Deciphering the Rising Sun

Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, 2009, 340 pages, including notes, bibliography and index, ISBN 10: 1591142113, £18.99 (Hardcover)

Review by Ian Nish

Professor Dingman has based this enlightening study on extended interviews with former officers in the US Navy and Marine Corps who are now in their upper 80s. But he has also made much use of the unpublished memoirs to be found in the Navy Language School Collection in the Norlin Library, University of Colorado at Boulder where they were trained. It is a tribute to the US government – and the British for that matter – that they appreciated the importance of training linguists during the Asia-Pacific war and had the foresight to recruit and train personnel not of Japanese ancestry to study the Japanese language with a view to serving as language officers. Dingman concludes that it was a successful experiment and draws a painful parallel with the Bush administration’s decision to invade Iraq:

“In June 2002 America teetered on the cusp of a war in Iraq that has lasted longer than the titanic struggle which the World War II language officers fought… It led to swift military victory, but true peace has proven elusive in the disastrously mismanaged, occupation that followed… those in our armed forces charged with carrying out their orders lacked knowledge of Iraq’s history and culture and of the language of its people. (pp. 249-50)”

In 1942 the US government recognized the need to set up a school where its servicemen could be instructed in the Japanese language. After brief sojourns at Harvard and Berkeley, it was decided to locate it at the University of Colorado in Boulder. On 23 June 1942, barely two weeks after the Battle of Midway, the school opened with 152 officer candidates, recruited mainly by Albert Hindmarsh, who had as a young academic visited Japan in 1937 to study the language intensively. The students were trained by both American and Japanese instructors, using the Naganuma texts. In their teaching they maintained a balance between the spoken and written aspects of “this most difficult language.”

When the first class graduated in July 1943, they became marine second lieutenants. In the first stage some were introduced in Washington to work as code-breakers and specialized in radio interception and cryptographic work for the Navy. But code-breaking and translation were demoralizing; and it was not until 1944 that they became involved in combat. As the war progressed, they played their part as Marine combat interpreters in the island-hopping campaign. Meanwhile their naval colleagues were trained to function as Japanese-speaking intelligence officers. In the last months of the war they were generally attached to combat units and saw grisly service in Okinawa.

Two items of relevance to Britain and the Commonwealth may be made at this point. Britain could not rely on niseis [a native the US or Canada born of immigrant Japanese parents and educated in America or Canada), except for those who were seconded from Canada. Nor had missionary families in Japan been as numerous as were the Americans before the war. So the British services had no pool of recruits on which they could draw in order to build up their linguistic resources. Apart from those trained at SOAS, Bill Beasley was sent by the Royal Navy to Boulder for training with the Americans. Some Commonwealth linguists also joined Allied Translator and Interpreter Service (ATIS), primarily an army facility, attached to General MacArthur’s HQ in Brisbane, which made a large contribution to Japanese language studies during the war.

After the official Japanese surrender in 1945, many language officers played a critical role in facilitating the local surrender of garrisons in islands like Wake and Truk which made up what Dingman calls Japan’s maritime empire. Later they became involved in war crimes investigations and the prosecutions in outlying stations like Manila. The same job had to be done for parts of Japan’s continental empire in China and Korea. Their linguistic knowledge was invaluable in achieving the successful dismantling of the Japanese Empire. From the evidence Dingman has amassed, it seems that interpreters were able to empathize with the commanders whose surrender they took and smoothed the transition to peace.

When they landed in Japan herself, language officers had to act as agents of occupation, enforcing the instruments of surrender. Dingman claims (pp. 194-5) that “language officers stood at the forefront of those who helped bring about that change (in unfriendly US attitudes to Japan).” Given the American perception that the Japanese had been transformed, what was the role of these wartime combatants in the post-war occupation of Japan’s home islands? They performed their roles as investigators, reporters but also as bridge-builders promoting American-Japanese understanding. This brings us to the question of fraternization. Evidently dance halls sprouted in Tokyo’s Ginza soon after the war’s end; and GIs enjoyed dancing with young Japanese girls there. Language officers visited Japanese homes. This was one area in which US and British perspectives differed. British troops when they came on the scene early in 1946 were subject to a non-fraternization order; and, however much that order was in practice violated, it remained in force.

Dingman concludes by looking at the later careers of the Boulder graduates. One year after Japan’s surrender, Boulder language school closed and the staff were dispersed. So far as the former graduates were concerned, Dingman divides them into two categories: those who were “touched by Japan” and joined professions where Japanese knowledge was peripheral but where they retained Japanese sympathies. And those who were “beguiled by Japan” – that is, those whose experience in the war persuaded them to devote their lives to furthering Japanese studies. Thus “By 1946 Ted de Bary, Donald Keene and John W. Hall were already uniquely positioned by their wartime naval experiences to become the intellectual leaders of Japanese studies in post-war America (page 245).”

In the years that followed these and so many more (Beardsley, Robert Ward, Tom Smith, James Morley, Ardath Burks, Scalapino and Shiveley) pursued cross-cultural projects with Japan and produced seminal publications. These are mainly historians; but one could duplicate this list in the field of journalism, Japanese art and translation. In their way they all operated as “unofficial ambassadors” between Tokyo and Washington. Eventually in 1975 the “academic veterans” succeeded in inducing Congress to fund a Japan-US Friendship Commission that would enable later generations to study Japan’s culture as they had earlier done in the extraordinary circumstances of war.