U. Of Minn.

When I arrived at Pioneer Hall, our quarters for the University of Minnesota year, it was the day before Christmas and no one in charge was around. I went into the cafeteria for dinner, which after basic training chow looked like a banquet—turkey and all the trimmings. There was only one other arrival. I took my loaded tray to his table, sat down, shook hands, and exchanged names. He was Gus Tanaka. I had finally seen my first Japanese, well hmm, born in the USA, perhaps not. We exchanged a few stories, backgrounds, and experiences. Very friendly and interesting, he spoke accent-free American English.

I knew that Roosevelt, whom I much admired, had incarcerated most persons of Japanese descent on the West Coast to keep them out of harm’s way, implying that real (read non-Jap) Americans would be so angry that they might kill Japanese-Americans if they ran into them anywhere. With that motivation FDR could imply that incarceration was to protect innocent people among those in the camps. That distinguished it from the Nazi concentration camps. My conversation with Gus encouraged me to ask him a tough question. “Gus, I never met a Japanese person before. How can I tell that you are not secretly a liege of the emperor of Japan?”

Obviously annoyed by my ignorance, he said, “Look, I’ve never been to Japan. I’ve been an American all my life, schools, friends, even family. Why would I serve the emperor when the Japanese in Japan are at war with us?” We continued in that vein for a bit. I was soon convinced. Roosevelt had made his detention decision almost the day after Pearl Harbor, ordering Japanese-Americans into internment camps. After entering the camps, most lost their homes, their jobs, their income, and most of their possessions.

It occurred to me that if Roosevelt had had a face-to-face discussion with people like Gus Tanaka, he would not have made that stupid decision. Meeting with Gus may have been the first encounter where I was more favorably impressed by listening to the view of an “ordinary” person than by accepting whatever our political leaders were telling us. It certainly wasn’t the last.

In orientation sessions, it was made clear that we were to be soldiers first and students second. We had been placed in a detached infantry regiment to pursue an Army Specialized Training Program (ASTP). All of us had the lowest rank, private, not even private first class. There were no women in the program, and most of the guys had come directly from infantry basic training.

The agenda included “area studies” of not only Japan but the vast Pacific and East Asia. Academics assigned by the army to lecture us taught us what they knew a great deal about in the “area”—the history and the evolution of religion, governance, warfare, health care, technology, industry, culture, family values, crops, construction, education, and lifestyles. Their lectures and the materials they handed out to us were full of facts and statistics. We also had one professor whose expertise was the Balkan states, where WWI was started. Perhaps the many Balkan wars and ethnic clashes bore some similarities to East Asia. I never noticed such a similarity.

We were expected to take notes and to read the materials, but we were never tested in area studies. I had trouble staying awake in class, especially when it was just after lunch or followed late-night language studying.

Most of our time was committed to learning Japanese, the spoken language, that would turn us into interpreters when we completed the program. I was fascinated by the language, grateful for no gender (unlike French or German). No prepositions, only postpositions. The spoken language is composed of fifty-one syllables that can transform speech into written language, similar to the way the alphabet works in English, but with one character for each of the fifty-one. Unlike English and many Western languages, every syllable is pronounced the same way no matter in what word it appears, and in any given word with two or more syllables every syllable has the same weight. I found Japanese a fun language to learn. The word for a syllable-based written language is a syllabery (sometimes spelled syllabary), in analogy to the “alphabet.” In fact most of Japanese written language is in Kanji (which in Japanese means Chinese language). Kanji words generally mean the same in Chinese as in Japanese, but are pronounced very differently. For the most part Chinese and Japanese can understand one another’s newspapers.

There are two different Japanese syllaberies: (1) Hiragana is used to add endings onto words, similar to changes of English verbs (for tense and case) and English nouns and verbs (for singular/plural). (2) Katakana is used to write foreign names after adjustment to ease enunciation by Japanese. We ASTP students learned the two syllaberies very easily, but learning Kanji as well as the spoken language would have at least doubled our workload. Since we worked on spoken Japanese about forty hours per week, the additional work of learning the Kanji for all the spoken words we would learn (about four thousand in a year or sixteen per day) was considered by us as almost impossible. In hindsight I have come to think that was a mistake. Yes, it would have taken more time to learn the Kanji, but it would have been worth it for what I had to do in the occupation of Japan. Now sixty years later I’ve come to believe that learning and knowing the spoken and written languages together reinforces the remembrance and facilitates the usage of both.

