Frank James Daniels (1899–1983), who became the first Professor of Japanese at SOAS in 1961, went to Japan in 1928 after graduating from the London School of Economics. He worked at first for the British Embassy in Tokyo but later he became a teacher of English at Otaru Commercial High School in Hokkaido. In 1939 he was appointed to a senior lectureship in Japanese at SOAS but since war had already broken out in Europe it was not until 1941 that he was able to reach Britain via the United States. Throughout the war he was in charge of the courses for interrogators run in the Japanese section at SOAS, which ran alongside separate courses aimed at translators.Footnote 1 In his inaugural lecture as professor in 1962, he referred to the small number of students and the infrequent classes held in 1941, adding: “This life of ease ended in May of the following year when the teaching of Japanese began in earnest for the purposes of the war against Japan”.Footnote 2 He modestly refrained on that occasion from mentioning his role in the direction and management of most of the wartime Japanese courses at SOAS from 1942 to 1945, but the fortunate survival of a photocopy of his report on those courses makes it possible not only to appreciate his contribution but also to grasp the details of these courses for the first time. The main part of this article, therefore, consists of an annotated transcription of the report.
As is now well known, the School of Oriental and African Studies had a significant role to play during the Second World War training young men and women to high levels of competence in Japanese and other non-European languages as part of the war effort. The School was, in fact, aware of the likely linguistic consequences of war with Japan nearly three years before the outbreak of the Pacific War. As early as January 1939, Sir Philip Hartog (1864–1947), a prominent educationist who was a member of the Governing Body of SOAS, wrote to Sir John Simon (1873–1954), then the Chancellor of the Exchequer. Hartog was already anticipating the possibility of war with Japan and realized that SOAS was hopeless ill-equipped to deal with the demands that war would create:
At the School of Oriental Studies we have for Japanese [language teaching] only a single Englishman, aided by a Japanese assistant. In war time this would be quite insufficient. I am told that there is at the present moment one distinguished British scholar with an outstanding knowledge of Japanese, now in Tokio, Mr. Frank Hawley, and that attempts are being made to induce him to go to America.Footnote 3 The School of Oriental Studies has not the funds necessary to secure his services. … It is understood that in the event of war there will be special demands on the Japanese department for censorship and intelligence work as well as for instruction, and that there may be a considerable demand from India for persons knowing Japanese. The School with its present staff could not cope with those demands.Footnote 4
He therefore appealed for more funds from the Treasury. The Chancellor of the Exchequer rejected the request, however, suggesting instead that SOAS apply to the Court of the University of London for the funds needed. The Court agreed to provide an additional £2,500 a year for the School to fund five new posts, in Japanese, Arabic and Turkish.Footnote 5 Thus the University of London had to meet the costs by reallocating to SOAS some of the funds which had been received from the University Grants Committee for the whole of the University of London: the government did not provide any additional funds for these five new posts.
Shortly after the outbreak of war in Europe, the Director of SOAS, Professor Sir Ralph Turner (1888–1983; Director 1937–57), wrote to the War Office with a proposal that “undergraduates and young graduates with special linguistic ability should be sent to the School to study the Oriental languages likely to be of importance in the War”.Footnote 6 On 13 November 1939 Lord Harlech (1885–1964), Chairman of the Board of Governors of SOAS, wrote in turn to Admiral of the Fleet Lord Chatfield, who was Minister for the Coordination of Defence, making the same points more forcefully and drawing attention to the time it took to acquire a good knowledge of these languages:
Before the War we were informed by the War Office, Admiralty and Air Ministry that in the event of war we should be required to give instruction to classes of officers of all three services in certain languages, of which the most important are modern Turkish, Japanese, Arabic and Persian. … The only students in Japanese now in training are five civilians of whom three are enemy aliens. … Professor Turner reports that from his contacts with the Ministry of Labour, the Postal Censorship Department and the Universities, there are not, in this country today[,] any reserves of British subjects with a knowledge of some of these Oriental languages, particularly modern Japanese and modern Turkish. He writes – “It is now clear beyond doubt that if there is any chance of men in the fighting or Government Services being wanted in the next six months with a knowledge of these languages the instruction of a certain number as beginners should commence at once”.Footnote 7
Chatfield's reply, when it came in January 1940, must have been disappointing. The Admiralty did not plan to send any officers to the School for training during the War, the War Office was exploring the army's needs for officers with a knowledge of Turkish, and the Air Ministry was planning to send six officers for short refresher courses in Turkish and Japanese. The only consolation was that, in view of the importance of the skills nurtured at the School, the teaching staff would not be called up for military service, thus ensuring the continued operation of the School.Footnote 8 SOAS thus made efforts at the highest levels to alert the government to the need to begin training immediately, but the School's arguments fell on deaf ears.Footnote 9
In the summer of 1941, still before the outbreak of war with Japan, SOAS apparently made further representations to both the Foreign Office and War Office, and “in view of the threatening posture of Japan pointed to the critical shortage of experts in Japanese and to the long period of training which servicemen would have to undergo to acquire a knowledge of the language”. Disappointingly, the response of the War Office in August 1941 was: “we feel we are at present reasonably insured in the matter of officers knowing Oriental languages”.Footnote 10 Meanwhile, in the course of 1941, Sir Robert Craigie (1883–1959), the British ambassador in Tokyo, wrote several times outlining his concerns about the shortage of language expertise.Footnote 11 Well before the outbreak of the Pacific War, then, the linguistic consequences of war with Japan were already being seriously considered both by SOAS and by the Foreign Office, again to no avail.
