From the Los Angeles Times, April 9, 2000:
Godfathers of Japan Policy Take Look Back
When Mitsubishi Zero fighters bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941, propelling America into war against Japan, the U.S. Navy was caught flat-footed in more ways than one.
Only 12 officers in the entire ranks were fluent in Japanese. The Japanese Issei (first generation) immigrants and their American Nisei offspring who understood the language were about to be rounded up into internment camps. In a panicky scramble to plug the gap, the Navy plucked more than 1,000 men and women from Harvard, Yale and other elite institutions and sent them to a crash course in the Japanese language at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Those "Boulder Boys"--who included some girls--served critical roles as interpreters, translators and code breakers, helping bring an end to the war. But their greatest contribution came later when many became America's first real brain trust on Japan.
Many of these unheralded veterans, now mostly in their 70s and 80s, gathered in Claremont over the weekend for the first--and probably last--conference to share their little-known experiences. The lineup included some of America's most distinguished names in Japanese studies.
There were Donald Keene and Edward Seidensticker, internationally known scholars and translators of Japanese literature who brought to the West such treasures as the Tale of Genji and the modern classics of Kobo Abe and Nobel laureate Yasunari Kawabata. Keene, 79, recalled his first glimpse of the emotion in the Japanese soul when he translated the blood-soaked diaries of dead soldiers: the terrible ravages of malaria and malnutrition and the bitter disillusionment over Japan's World War II aggression.
There were William Theodore deBary, James Morly and Robert Scalapino, who improved and expanded East Asian studies programs at such universities as Columbia and Berkeley. Scalapino, 80, has pioneered the study of Japanese democracy, briefed three American presidents on Asia, met virtually every postwar Japanese prime minister, and started the University of California's Institute of East Asian Studies to meld traditional academics with concrete policy analysis.
Some of the "Boulder Boys" became politicians and business leaders; some were among the first journalists who could interview the Japanese in their own language. That fluency helped Frank Gibney become the first American correspondent to uncover rapes, murders and other crimes against the Japanese by American GIs during the postwar Allied occupation. Gibney, 75, is now president of the Pacific Basin Institute at Pomona College, which sponsored the conference.
"These are the godfathers of Japanese studies in the U.S.," said David Arase, an associate professor of politics at Pomona College. "They not only demystified Japan; they also dispelled the vicious negative stereotypes of Japan by giving Americans an image based on deep knowledge of Japanese language and culture."
The story of the "Boulder Boys," however, also includes the painful contrast with their Japanese instructors--most of them Issei and Nisei dispatched to Boulder from the internment camps. While the war launched the careers of the Boulder intellectual elites, it destroyed the lives of many of their teachers. Like other Japanese Americans interned during the war, they lost their homes, businesses and sometimes family members who succumbed to illness in the camps. Conference organizers Roger Dingman and [PBI archivist] Pedro Loureiro are trying to preserve these stories as well and, at the conference, presented videotaped remarks by three former teachers. ...
--Teresa Watanabe
