Nisei Linguists

Nisei Linguists PDF

Author: James C. McNaughton

Publisher:

Published: 2016-03-29

Total Pages: 532

ISBN-13: 9781944961336

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This book tells the story of an unusual group of American soldiers in World War II, second-generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) who served as interpreters and translators in the Military Intelligence Service. It describes how the War Department recruited soldiers from an ethnic minority and trained them in a secret school to use the Japanese language. Months before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, the Fourth Army Intelligence School was established on the Presidio of San Francisco with sixty students. After the attack the Western Defense Command removed all persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast. The War Department transferred the school with its Nisei instructors and students to the Midwest. For the rest of the war the renamed Military Intelligence Service Language School operated in Minnesota at Camp Savage from 1942 to 1944 and then at Fort Snelling from 1944 to 1946. By the spring of 1946 the school had graduated nearly 6,000 military linguists in the Japanese language. The book also describes how these Nisei served with every major unit and headquarters in the Pacific war. Their courage, skill, and loyalty helped win the war sooner and at lower cost to the United States than would otherwise have been possible. During the American occupation of Japan they helped turn bitter enemies into friends, thus securing the victory and serving as a bridge between the two cultures.

Nisei Linguists

Nisei Linguists PDF

Author: James C. McNaughton

Publisher: Department of the Army

Published: 2006

Total Pages: 536

ISBN-13:

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At the start of World War, II the U.S. Army turned to Americans of Japanese ancestry to provide vital intelligence against Japanese forces in the Pacific. Nisei Linguists: Japanese Americans in the Military Intelligence Service during World War II tells the story of these soldiers, how the Military Intelligence Service (MIS) recruited and trained them, and how they served in every battle and campaign in the war against Japan. Months before Pearl Harbor, the Western Defense Command (WDC) selected sixty Nisei soldiers for Japanese-language training. When the WDC forcibly removed more than 100,000 persons of Japanese ancestry from the West Coast, MIS continued to recruit Nisei from the relocation camps and later from Hawaii. Over the next four years, the school graduated nearly 6,000 military linguists, including dozens of Nisei women and hundreds of Caucasians. Nisei Linguists tells the remarkable story of those who served with Army and Marine units from Guadalcanal to the Philippines, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. Their duties included translation, interrogation, radio monitoring, and psychological warfare. They staffed theater-level intelligence centers such as the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section in the Southwest Pacific Area. In China, Burma, and India they served with the Office of Strategic Services, Merrill’s Marauders, and Commonwealth forces. Others served with the Army Air Forces or within the continental United States. At war’s end, the Nisei facilitated local surrenders of Japanese forces as well as the occupation. Working in military government, war crimes trials, censorship, and counterintelligence, the MIS Nisei contributed to the occupation’s ultimate success.

Bodies of Memory

Bodies of Memory PDF

Author: Yoshikuni Igarashi

Publisher: Princeton University Press

Published: 2012-01-09

Total Pages: 295

ISBN-13: 1400842980

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Japan and the United States became close political allies so quickly after the end of World War II, that it seemed as though the two countries had easily forgotten the war they had fought. Here Yoshikuni Igarashi offers a provocative look at how Japanese postwar society struggled to understand its war loss and the resulting national trauma, even as forces within the society sought to suppress these memories. Igarashi argues that Japan's nationhood survived the war's destruction in part through a popular culture that expressed memories of loss and devastation more readily than political discourse ever could. He shows how the desire to represent the past motivated Japan's cultural productions in the first twenty-five years of the postwar period. Japanese war experiences were often described through narrative devices that downplayed the war's disruptive effects on Japan's history. Rather than treat these narratives as obstacles to historical inquiry, Igarashi reads them along with counter-narratives that attempted to register the original impact of the war. He traces the tensions between remembering and forgetting by focusing on the body as the central site for Japan's production of the past. This approach leads to fascinating discussions of such diverse topics as the use of the atomic bomb, hygiene policies under the U.S. occupation, the monstrous body of Godzilla, the first Western professional wrestling matches in Japan, the transformation of Tokyo and the athletic body for the 1964 Tokyo Olympics, and the writer Yukio Mishima's dramatic suicide, while providing a fresh critical perspective on the war legacy of Japan.

Pearl Harbor Revisited

Pearl Harbor Revisited PDF

Author: Frederick D. Parker

Publisher: CreateSpace

Published: 2012-07-31

Total Pages: 104

ISBN-13: 9781478344292

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This is the story of the U.S. Navy's communications intelligence (COMINT) effort between 1924 and 1941. It races the building of a program, under the Director of Naval Communications (OP-20), which extracted both radio and traffic intelligence from foreign military, commercial, and diplomatic communications. It shows the development of a small but remarkable organization (OP-20-G) which, by 1937, could clearly see the military, political, and even the international implications of effective cryptography and successful cryptanalysis at a time when radio communications were passing from infancy to childhood and Navy war planning was restricted to tactical situations. It also illustrates an organization plagues from its inception by shortages in money, manpower, and equipment, total absence of a secure, dedicated communications system, little real support or tasking from higher command authorities, and major imbalances between collection and processing capabilities. It explains how, in 1941, as a result of these problems, compounded by the stresses and exigencies of the time, the effort misplaced its focus from Japanese Navy traffic to Japanese diplomatic messages. Had Navy cryptanalysts been ordered to concentrate on the Japanese naval messages rather than Japanese diplomatic traffic, the United States would have had a much clearer picture of the Japanese military buildup and, with the warning provided by these messages, might have avoided the disaster of Pearl Harbor.

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