On 8 December 1941, the Japanese army launched its assault on Malaya. A few hours later, but on 7 December owing to the impact of the International Date Line, the attack on Pearl Harbor took place. The attack on Hong Kong started a few hours later, followed on 10 December by the sinking of the battleship Prince of Wales and the battlecruiser Repulse. Hong Kong surrendered on 25 December, and Singapore in turn on 16 February 1942. It was only at this point that the British government woke up to its woeful deficiencies in Japanese language expertise and its failure to plan for wartime needs. By contrast, the Censorship Office Japanese School in Melbourne had begun operations in August 1940, and in the United States courses in Japanese began in October 1941 for the Navy and in November 1941 for the Army.Footnote 12
Once war had broken out with Japan, SOAS made another attempt to expand its teaching of languages essential for the war effort. On 14 January 1942, Hartog wrote to R.A. Butler, then President of the Board of Education (later known as the Ministry of Education), renewing the arguments made in 1939:
There is now a great paucity of Japanese, Chinese, Thai and Turkish linguists for the Intelligence and Interpretership Services of the War Office and we have had demands not only from the War Office but also from the Air Ministry for linguists in some or all of these languages. … Professor Turner, the Director of the School of Oriental Studies and I foresaw more than two years ago that such needs would arise and we made representations asking various Government Departments to take the necessary steps to meet them. We were unsuccessful but I need not go into that.Footnote 13
This time, however, the War Office was interested, and from early 1942 the teaching of Japanese and other languages for wartime purposes began in earnest at SOAS.Footnote 14
The only detailed account of the wartime courses at SOAS is that by Ōba Sadao, which was published in 1988 and appeared in an English translation (with photographs and additional material) in 1995.Footnote 15 Apart from interviews, one of the main sources used by Ōba was a work listed in his bibliography as “Frank Daniels, War-time Courses (SOAS, 1945)”. Searching for this, I found that no such published work seemed to exist, nor did the archives of SOAS contain any such item. It seemed, then, that Daniels’ original report had been lost. However, in September 2016 I met Ms Satsuki Ōba, one of Ōba's daughters, in Tokyo, and she kindly extracted from her father's papers a photocopy of Daniels’ report and gave me a photocopy of it, which I have deposited in the SOAS archives. It appears that, when preparing his book, her father had obtained this photocopy of the original either from Daniels himself or from SOAS, and he added some annotations to it in Japanese. It is not a complete photocopy for, unfortunately, appendices C, D, E and F, which are referred to in the report, are missing. There are also some handwritten corrections to the typewritten text, probably made by Daniels himself after the report had been typed.
Daniels’ report provides valuable information about the various SOAS wartime courses and about those who taught on them. As his list of the staff involved makes clear, almost all the teachers had acquired their knowledge of Japanese either as long-term residents in Japan before the war or as students on the courses who were subsequently retained to expand the number of teachers, but there were also a number of native speakers, either Japanese who had married Britons or Canadian Nisei. After the war, many of the teachers went on to lay the foundations of the academic study of Japan in Britain, including Carmen Blacker, Frank Daniels himself, Ronald Dore, Charles Dunn, Douglas Mills and Yanada Senji; Edwin McLellan, on the other hand, pursued his academic career in the United States.
