Because Japanese Americans had been excluded from the Pacific coast, the Army decided to move its school from San Francisco to Minnesota. In June 1942, just as the graduates of the first language school began their first tours of duty, the War Department declared it would not allow any people with Japanese ancestry to enlist in the military. READ MORE: 8 Groundbreaking Contributions by Asian Americans Throughout HistoryĬaptain Jerry Tobin, infantry recruiting officer, shown swearing in a batch of Nisei youths about to undergo examinations of their ability as interpreters, in written and spoken Japanese, recruited for service in the US Army. This “evacuation” was accompanied by xenophobia and prejudice, and Nisei who were already in the military were viewed as potential spies and threats, and many were discharged. Two months earlier, backed by an executive order by President Roosevelt, the United States had begun forcibly relocating people who had 1/16 Japanese ancestry or more, sending them to 10 internment camps around the country. By then, the Japanese had attacked Pearl Harbor and the United States was gripped with paranoia about Japanese Americans. Nakamura, “and, given the short supply of texts, trainees studied from mimeographed sheets.”įorty-five students graduated from the program in May 1942-a full quarter of the class had failed because the program was so difficult. “Initially orange crates and boxes functioned as desks and chairs,” writes historian Kelli Y. So in November 1941, armed with $2,000 and four Nisei language teachers, the Army began its first Japanese language school in an airport hangar in San Francisco. It was clear the war effort would need Japanese interpreters, and even clearer that so few white Americans spoke Japanese that equipping them with the skills they needed in time for war would be almost impossible. In the summer of 1941, the military surveyed the Army to determine if there were Japanese speakers who might be able to help in the case of war with Japan, but it found that of the 3,700 Nisei who were already in the army, only a small number were fluent enough in Japanese to serve as intelligence workers. Though there was talk of recruiting Nisei to help with intelligence overseas, there weren’t many people to choose from. But though they helped the Allies win the war, the Nisei linguists’ contributions to the war effort were kept secret until decades later.īefore World War II, the United States military had invested little in establishing a Japanese-language intelligence corps. They served their country while over 100,000 Japanese Americans and immigrants from Japan were forced from their homes and jobs and into internment camps. These children of Japanese immigrant (who were known as Issei) translated crucial documents and assisted with interrogations and interpretations, often during tense battles. Over the course of World War II, Nisei linguists, many of whom were initially forbidden from serving in the military and many of whom spoke little Japanese before the war, became a critical tool in the Pacific Theater. Instead, they were training to be shipped to the Pacific Theater, where they would become one of the United States’ most powerful secret weapons. These sons of immigrants were American citizens, but because of their parents’ ancestry, they were considered enemies of the United States.īut unlike their parents, they weren’t headed for internment camps. They weren’t there to gamble: They were there to visit their parents, Japanese immigrants who were about to be incarcerated for the duration of the war. They slipped out of their headquarters in San Francisco and snuck toward their destination, a nearby racetrack. In February 1942, a small group of members of a top-secret military language school defied orders.
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