1 Dore, Ronald, “Frank and Otome Daniels”, in Nish, Ian (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 1 (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1994), 268–78Google Scholar; Ōba, Sadao, The “Japanese” War: London University's WWII Secret Teaching Programme and the Experts Sent to Help Beat Japan, trans. Kaneko, Anne (Folkestone: Japan Library, 1995), 17–9, 24–5Google Scholar.

2 Daniels, Japanese Studies in the University of London and Elsewhere: an Inaugural Lecture Delivered on 7 November 1962 (London: SOAS, 1963), 19Google Scholar.

3 The Englishman was Isemonger and the “Japanese assistant” was Yoshitake Saburō: see notes 47 and 68, below. Frank Hawley (1906–61) attended Liverpool University and then, after further study in Berlin and at Cambridge, he moved in 1931 to Japan to become an English-language teacher at the Tokyo School of Foreign Languages. After some time as a teacher at various institutions, he was attached to the British Embassy in Tokyo as Director of the Library of Information and Culture. He married a Japanese woman and acquired a facility with both written and spoken Japanese. He had already accepted a position at SOAS when the Pacific War broke out and he was repatriated in 1942. He taught Japanese at SOAS from November 1942 to July 1943, then worked for the BBC and eventually travelled to Washington DC to work at the British Embassy. As the war neared its end, he applied for a special position at the London Times, and returned to Japan in the autumn of 1946 as the head of the Tokyo branch office of The Times. Yokoyama, Manabu, “Frank Hawley, 1906–1961: scholar, bibliophile and journalist”, in Cortazzi, Hugh (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 5 (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2005), 409–17Google Scholar.

4 SOAS Archives [hereafter SA] SOAS 19/1 [uncatalogued: temporary code]: Hartog to Simon, 23 January 1939; National Archives [hereafter NA] WO 32/4356, Hartog to French, 31 January 1939.

5 NA CO 859/5/3, Macmillan, Chairman of the Court, to Simon, 9 March 1939; School of Oriental and African Studies, Report of the Governing Body and Statement of Accounts for the year ending 31^st July, 1939, 15; Brown, Ian, The School of Oriental and African Studies: Imperial Training and the Expansion of Learning (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), 83–4CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 Report of the Governing Body, Statement of Accounts and Departmental Reports for the year ending 31^st July 1942 (SOAS, 1942), 15.

7 NA CO 859/5/5: Harlech to Chatfield, 13 November and 11 December 1939; Turner to Brooks and Turner to Harlech, 9 December 1939; Brown, The School, 84.

8 SA SOAS 20/2 [uncatalogued: temporary code]: Chatfield to Harlech, 10 January 1940.

9 On the Director's efforts and of his frustration in the face of the government's poor response to his warnings, see SA SOAS R 24/6, Ralph Turner to Scarbrough, 1 October 1945; Brown, The School, 84–5.

10 Sir Phillips, C.H. [sic: Philips], The School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, 1917–1967: An Introduction ([London: SOAS], 1967), 34–5Google Scholar; unfortunately, the sources are not identified and I have so far been unable to trace this correspondence in the National Archives.

11 NA FO 371/27953, Craigie to FO, 24 March, 26 April, 1 July 1941.

12 Funch, Colin, Linguists in Uniform: The Japanese Experience (Clayton, VIC: Japanese Studies Centre, Monash University, 2003), 39–41Google Scholar; Binkley, Cameron, Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center: A Pictorial History (Monterey, CA: Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center, 2011), 17–21Google Scholar; see also Dingman, Roger, “Language at war: U.S. Marine Corps Japanese language officers in the Pacific War”, Journal of Military History 68, 2004, 853–83Google Scholar, and NA FO 371/41792.

13 NA ED 54/123: Hartog to Butler, 14 January 1942.

14 Brown, The School, 85–92.

15 Sadao, Ōba 大庭定男, Senchū Rondon Nihongo gakkō 戦中ロンドン日本語学校 (Tokyo: Chūō Kōronsha, 1988)Google Scholar; for the English translation, see note 1, above.

16 Daniels, Japanese Studies in the University of London, 19; the names of those from the three Services who took the courses in 1943–44 are given in SOAS/REG/01/01/05 (“Department of Phonetics and Linguistics: Japanese Phonetics Service Students”). SOAS/REG/01/01/05 also contains lists of the students who took courses in the Far East Department.