Daniels’ report covers only those who taught in the Far East Department. Simultaneously, the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at SOAS was also providing ten-week courses in the transcription of oral Japanese, probably for the benefit of those in India listening to Japanese airborne communications in the clear, and around 180 students took these courses.Footnote 16 Those involved as teachers were listed at the time as follows.:
Academic: Mr J.R. Firth, Miss B. Honikman, Miss E. Henderson, Miss E.M. Evans, Mr N.C. Scott, Miss H.M. Lambert, Mr J. Carnochan, Mr J.K. Rideout*, Mr B. S. Mackay*
Service instructors: F/O R.H. Robins,Footnote 17 P/O R.F.P. Snelling, P/O O.D. King-Wood, Sgt R.A. Hendrie, P/O D. Lees*, Sub/Lt F. Waind, Mdsn K.L.C. Strong.Footnote 18
(*=not phoneticians)Footnote 19
Apart from Rideout and Mackay, who are also named in Daniels’ report, the other academic teachers were linguists and phoneticians at SOAS with no knowledge of Japanese: John Rupert Firth (1890–1960), for example, was an expert on the phonetics of Gujarati and Telugu and was later to become the first Professor of General Linguistics in Britain, while Beatrice Honikman (1905–97) was an expert on African languages.Footnote 20 I have been unable to trace most of the service instructors, with the exception of Robins and Strong, who both later taught at SOAS: they all probably completed courses in the Far East Department and were then retained as temporary teachers until the end of the war.
Daniels’ report takes the form of a retrospective account of the wartime work of the Japanese section with a focus on the courses and the teaching. The burden of overseeing all the wartime courses in Chinese and Japanese and administering a vastly expanded department fell upon the shoulders of Evangeline Dora Edwards (1888–1957), who was Professor of Chinese and Head of the Far East Department from 1939 to 1953. During the five years from 1941 to 1945 the department trained 550 students in Chinese, Japanese and Malay.Footnote 21 Soon after the end of the war, in late July 1946, she left London on a six-month visit to Southeast Asia, East Asia and Australia “to follow up the training of Service candidates by studying on the spot the results of the training they had received”, as her obituary put it.Footnote 22 This trip was arranged by the Air Ministry in collaboration with the South East Asia Command in Singapore, and had an official side to it, but in order to evaluate the efficacy of the SOAS training she met a number of former wartime students from SOAS in Singapore and Japan. She embodied her observations and recommendations in a very detailed report, but the only copy of this that I have been able to locate lacks the section giving an assessment of the value of the wartime courses.Footnote 23
Daniels’ report was perhaps written too soon after the end of the war to be able to offer any reflections on the strengths and weaknesses of the wartime courses. He does, however, make it clear that the teachers were, until 1944, at odds with the military authorities, who wanted interpreters to be taught only oral skills and translators only written skills. The students, it seems, realized that the official either/or approach was damaging and in their subsequent postings endeavoured to make good the deficiency by acquiring the other skills they needed. Daniels’ view all along had been that the best results would be achieved if the written and spoken languages were taught together, and it is this understanding that is now a commonplace in the methodology of Japanese language teaching. On the other hand, the objectives of the wartime courses were understandably determined by military needs, and this had an inevitable impact not only on the range of vocabulary to be acquired but also on the styles of written and spoken Japanese that were taught. Since interpreters put their skills to use either interrogating prisoners of war or intercepting air-to-ground communications, knowledge of colloquial and everyday language was superfluous; similarly, translators needed only to have knowledge of the formal military language used in captured documents and of the abbreviated Japanese used in wireless messages (after being decrypted). These necessary limitations, as well as the obvious urgency in wartime and the military discipline, go some way towards explaining why the wartime courses were so successful in terms of the levels of competence achieved by the students in a relatively short time. Those who were transferred to Japan after the surrender and formed part of the British Commonwealth Occupation Force discovered that the courses, limited in scope though they were, provided them with sufficient foundations on which to build for the very different language requirements of peace-time occupation duties.Footnote 24
