Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki

Abstract

Reviewed by: Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan by Peter Kornicki Roger H. Brown (bio) Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain's War with Japan . By Peter Kornicki. Oxford University Press, 2021. xxx, 402 pages. $29.95. For decades after World War II, the extent of Allied success in breaking enemy codes and the contribution it made toward the defeat of the Axis powers remained classified. The gradual lifting of the veils of secrecy finally opened the archives to scholars and permitted participants to share their experiences. Regarding the Asia-Pacific theater of the war, the lion's share of attention went to codebreaking in relation to battles such as Pearl Harbor and Midway and to strategic decisions such as those regarding war termination. More recently, historians have produced a small but solid body of scholarship examining the intensive Japanese language programs required to exploit such cryptological successes, as well as to translate documents recovered on the battlefield and interrogate prisoners. However, reflecting the dominant role of the United States in the Pacific theater, the scholarship on wartime linguists has almost totally neglected the British contribution. 1 In Eavesdropping on the Emperor, Peter Kornicki endeavors to redress this deficiency and to thereby "reveal what made the Japanese-language training programmes during the war so successful, who the remarkable teachers and their extraordinary students were, and what unseen contributions they made to the war effort in all theatres of war" (p. xxviii). Kornicki's successful effort echoes the achievements of the men and women whose stories he tells. Indeed, recovering the personal experiences of British linguists, which is at the heart of Kornicki's account, constitutes one of the great strengths of his book. The reader meets an almost endless variety of people appearing and often reappearing throughout the book, and the details regarding these individuals and their experiences in various services, programs, and theaters of action should prove valuable to a wide array of researchers. Kornicki begins by demonstrating how, even as the likelihood of war with Japan loomed, British diplomatic and military leaders responded with [End Page 267] astonishing complacency to entreaties from knowledgeable academics and military officers about the dire need for Japanese linguists. He partly attributes this lack of action to the overall underestimation of the military threat posed by Japan, a prejudice that was only shattered by the successful Japanese operations during the first six months of the war. In response to these setbacks, the few academics, missionaries, military officers, and other individuals with close knowledge of Japan and its language then established language programs at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS) and the Bedford School. The instructors and students came from eclectic backgrounds ranging from professors at elite universities to working-class youths and enlisted servicemen. Together they confronted the daunting challenge of attaining a high level of proficiency in a difficult language in an extraordinarily short period of time. Success required not just personal ability but powerful motivation. Inspiration could come from many sources, but those already in service sometimes bore their own special incentives. Peter Laslett, who joined Fleet Air Arm in 1940 and was sent to learn Japanese in 1942, recalled that: "They … told us that if we couldn't read Japanese within a year we would be sent back to our ships. I had been on the Murmansk route, which was extremely dangerous, so I learned Japanese under sentence of being drowned" (p. 82). Kornicki details how these diverse students, once enrolled, engaged in truly intense study directed at mastering those aspects of the Japanese language required for their expected tasks, which included translation of decoded diplomatic messages, tactical wireless intercepts, diaries and orders found on the battlefield, and interrogation of prisoners. Graduates deployed to duty posts scattered as far as Singapore, Mauritius, India, Australia, Burma, and, eventually, occupied Japan. As was the case with their U.S. counterparts, most of these men and women returned to their civilian lives and never made use of their language skills again, but some went on to lay the foundations for the great postwar expansion of Anglophone Japanese studies. The tardiness of...