17 Robert H. Robins (1921–2000) later completed his studies in Classics at Oxford and then returned to the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics at SOAS, where he taught for the remainder of his career.

18 Kenneth Strong (1925–1990) completed a BA in Japanese at SOAS in 1951 and then later taught at SOAS from 1964 to 1980. He published Ox against the Storm (1977), a biography of Japan's conservationist pioneer Tanaka Shōzō, and several highly regarded translations of modern fiction.

19 SOAS/REG/01/01/01 “Department of Phonetics and Linguistics: staff engaged on current Japanese Service courses”.

20 Obituary of Firth by N.C. Scott in BSOAS 24, 1961, 413–8; obituary of Honikman in The Phonetician 83, 2001, 23–4. Firth provided further details of the courses taught in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics in “Wartime experiences in linguistic training”, Modern Languages: A Review of Foreign Letters, Science and the Arts 26, 1945, 38–46. Here Firth described what he called “the short intensive phonetics course in Japanese” and “the longer intensive character course in Japanese” (italics as in the original; presumably Firth means written Japanese), which ran for six months. He implies that the course in written Japanese was taught in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics, but it is not clear if this was a separate course from that run in the Far East Department; he has little to say about it and does not make any mention whatsoever of the courses that are the subject of Daniels’ report.

21 SOAS/REG/01/01/05: “Far Eastern Department: list of students from 1941 to 1945” (signed E.E. [Evangeline Edwards] and dated 13 February 1945). Obviously, students trained later in 1945 are not included.

22 Obituary by W. Simon, BSOAS 21,1958, 219–23.

23 NA WO 208/226, copy of undated telegram from War Office to South East Asia Interrogation and Translation Centre. NA CO129/616/1: “Report on a six months’ tour of South East Asia, the Far East and Australia, August 1946–February 1947”, dated 18 September 1947; a handwritten note indicates that this Colonial Office copy did not include the part of the report addressed to the Services; Appendix B gives details of the former students she met on the trip.

24 See, for example, Cortazzi, Hugh, Japan and Back and Places Elsewhere: A Memoir (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 1998), 21 ffGoogle Scholar.; Bates, Peter, Japan and the British Commonwealth Occupation Force, 1946–52 (London: Brassey, 1993)Google Scholar.

25 Dingman, “Language at war: U.S. Marine Corps Japanese language officers in the Pacific War”, 857–8; Loureiro, Pedro, “‘Boulder boys’: Naval Japanese language school graduates”, in Balano, Randy Carol and Symonds, Craig L. (eds), New Interpretations in Naval History (Annapolis, Maryland: Naval Institute Press, 2001), 366–88Google Scholar. See below for Daniels’ remarks on the courses at Colorado.

26 Bloch, Bernard and Jorden, Eleanor Harz, Spoken Japanese, 2 vols (np: Linguistic Society of America and the Intensive Language Program of the American Council of Learned Societies, 1945; this wartime edition prepared for the United States Armed Forces Institute was in 1946 republished for sale to the public)Google Scholar.

27 Firth, “Wartime experiences in linguistic training”, 39.

28 For an account of the teaching methods at the University of Colorado, see Axelrod, Joseph, “The navy language school program and foreign languages in schools and college: aims and techniques”, The Modern Language Journal 29, 1945, 40–47CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 It appears from this statement, which is repeated below, that British prisoners of war in Germany were able to sit SOAS examinations, presumably with the assistance of the Red Cross.

30 Army, Royal Navy and Royal Air Force.

31 William Montgomery McGovern (1897–1964) was an American who in 1917 attained a Buddhist qualification at Nishi-Honganji, Kyoto, and subsequently studied at the Sorbonne, Berlin and Christ Church, Oxford, where he was awarded a DPhil in 1922. He was appointed lecturer in Japanese at SOAS in 1919 and taught there up to 1923, but he also made extended expeditions to Tibet and the Amazon basin. From 1927 he taught at Northwestern University, Illinois, which holds his papers. He published many books, including accounts of his travels and studies of Buddhism; extant copies of his Colloquial Japanese, published by Kegan Paul & Trench, are undated but it is thought to have been published in 1920; in 1942 E.P. Dutton of New York published a wartime edition. Daniels, Japanese Studies in the University of London, 17–18. https://www.soas.ac.uk/news/newsitem104621.html. http://web.archive.org/web/20010706233848/http://www.library.northwestern.edu/archives/findingaids/McGovern_William.pdf.