The teaching techniques developed at SOAS were largely the creation of Daniels and his colleagues. This was because the courses at SOAS, Bletchley Park, Simla, Colorado, Melbourne and elsewhere were each developed independently, on the spot and in haste, and in response to specific needs. Inevitably they tended to focus on military vocabulary, but the US Navy language courses at the University of Colorado used the pre-war Naganuma textbooks, which Daniels rejected on account of the inclusion of literary forms and too much vocabulary of no military relevance.Footnote 25 The same is true of the textbook prepared by the linguist Bernard Bloch and his pupil Eleanor Harz Jorden for the US armed forces, which was used at Yale and elsewhere for enlisted men and for officers: it was a sophisticated and thorough guide to the contemporary spoken language but it contained little or no military vocabulary and included dialogues relating to everyday life and even to activities such as visiting a theatre.Footnote 26 What is more, it focussed on speech alone and for that reason used romanized script, as Jorden's influential textbook Beginning Japanese (1962) was to do. The courses in the SOAS Department of Phonetics and Linguistics were likewise focused on the acquisition of oral skills, and were driven solely by wartime needs; as Firth put it, “The progressive nipponification of the young service man is a systematic process in which he is not encouraged to saunter through groves browsing and picking up tasty little bits of culture. He is put through an intensive course of discipline in every sense of the word”.Footnote 27 The US Navy courses, by contrast, taught both oral and written skills. This is what Daniels had wished to do from the outset and, as his report makes clear, representations made by him and his colleagues, and the experiences of their students in the field, eventually persuaded the authorities to allow the teachers to follow their instincts in this respect.Footnote 28
[Frank Daniels]
War-time courses
The end of the war in Asia in August 1945 offers a suitable opportunity for reviewing the war work of the Japanese section, which for security reasons could not be dealt with in detail before.
Since the beginning of the war the [Far East] Department has been responsible for five main Japanese courses for the fighting Services:-
(a) State Scholarship (general purpose) course, May 1942–Dec 1943.
(b) Services Interrogators’ course, July 1942–July 1945.
(c) Services Translators’ general course, July 1942–(still in being)
(d) Services Translators’ short course, July 1942–Sept 1943.
(e) Services General Purpose course, June 1944–(still in being)
The lengths of courses (a), (b), (c) and (e) have in general varied between twelve and eighteen months (course (a) a little longer, but the boys on that course took normal school – not university – vacations, whereas all other students have worked for 46 weeks in a year; a few other students have been in the Department for more than eighteen months, but only because the Services were not ready for them on completion of training). Course (d) was for either six or nine months. The length of course (e) has been fixed at eighteen months.
The Department has also at various times during the war given (f) refresher courses to members of the fighting Services and, for the Ministry of Information, to one civilian. Far the greater number of these students have had a pre-war knowledge of Japanese, but some few have been ex-students from one of the main courses who had not used their language for a considerable time; one student now here taught himself Japanese while a prisoner of war in Germany, where he passed an examination set by the School.Footnote 29
The Department further gave (g) a specialized translation course to certain employees of the Foreign Office, and (h) another specialized translation course to certain technical experts of the Admiralty.
Details of the numbers of students entered and trained in the five main courses and on refresher courses are given later in this report.
The main courses – historical and general
Course (a) has been reported on in some detail in the Annual Reports of the School for 1942–43 and 1943–44. This was primarily a civilian course, with some military bias towards the end. Twenty-eight of the thirty boys selected completed the course and entered one or other of the three Services.Footnote 30 One ex-student from this course was subsequently seconded by the Army as an Instructor.
Courses (b), (c) and (d) began in July 1942. Apart from course (d) (exceptional because only a translating knowledge of a limited part of the classical literary style was required), the Department agreed only with reluctance, at the insistence of the Services, to give strictly separate courses, teaching Interrogators no characters and Translators no speech; it advocated a grounding in both aspects of the language for all students who are aiming at a fair degree of competency, the approach to be made through colloquial style, with a preliminary period before starting to learn characters. However, the courses were undertaken on the basis of strict separation. In the autumn of 1942 supervisors of studies were appointed, Mr. Daniels for interrogation and Mr. Rideout for translation.
In September 1943, course (d) together with Mr. Rideout and two other members of the staff, was transferred from the Far Eastern Department to the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, which was already at this time conducting classes in a special aspect of Japanese. As the Far Eastern Department was not consulted in regard to these arrangements, which were made on grounds of security, it can express no opinion about them, but it remains in principle opposed to such experiments, believing that full responsibility for all aspects of language teaching should rest with the language Department concerned. After the transfer, Mr. Rideout's place as supervisor of translation studies was taken by General Piggott.