Once we got used to it, it was not hard to learn sixteen new words a day. The difficulty that came from remembering them all as the year went on was overcome by repetition aided by mnemonic techniques, sometimes by ad hoc combinations of English and Japanese song snippets, rhymes, doggerel, and bilingual jokes, which with great amusement we tossed out to each other.

We were also taught about a hundred Kanji characters, selected from thousands as representing common words or words with simple brush strokes, like “–” and “=,” pronounced “ichi” and “ni,” respectively, and meaning the numbers “one” and “two”—pretty obvious from the Kanji, right? Well, Kanji rapidly gets much more complicated. The preceding information was relevant to our studies and later to my duties in Japan. We’ll stop there. I promise there will be no more language lessons.

Unlike area studies, learning spoken Japanese was serious business. Within a short time we were organized into about twelve small groups with eight to ten per group. I realized that I had been put into the top group of fast learners. All the groups covered the same material. A very few students, who apparently strongly preferred to be discharged with good conduct as soon as possible, did leave the program before the year ended. I never knew whether that happened as a result of medical problems, political influence, bribes, or zero interest in learning Japanese. The rest of us enjoyed the great opportunity we had received. It was certainly better than going to fight in Europe. Don Gold and I were the only two from the thousand-man Camp Croft battalion sent to Minnesota, as mentioned in the last chapter. There were three people in the battalion who were Jewish: Gold, me, and Louis Fullenbaum. Gold was in touch with Louis’s family and learned that Louis had been killed fighting in the drive across Europe. So I could believe that in Minnesota I had avoided a bullet with my name on it.

As an assignment I read a classic Japanese book by Murasaki, The Tale of Genji, a sophisticated and lengthy novel written a thousand years ago by a woman courtier in the eleventh century. Reading in bed at night, it took me months to finish. Each night the book took me into a totally different world. Murasaki wrote as a keen, friendly, feminine, and enchanting observer living in the court of Prince Genji, a youthful, handsome, much loved potential successor to the throne, or shogunate. She appreciated and encouraged artistry within the court in its many forms—tempering and performing the classical musical instruments, graciously brush-stroking poetry script and recitals, and the beauty and techniques of stylized painting.

Genji had to travel occasionally and clearly was under pressure to secure his position. Such developments were only treated in the novel on the personal level with no mention of the underlying power struggles. Genji also had many sequential love affairs. The book develops in exquisite detail the characters and the activities of the key players, friends, and confidantes of Genji and the ladies who adored him when he politely, protectively, and intriguingly entered their bedrooms.

Reading about a world more different from anything in the modern world I knew or could imagine, I was carried away for a brief time each evening to a world of enchantment.

When the guys fell in for reveille one day, the officer in charge looked us over for a while and then chose four to be the “color guard.” I was one of them. We later learned of two duties. One was going with the officer in charge to the bank in downtown Minneapolis, carrying loaded rifles to get the monthly payroll in cash (about $7,000) to be distributed that night when each private signed off and received his money.

A second duty came later. The color guard was to march four abreast in a parade down the field at halftime of the university home football games. All four of us shouldered rifles, this time unloaded. The two in the middle also had to carry an American flag and one other. I may never have even noticed whether the other was the flag of the state of Minnesota, the infantry, or the university. To hold the flag with one hand and shoulder the rifle with the other required wearing a special leather flag holster over the hips. Then for the four of us it was heads up, body erect, and stay in step. Minnesota had a ferocious prewar football reputation that tanked by 1944, when almost all the top players had been drafted and were fighting overseas. I recall only one time when our army color guard actually paraded. Perhaps it was the lack of interest in the team or a decision that an army color guard was not such a good idea. I cannot say.

(This is an excerpt from MILITARIST MILLIONAIRE PEACENIK: Memoir of a Serial Entrepreneur by Alan F. Kay and reprinted with the permission of the author)