32 Chamberlain, Basil Hall (1850–1935) went to Japan in 1873 and in 1887 he became Professor of Japanese at Tokyo Imperial University. His Handbook of Colloquial Japanese was first published in 1888 (London: Trübner & Co.)Google Scholar but a fourth edition was published in 1907 (Yokohama: Kelly and Walsh). Bowring, Richard, “An amused guest in all: Basil Hall Chamberlain (1850–1935)”, in Cortazzi, H. and Daniels, G. (eds), Britain and Japan 1859–1991: Themes and Personalities (London: Routledge, 1991), 128–36Google Scholar.

33 Serge Elisséeff (1889–1975) studied Japanese in Berlin and then at Tokyo Imperial University before taking up a teaching position at the University of St Petersburg. In 1920 he fled to Paris and then to the United States, where he became the founder of the Department of Far Eastern Languages at Harvard and its first chair. Edwin O. Reischauer (1910–1990) studied under Elisséeff and later taught at Harvard; he also served as US ambassador to Japan from 1961 to 1966. Their Elementary Japanese for University Students was first published in 1941 and then went through several wartime editions.

34 William Beasley FBA, who in 1954 became Professor of the History of the Far East at SOAS, was one of five British naval officers who were sent to the US Navy language school at the University of Colorado: Beasley, W.G., Traveller to Japan: Incomplete and Unreliable Recollections of my Life (unpublished typescript, 2002; I am grateful to his son, John Beasley, for having provided me with a copy of the relevant parts), 48Google Scholar.

35 From the early years of the twentieth century small numbers of Army, Royal Navy and (after 1918) Royal Air Force officers were sent to Japan for periods of up to three years to acquire a knowledge of Japanese. Kornicki, “A brief history of Japanese studies in Britain from the 1860s to the 21^st century”, in Cortazzi and Kornicki (eds), Japanese Studies in the Britain: A Survey and History (Folkestone: Renaissance Books, 2016), 7–9Google Scholar.

36 Naganuma Naoe 長沼直兄 (1894–1974) began to publish his Hyōjun Nihongo tokuhon 標準日本語讀本, widely known as the Naganuma Readers, in 1931; volume 7 appeared in 1934, completing the series. These and other textbooks produced by Naganuma were reprinted in the United States in 1941–45 for wartime use.

37 Carmen Blacker OBE FBA (1924–2009) had already learnt some Japanese before the war and worked at Bletchley Park before transferring to SOAS. She was later to become University Lecturer in Japanese at the University of Cambridge and published books on Fukuzawa Yukichi and on shamanistic practices in Japan. Cortazzi, Hugh (ed.), Carmen Blacker: Scholar of Japanese Religion, Myth and Folklore: Writings and Reflections (Folkestone: Renaissance Books, 2017)Google Scholar.

38 (The numerals in brackets after this and some of the other names in the list refer to Daniels’ notes at the end of the list of members of staff). Flight Lieutenant Edmund Barry Cahusac (1895–1968) was awarded the Military Cross during the First World War as a member of the Royal Flying Corps; in 1918 he was posted missing but survived the war as a prisoner in Germany. He was born in Yokohama, where his family lived, and his Royal Air Force record gives his home address as Azabu, Tokyo. Supplement to the London Gazette, 11 May 1917, 590; The Japan Chronicle: Weekly Edition, Issues 979–1000 (1916), 565; NA AIR 76/72/53.

39 Clarke, Aiko (née Itō Aiko 伊藤愛子; 1912–75) is described as “the exotic beauty Aiko Clarke, immortalized by [Richard Mason] in his novel The Wind Cannot Read” in Bayly, C.A. and Harper, T.N., Forgotten Armies: The Fall of British Asia 1941–1945 (London: Allen Lane. 2004), 260Google Scholar. According to Dore, who described his teacher as “the ravishing Mrs Clarke”, she divided her time between SOAS and the BBC and after the war became editor of the Japan Quarterly under her maiden name. She married D.H. Clarke of the British Foreign Service but divorced him after coming to Britain in 1941; she was apparently interned for a while on the Isle of Man. Dore, “Frank and Otome Daniels”; Ōba, The “Japanese” War, 25–6, 45, 117–20; http://hollywoodjapanfile.blogspot.co.uk/2014/04/the-wind-cannot-read-1958.html.