The best students in courses (b) and (c) became aware as their studies progressed that they were handicapped by having only a one-sided knowledge of the language, and in 1943 the Services relaxed their policy of complete separation to the extent of agreeing that the School might teach an Interrogator some characters and a general Translator some speech, but only towards the end of his course if it were satisfied in each case that he would not thereby reach a lower standard in the speciality for which he was required. This still did not admit of teaching in the most rational and economical way. Finally, in 1944, the Services reversed their decision, and in July of that year course (e) was started on the lines all along advocated by the Department. The reason for the change of policy was that the rigid separation of functions had broken down in the field, and it is now known that many of the earlier “illiterate” Interrogators have taught themselves to read after arrival in India and that a number of “dumb” Translators have undertaken interrogations or acted as interpreters. Although the work of most of the students we have trained seems to have given satisfaction, it must be stated that we believe results would have been even better if we had been allowed to train the earlier students as we wished. The first batch of students from course (e) will not be ready until the end of this year [1945].
Five trainees from courses (b), (c) and (d) were retained as Instructors, one each seconded by the Navy and the Army from both course (b) and course (c), and one seconded by the Air Force from course (d). The last-mentioned was transferred with the course, but the other four are still at work in the section. Two of these five have passed the final examination for the B.A. Honours degree in Japanese during their secondment.
At this date (August 1945) there are 78 students on course (e), 12 still remaining on course (c), and four refresher students doing part of course (e). The last of the students on course (b) left in July 1945. Twelve more students for course (e) are expected early in September.
Hours of instruction
All Service students attend from 9 till 12 in the morning and from 2 till 5 in the afternoon on five days a week. As will be seen from the syllabus of course (e), four hours a day of instruction is given for most of the course, the other two hours being used for private study, and conditions have been very similar for all the Service courses. Students have also to do a considerable amount of private study outside the School. Two weekly lectures of an hour each are arranged on background subjects connected with Japan, or with the Far East in general.
General-purpose course – syllabus and material
The syllabus of course (e) is given in Appendix A. Since the other courses are at or near their end, and course (e) embodies experience gained from them all, it seems unnecessary to go into details about them, and in fact, apart from the State Scholarship course which was taken by only one batch of students, the syllabuses were being constantly revised as new material became available.
The preparation of material has taken much labour. It was realised from the start that no published work would give more than a small fraction of the material required, especially on the spoken side. The books which have been used for instruction are:- Colloquial Japanese by Dr. W.M. McGovern,Footnote 31 former Lecturer at the School, used in all cases as the first textbook, except with one group of Interrogators when Chamberlain's Handbook of Colloquial Japanese Footnote 32 was substituted; and, in the State Scholarship and Translator courses, Japanese Reading for University Students by Professor Elisseeff and Mr. Reischauer of Harvard.Footnote 33 For the teaching of the spoken language, neither of the first two books named gave more than part of the material needed for the first seven weeks of the course. The School's peace-time colloquial course, prepared by the late Mr. Yoshitake, gave more material, but because it introduced honorifics and deferential language onlly [sic] half of it was suitable for wartime Service courses. Apart from this existing material, practically everything used for instruction, and a considerable amount of reference material in addition, has been prepared by the staff during the war. An idea of it's [sic] amount can be obtained from Appendix B, which lists all the material in use at August 1945. The members of the staff responsible for preparing the various items are shown in Appendix C. It has been a very co-operative undertaking.
Teaching principles
The co-operation has been possible only because of general agreement on certain principles, of which the chief are:-
1. The desirability of limiting (mainly by the criterion of what is essential for idiomatic communication – not by the criterion of “frequency”) the vocabulary, the characters, the structural forms, and the style, to be taught during the first thirty or thirty-five weeks.
2. The undesirability of much work on formal grammar. We think it useful to give a rapid bird's-eye view of the structure of the colloquial language at the start, and of the classical literary style when that is first introduced, but to take up points of detail only as they arise in the material being studied or as students come to feel the need for guiding rules in attempting to express themselves.
3. We believe on the other hand that a student should understand exactly what is being said by every specimen of Japanese presented to him. Because of the subtlety of Japanese sentence forms, we favour the provision of very careful idiomatic English translations of early material.
