...I also took lessons in Japanese language from an American, a man of great kindness and sensitivity to Japanese art and poetry but who unfortunately knew little Japanese. A new textbook had been issued that (unlike the saita, saita text) was intended to teach foreign adults to read Japanese; but the professor, who rarely prepared the lessons, was obliged to look up words he did not know in his dictionary while the students were translating...
...For foreigners, the experience of learning Japanese is a major event that links them to everyone else who has studied Japanese. Years later, when I travelled in Europe, it was easy to make friends with professors of Japanese wherever I went. Regardless of the country or the differences in our political opinions, the experience of memorizing kanji and learning Japanese grammar created important ties between us...
...The American troops followed us ashore. Everyone was relieved there was no enemy to fight, but a few days later we had a different kind of shock. The least capable of the Navy interpreters came up to me with a sign he had found. He said, "Of course I get the general meaning, but I'm not sure of a few things." The inscription on the sign was perfectly clear: "Gathering point for bubonic plague victims." Messages were hastily sent to San Francisco for plague serum and for days we looked anxiously at our bodies for telltale spots. Many years later the wife of a Japanese army doctor who had been stationed on Kiska revealed that her husband, guessing the Americans would find it, had written the inscription. It was a joke, but nobody laughed...
Strange to say, although I had eagerly awaited release from the Navy, I had never given much thought to what I would do afterwards. Most of the other language officers planned to return to the work they had been doing before they joined the Navy, but I had no profession. I knew Japanese, but this was not much of an asset. It was commonly assumed that it would take at least fifty years for Japan to regain its prewar importance. Some language officers, deciding that China was likely to replace Japan as the leading power in East Asia, shifted to the study of Chinese. But most of those who had learned Japanese lost all interest in using the language. If I met them, they would say with a touch of pride they had forgotten every word of Japanese or they would declaim the few phrases they remembered, such as "Teki wo mizugiwa nite gekimetsu subeshi" (Annihilate the enemy at the water's edge!)...People sometimes congratulate me on having realized in 1946 that an economic miracle would take place in Japan twenty-five years later, but I did not in the least expect this miracle. I made the choice because of a vague awareness that I was temperamentally suited to the study of Japan. Years later, when I applied for a visa at the Japanese Consulate General in New York, a young vice-consul said, "You were clever to have studied Japanese. You would never have become famous in anything more competitive." It naturally did not please me to be told this, but he may have been right.
