Nisei Soldiers Break Their Silence: Coming Home to Hood River

6. “Getting Shot from Ahead of Us and Behind Us” : War in the South Pacific

7 5 S i x “Getting Shot from Ahead of Us and Behind Us” War in the South Pacific H eaded for the South Pacific battlefront, Mam Noji gazed across San Francisco Bay from the top deck of a cargo Liberty ship. In only a few minutes, the enormity of his future would become apparent. “When Tot [fellow Hood Riverite Taro Asai] and I were going underneath the Golden Gate Bridge, he says, ‘I figure that we’ve only got a fifty-fifty chance of seeing that bridge again.’ Until then I never thought of not coming back. Fifty-fifty’s not good odds, is it?” Marksmanship practice on the ship did not bolster Noji’s confidence. “For the first three days we were accompanied by a big Chicago cruiser, a big battleship. We felt pretty good about it. One day, my gosh, we were all alone. We felt like a big target out there. And every day a few sailors on our ship would let loose a balloon and practice. They never even came close to it, you know. That didn’t do our morale too much good.” Military Intelligence Service Noji, Asai, and Frank Hachiya were specially trained Nisei linguists in the Military Intelligence Service (MIS), considered to be the U.S. Army’s “secret weapon.” They worked as Japanese-language translators and interrogators for the Intelligence Division of the U.S. Army (G-2).1 Dubbed the “Yankee Samurai,”2 they would become the eyes and ears of the Allied forces and would be instrumental in breaking the Pacific stalemate. Dis- 7 6 C h a p t e r S i x persed to duty with front line units from Great Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, India, and China, the MIS would serve in every major campaign and every major battle in the Pacific.3 In order to defeat Japan’s army, the U.S. military determined it would need hundreds, if not thousands, of linguists. Beginning in the spring of 1941, it laid the foundation for a language school, assuming that Nisei soldiers would be ready candidates. Unraveling the Japanese language, considered more complicated than most European languages, was a daunting mission, however, “almost beyond comprehension,” according to Brigadier General John Weckerling, the intelligence officer in the South Pacific who organized the school. Two separate alphabets and thousands of Chinese characters composed the written symbols, and the spoken language used different forms depending on rank or class. Military commanders in the Japanese army, confident that foreigners could not possibly intercept their messages and translate their complicated language, neglected to code their wartime communications. Japanese soldiers spoke freely, labeled their minefields, carried personal diaries, and even disregarded security while handling military documents. As a result, Nisei, who had been criticized for an upbringing that included Japanese language and culture, became indispensable for their wartime service: translating captured Japanese documents and interrogating prisoners of war.4 “The military were desperately scraping the bottom of the barrel to find some of us,” admitted Noji. “There was almost zero amongst American people who could speak Japanese language. . . . They were so desperate to find people who understood some Japanese—and I put myself at the lower level. They had to have us!” Indeed, the army had overestimated Nisei linguistic skills, hoping that a few weeks’ study of Japanese vocabulary, military terminology, and combat intelligence would suffice. Most Americanized Nisei had managed to converse in Japanese with their parents but had little experience reading and writing the complicated foreign characters (and certainly no exposure to Japanese military language). In 1941, a survey of the first 3,700 enlisted Nisei showed that only 3 percent could speak fluently. Another 4 percent were considered proficient, and 3 percent would be eligible only after “a prolonged period of training,”5 according to historian Masaharu Ano. Even then, one-fourth of GIs in the first class failed to graduate.6 Kibei, defined by U.S. intelligence as those Nisei having three or more years of schooling in Japan, particularly after age thirteen,7 were more W a r i n t h e S o u t h P a c i f i c  7 7 fluent in both written and spoken Japanese. In a college autobiography, Frank Hachiya shared his perspective on balancing his marginal positions between two cultures: “When you know the language of one people, you know the people...