4. We also believe in careful phonetic instruction and in a considerable amount of gramophone drill.
A special feature of all but the pure Translator courses has been the relatively large amount of practice, after a preliminary period, with native speakers. Care has had to be taken that students should not, before their own speech habits become more or less fixed, be given practice with native speakers whose speech diverges rather widely from the Tokyo standard (and only two of the seven native speakers now available can be regarded as fully conforming to this standard) – this not because of prejudice against other modes of speech, but because a multiplicity of modes makes things more difficult for the student.
The abrupt switch in reading in course (e) from pure colloquial to classical literary style should be noted. We believe that this not only obviates the need for explicit instruction in modern literary (DE ARU) style, but lessens the danger that students will talk like a book.
We believe that in all these ways we have achieved a notable advance in economical teaching, even if we have introduced no startling innovations of method. The course does, we believe, concentrate on essentials and bring students to a stage from which he can go forward with confidence in almost any direction. One of our slogans has been, “Half the art of teaching is knowing what not to teach”.
The ideas behind our teaching will be brought into sharper relief by comparing our methods with what might almost be called the American language-school system. Actually we have detailed information only about the courses at the Navy School of Oriental Languages, University of Colorado, Boulder, but it is understood that the courses at Army schools in America – earlier under the influence of theories derived from the necessities of linguistic research – now also follow somewhat similar lines.Footnote 34 Information about the Boulder course is given in Appendix D. It will be seen that the aim is to teach in fourteen months approximately what pre-war Language Officers were supposed to acquire during a minimum of three years in Japan.Footnote 35 This must, in our opinions, result in cramming. The size of the vocabularies of words and characters which students are required to absorb must leave little time or energy for learning much about, e.g. the subtler implications of slightly differing sentence forms, that is to say, for acquiring a “feeling for” the language; and the lack of this cannot, we believe, be compensated for by a wider knowledge of vocabulary. It will be seen, too, that the course leans very heavily on the Naganuma Readers.Footnote 36 We considered using these ourselves, but decided against them for four main reasons:-
(a) the examples are inclined to pedantry;
(b) the examples are largely semi-literary in flavour even when the forms are colloquial;
(c) more words and forms are introduced than can be learnt for “active” use in the time available; and
(d) much is introduced that is inessential, especially for war purposes, in both vocabulary and structure.
Numbers of students entered and trained
The numbers of students entered and trained in the various courses are, by Services, as follows [see Table 1]:-
Table 1. Number of students entered and trained
Results of the courses
Apart from news received in letters and at meetings with persons returned from the war areas, the Department has by and large had detailed news of the competence of its ex-students in the field only as regards those who entered, or were already in, the Army. The other two Services have not so far supplied copies of official reports on individuals, although a favourable report on two Naval ex-students was made to a seconded member of the staff. Appendix E gives both the final School report and the Army report on all Army students who have reached India after taking one of the main courses (except that no reports from India have yet been received on the latest batches of students to leave). The Army authorities twice cabled their appreciation of the ability of the first batches of their students from courses (a), (b), and (c). An extract from a letter from India containing certain criticisms of the courses, together with a copy of our reply to the criticisms, is given in Appendix F.
On the whole it can safely be said that a higher average standard has been reached than was thought possible when the courses began, either by officers in the Services with a pre-war knowledge of Japanese and its difficulties, or by those responsible for planning the courses. That trainees on leaving the School should have a smaller vocabulary and know less of the social and cultural background of Japanese thought than people who have learned the language in Japan is inevitable, but on the average it is possible that these trainees have a clearer grasp of fundamentals and almost certain that they have a better pronunciation than pre-war Language Officers after three years in Japan. They have demonstrated fairly conclusively that a year of concentrated work in this country before going to Japan is more profitable than a year's work in Japan with little or no preliminary training.
Staff concerned
The following is a list of all the past and present members of the staff who have taken part in the training of these war-time courses. Those marked + are still with us.
(1) due for demobilization. (2) took up appointment with the B.B.C.
(3) retired. (4) transferred temporarily to Dept. of Phon[etics] and Ling[uistics].
(5) Called up for service in R.A.F. (6) Took up appointment with the Treasury
(7) died.
