Enduring Legacies: Ethnic Histories and Cultures of Colorado

10: Journey to Boulder: The Japanese American Instructors at the Navy Japanese Language School (1942–1946)

175 In April 1942, Joe Sano wrote a letter to his wife, Miya, who was being held at Tanforan Assembly Center in San Francisco with his elderly mother. Like 120,000 other Japanese Americans, the Sanos had been forcibly evicted from their home by Executive Order 9066 and imprisoned behind barbed wires. However, Joe had been secretly whisked away by Naval Intelligence officers and was only now allowed to explain his whereabouts to his wife. He had been brought to Boulder, Colorado, to teach the Japanese language to naval officers and was settling into his new environment. Joe promised Miya that when she joined him she would like Boulder, which he described as having a church or a bank on every corner.1 Despite the idyllic setting Joe painted for Miya, the disruption caused by the evacuation, the dispersion of her family to unknown destinations, and their lives at the assembly center had strained them both. White Americans, affirmed by their government’s policies, blamed Japanese Americans for Pearl Harbor and the war with Japan, and overnight all Americans of Japanese descent became suspected of betrayal. Would the Boulder community act any differently? Over 150 Japanese Americans served as instructors at the University of Colorado–housed Navy Japanese Language School (JLS) during World War II. Journey to Boulder: The Japanese American Instructors at the Navy Japanese Language School (1942–1946) 10 Jessica N. Arntson 176 Journey to Boulder Although evicted from their homes on the West Coast and imprisoned in concentration camps, they journeyed to Boulder to make vital contributions to the war effort by training interpreters, translators, and interrogators. The JLS instructors trained over 1,100 men and women officers to be proficient in the Japanese language and in the process altered their students’ lives, career paths, and biases toward the Japanese people. In the Pacific theater, officers of the JLS fought restrictive protocols and contested their superiors’ orders to lobby for humane treatment of Japanese prisoners of war. When they returned from their wartime posts, the former students of the JLS instructors went on to establish and nurture Japanese studies programs throughout the country to train new generations of scholars to understand the Japanese language, people , culture, economy, and history. The experiences of the JLS instructors and their families present a compelling perspective on both the Internment and Japanese American participation in the war effort.2 Their struggles in Boulder offer a glimpse of the hardships and racism Japanese Americans endured during World War II from neighbors and the media who labeled them the “enemy” even as they helped the United States win the war. The evacuation and Internment of West Coast Japanese Americans based “loyalty” and “disloyalty” on race. “[B]eing Japanese was anti-American,” wrote Tomi Kaizawa Knaefler.3 “War work” emerged as a way for Japanese Americans to prove their loyalty, get out of the camps, and resume their lives in society. Teaching Japanese to naval officers was one of a handful of opportunities available to a qualified few. The hurricane of the evacuation and relocation of 120,000 persons of Japanese ancestry living on the West Coast following the declaration of war against the Japanese in December 1942 not only disrupted but also dissected families by separating and shipping members to Internment camps throughout the western states. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt determined the Internment to be a “military necessity” in Executive Order 9066 and designated the West Coast a “zone of combat” where the presence of Japanese Americans would confuse U.S. Army forces because of their resemblance to the enemy. Officials decided that all Japanese Americans, including women, children, and the elderly, were “potential enemies” who would turn against the United States if put to the test.4 The division in charge of the evacuation and Internment, the War Relo­ cation Authorities (WRA), initially herded Japanese Americans into temporary housing or assembly centers, such as the one in which Miya Sano and her mother were living, after systematically evacuating neighborhoods on the West Coast. Japanese Americans were usually placed in fairgrounds or on Jessica N. Arntson 177 racetracks. Families often slept in stables recently vacated by horses until they were transported inland to the permanent camps. Overlooking “the paradoxes created by . . . outside labor recruitment,”5 war relocation officials and branches of the military began actively recruiting Japanese Americans from assembly centers and Internment camps as farmhands in furlough work and as...