted to the Army language school at the end of winter quarter. Once there, we encountered another hurdle: now many of our sensei (the title of honor for teacher) were native Japanese speakers, but some were fluent only in Japanese—not English.
I remember Mr. Akia, one of my teachers at Minnesota's Fort Snelling, sent everyone in his class Christmas cards with the greeting “To my best friend.”
“Sensei,” we explained, “you can have good friends and better friends, but only one best friend.”
“Oh, class,” Mr. Akia said, “please excuse me. What I meant to say is that I do not particularly care for any of you.”
Long before the rest of the military was integrated, Japanese-Americans' loyalty was recognized as beyond dispute, and many were commissioned as intelligence officers as well as in combat branches. I'm grateful, now, to Stanford for offering Japanese 101. It allowed me to ultimately serve in the Occupation, which, although successful, should not, in my experience, be considered a model for other occupations. Most of the credit for the Occupation's success should go to the culture and spirit of the Japanese-Americans themselves.