Other war work
The section has done a considerable amount of translation, mostly of a technical nature, for Government Departments, and since the end of the War in Europe has assisted the postal censorship. It has been consulted by the Service Departments on many occasions, both officially and unofficially, in connection with translation problems, books of reference, etc. Early in 1943 two of its Naval students investigated the resources of libraries throughout the country in Japanese publications likely to be of use in the War effort, and their report was of value not only to the School but to various Government Departments. The section compiled a Glossary of Air Terms for the Air Ministry. A number of examination papers were set and marked for Prisoners of War studying Japanese in Germany, one of whom is now on a refresher course and three more of whom are expected in the near future.
Appendix AFootnote 69
Syllabus of general-purpose course
Weeks 1–7 Daily:-
(a) 1 hr. detailed work on phonetics and selected points of syntax – under school trainee. Material not yet [re]produced; it consists of a series of exercises designed to introduce all the sounds of the language (vowels with and without “pitch accent” being regarded as distinct sounds), as well as to illustrate uses of the chief particles: about 200 words are introduced.
(b) 1 hr. bird's-eye view of colloquial grammar – under qualified British lecturer. The text-book is gone through very rapidly, its exposition being amended or expanded as necessary, and its less essential parts pointed out. Memorization of “content” words in the textbook is not required. Questions on (d) are encouraged. Material 1, but the commentary is not yet reproduced.
(c) 1 hr. direct-method and simple translation work – under qualified native Japanese lecturer. Material not yet reproduced, but very few new words are introduced.
(d) ½ hr. pronunciation drill with gramophone – actually under young Canadian-born Japanese, but could be taken by anybody with great patience (the most essential qualification), a good accent and a good ear, and (if possible) a practical knowledge of phonetics. Material 2.
(This preliminary period is purposely not very strenuous, so as to allow time for students whose brains have been deadened or “grooved” by Service life to become acclimatized. It is for this reason that the number of words introduced is so strictly limited. At the same time no attempt is made to minimize the “unlikeness” of Japanese syntax by, e.g., concentrating on examples which have near word-for-word parallels in English or other European languages. Students are forced, e.g. to consider the implications of kurun'desu (as distinct from kimasu) and the theory of the “direct” and “indirect” passive. Students are told that much drudgery and learning by heart are unavoidable (and of this (d) is an example), but are encouraged at the same time to appreciate the intellectual satisfaction in understanding and learning to use the novel system of symbolization which is Japanese. All work in this stage in romanized script.)
Weeks 8–35 Daily:-
(a) 1 hr. instruction in colloquial language – under qualified lecturer, British or Japanese, or School trainee. Exercises and texts form the basis of repetition (with variations), explanation, and, as necessity arises, of further exposition of grammatical points. Material 3–13.
(b) 1 hr. instruction in script – under school trainee assisted by native Japanese instructor (for showing order of strokes etc.) or under qualified Japanese lecturer. Material 14–20.
(c) 2 hrs in four ½ hr. periods of conversation practice with native Japanese instructors or lecturers (sometimes of necessity however with Britishers) or of individual gramophone listening. Students go for conversation practice either in small groups (maximum 5, in later stages usually 2 or 3) or individually; as far as possible every student has one individual ½ hr. a day. No material reproduced for conversation practice except weekly word-lists in the earlier stages. Material for gramophone listening, besides the discs themselves, consists mostly of romanized scripts listed elsewhere.
(By the end of this period the whole of the basic vocabulary and the selected characters are supposed to be learned).
Weeks 36–40 Daily:-
(a) 1 hr. instruction on NARI (“military order”) style – under School trainee. Material 21–23.
(b) 1 hr. instruction in colloquial language – under qualified lecturer, British or Japanese, or under School trainee. Texts form the basis of repetition (with variations), explanation, and, as necessity arises, of further exposition of grammatical points. Material 12–13 (and revision).
(c) 2 hrs. in four ½ hr. periods, as above.
(Students are not expected to memorize new characters appearing in Material 23.)
Weeks 45–to end of course. Daily:-
(a) 1 hr. instruction on translation, and/or translation practice – under qualified lecturer, British or Japanese, or School trainee (during the final two months includes scanning and summarizing actual captured documents; work on proper names; and an introduction to sōsho, though selected students with a special aptitude for characters may begin sōsho instruction earlier and be given more practice in reading it). Material 26–33.
(b) 1 hr. instruction in colloquial language – under qualified lecturer, British or Japanese, or under School trainee. Includes specialized instruction leading up to interrogation – under lecturers who have had experience in the field. Material 34–36 (and interrogation questionnaire etc. not reproduced).
