Yankee Samurai: The Secret Role of Nisei in America's Pacific Victory

Joseph D. Harrington, 1979

The author talks about the 100th and 442nd and notes that the story of the Nisei in the Pacific is sometimes overlooked. It concerned about 5000 Nisei who served as translators, interpreters, interrogators and combat infantry. The author starts by relating the story of two Nisei who served as spies for the U.S. shortly before the war began, and relates one of them to the rumor of a Japanese pilot during Pearl Harbor being shot down and wearing a high school ring from a U.S. high school.

At the start of the war apparently only about 100 people in the U.S. (other than the Issei and Nisei) spoke Japanese The Japanese military thus continued to mark their maps, etc, in regular Japanese and didn't bother to put everything into code, thinking no U.S. soldiers could translate what they had written.

Convincing the military to use Nisei was not an easy task, but eventually the decision was made and it proved to be one of the best ones made during the entire war. It's also pointed out that many Nisei had little if any knowledge of Japanese, they had become so "Americanized."

A lot of the book deals with personal experiences of individual people, which is one of the books main strengths.

The author talks about Pearl Harbor and the differences in the reaction to West Coast Nisei and Hawaiian Nisei. Not everything went well for the Nisei, though, as almost all the Nisei GI's on Hawaii were pulled from their regular outfits during the time of the Battle of Midway and their guns were taken away from them. They were then shipped away from Oahu and were told they were going to be in a "special battalion" which was an obvious lie to all of them. The military just didn't want "armed Japanese" on the island of Oahu if the battle of Midway was lost and Yamamoto decided to attack Pearl Harbor again.

The third chapter takes a step back and goes into the opening of Japan by Admiral Perry and Japanese immigration to Hawaii and the U.S. mainland.

A unit under MacArthur was the Allied Translator and Interpreter Service which was made use of the Nisei to translate captured documents. The book goes on to tell about how this or that group of linguists was shipped to this or that place and what they started doing once they got there. All of this is quite fascinating and interesting.

The author points out that it was common in the Japanese army for men to keep diaries, but that was restricted in the American army. The diaries provided quite a bit of useful information (once translated). The author also describes the type of behavior expected of the Nisei in Hawaii by their parents.

One of the most important documents they translated was seized on Goodenough Island, north of New Guinea, after a battle in which the Japanese forces were decimated. The book listed every Japanese army officer, his rank, the unit he was serving with and his job, all of which were of major help to the U.S. military.

The differences between the Hawaiian soldiers and the mainlander Nisei soldiers is gone into with a very fascinating account of the origin of the terms Buddahead and kotonk.

As the war went on and it became apparent the U.S. would win (which they knew as of Spring, 1943, according to the author) the demand for Nisei translators increased and they became highly sought-after.

Another good thing the author does is insert here and there bits of what was going on elsewhere such as Mussolini dying, the 100th going off to fight, etc, so the reader can put what was going on in the Pacific into historical perspective.

The rest of the book deals with still more details about the rest of the Pacific war, individual battles, Japanese kamikaze boats and planes, and the end of the war. Then it also covers what happened after the war and how the Nisei helped during the occupation of Japan and how this led to Japan's being close to the U.S. as time war on.

This is a particularly fascinating and excellent book covering aspects of the use of the Nisei that few other books go into. Definitely worth reading.

---

Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page