(c) 2 hrs. in four ½ hr. periods, as above (during the final two months certain of these periods may be used for instruction in interrogation).
Appendix B
Since this is reproduced almost in full in the English version of Ōba Sadao's book (pp. 148–51), it will be omitted here. It consists of a number of lists of the teaching materials. Most of the Japanese titles given in the list of “Teaching Material Used in the General Purpose Course” appear to be extracts or passages for classroom use and cannot be traced, but also included are Kaigun tokuhon 海軍讀本 (“Naval reader”) by Hirata Shinsaku 平田晋策, which was first published in 1932, and Moyuru ōzora 燃ゆる大空 (“The burning sky”), which is the name of a film released in 1940 and of a military song featured in the film. The list of “Reference Material Issued to Students in General Purpose Course” includes the following items which were all available in wartime editions:
Daijiten 大字典: compiled by Ueda Kazutoshi 上田萬年, it was first published in Japan in 1917; a wartime edition was published by Harvard University Press in 1942 under the title Ueda ’s Daijiten : a Japanese dictionary of Chinese Characters and Compounds.
Beginner's dictionary of Chinese–Japanese Characters and Compounds compiled by Arthur Rose-Innes was first published by Kyōbunkwan in 1922 but Lund Humphries published a wartime edition in 1942 and Harvard University Press followed suit in 1944.
Rose-Innes’ Vocabulary of Common Japanese Words with numerous examples and notes was first published in Yokohama by Kelly and Walsh in 1915 but wartime editions were published by Yale University Press in 1943 and by the Government of India in 1944 (for use at the School of Japanese in Simla).
Isemonger's The Elements of Japanese Writing (1929) was published in a wartime edition by Luzac & Co. in 1943.
Kenkyusha's Japanese–English Dictionary appeared in wartime editions published by Lund Humphries and by Harvard University Press in 1942.
Sanseido's New Concise English–Japanese Dictionary was published in a wartime edition by Harrison & Smith Co. of Minneapolis in 1944.
Japanese–English Dictionary of Sea Terms, by Lt-Cdr. C. Ozaki (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1928) appeared in a wartime edition published by the same press in 1942.
A Dictionary of Military Terms, English–Japanese, Japanese–English, compiled by Major Harry Thornton Creswell, Major Junzō Hiraoka and Major Ryōzō Namba, was first published in 1932 by Kaitakusha but from 1942 onwards there were US and UK editions published by the University of Chicago Press and Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, respectively.
Hōtei banri 鵬程萬里: Japanese Air Term s, English–Japanese, Japanese–English, compiled by Squadron Leader A.R. Boyce of the South-East Asia Air Command in New Delhi (The Far Eastern Bureau, British Ministry of Information, Calcutta, 1944).
Dictionary of Japanese (Sōsho) Writing Forms by Otome Daniels was published in 1944 by Lund, Humphries & Company of London, with finding tables compiled by Matsukawa Baiken; in 1947 a second revised edition was published with a preface thanking Edwin McLellan and Ronald Dore for their help.
The list of “Gramophone Records Used in General-Purpose Course” includes Rakugoka no heitai 落語家の兵隊, a new rakugo narrative created by Yanagiya Kingorō 柳家金語楼 (1901–72), which was published as a 78 rpm record in the 1920s. A Handbook to the Records (typescript, 1944) produced by the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics is preserved in the Bletchley Park Archives but the gramophone records themselves do not seem to have survived.
After the lists comes the following paragraph, which is omitted from the English version of Ōba Sadao's book:
The foregoing lists show what is in use as at August 1945. Material used in State Scholarship and Interrogator courses has mostly been incorporated in the General-Purpose Course. Such items as have been dropped have in general been superseded by others considered to be of more use, and it therefore seems unnecessary to list them.
Appendix C
Missing. Evidently gave the names of the members of the staff responsible for preparing the teaching materials.
Appendix D
Missing. Evidently contained information about the courses at the Navy School of Oriental Languages, University of Colorado, Boulder.
Appendix E
Missing. Evidently included both the final School report and the Army report on all Army students who had reached India after taking one of the main courses. Some extracts are included in the English version of Ōba Sadao's book.
Appendix F
Missing. Evidently contained an extract from a letter sent from India containing certain criticisms of the courses, together with a copy of the SOAS reply to the criticisms.