40 Commander Edward Harry Manby Colegrave (1902–69) was a Royal Navy Language Officer in Japan in 1929 and was already engaged in Japanese cryptographic work for the Navy in 1934; in 1941–42 he was working on Japanese codes in Singapore and left just before the surrender. In 1954 he published a translation of Sunk: The Story of the Japanese Submarine Fleet 1942–1945 by Hashimoto Mochitsura (London: Cassell & Co., 1954). NA FO 262/1733 “Language Officers”; NA ADM 116/3114, “Memo from G.C. Dickens, Director of Naval Intelligence, 6 July 1934”.

41 Daniels, Otome (née Nishide 西出) was the Japanese wife of Frank Daniels from 1932. During the war she produced Dictionary of Japanese (Sōshō) Writing Forms (London: Lund Humphries and Company, 1944)Google Scholar. Ōba, The “Japanese” War, 17–19, 24–5; Dore, “Frank and Otome Daniels”, 268–78.

42 Ronald Dore FBA (1925– ) was on the “State Scholarship (general purpose) course”. After the war he took a degree in Japanese in 1947 and subsequently taught at Sussex University; he has published many books on Japanese society, starting with Life in a Tokyo Ward (1958).

43 Charles J. Dunn (1915–95) graduated from Queen Mary College, London, in 1936 with a degree in French and then worked for the Special Branch of the Metropolitan Police for three years. He was called up in 1943 and joined the Royal Navy; owing to his language ability he was assigned to study Japanese at SOAS and on completion of the course he was retained as a teacher. After the war he took a degree in Japanese and then became a member of staff at SOAS. Cortazzi, Hugh, “Charles Dunn (1915–1995)”, in Cortazzi (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 8 (Leiden: Global Oriental, 2013), 525–34Google Scholar.

44 Walter F. France (1887–1963) was a missionary in Japan for the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel from 1910 to 1923; he wrote Industrialism in Japan (1928). After the war he was the last Warden of St. Augustine's College, Canterbury, a Missionary College for the Church of England. Ion, Hamish, “For the triumph of the cross: a survey of the British missionary movement in Japan, 1869–1945”, in Daniels, Gordon and Tsuzuki, Chushichi (eds), The History of Anglo-Japanese Relations 1600–2000 vol. 5 Social and Cultural Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 101Google Scholar, n. 70.

45 See note 3, above.

46 Audrey Margarette Henty (1879–1970) worked in Japan as a missionary for the Church Missionary Society from 1905 until January 1941, when she was evacuated to India. She reached Britain in 1944 and retired from the CMS at the end of the year. Ion, A. Hamish, The Cross and the Rising Sun: The British Protestant Missionary Movement (Waterloo, Ontario: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 1993), 19, 178–9, 196–7, 252Google Scholar. Archives of the Church Mission Society, Oxford: “Register of Missionaries”.

47 Noel Everard Isemonger (1883–1951) was a Royal Navy officer who qualified as a Japanese interpreter in 1909 and reached the rank of Commander in 1918. He joined the School in 1921 as a teacher of Japanese and retired in 1943. NA ADM 196/126/283; The Naval Who's Who 1917 (Polstead, Suffolk: J.B. Hayward & Son, 1981), 84; Daniels, Japanese Studies in the University of London, 18.

48 Shoki Coe (Ch. Huang Zhanghui, J. Kō Shōki 黄彰輝; 1914–88) grew up in Japanese-occupied Taiwan and went to Cambridge in 1937 for theological training. In 1942, unable to return to Taiwan and having a good knowledge of Japanese, he was appointed to a position at SOAS. He later became a pastor in the Taiwan Presbyterian Church. Chang, Jonah, Shoki Coe: An Ecumenical Life in Context (Geneva: World Council of Churches Publications, 2012), 62–7Google Scholar.

49 Richard Thomas Davenport Ledward (1915–62) graduated from Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1936, spent three years in Japan at the embassy as a probationer vice-consul and then served in Harbin, Manchuria, until the outbreak of war. After the war, he returned to the Diplomatic Service and when he died he was Counsellor at the British Embassy in Washington. NA HW 8/125; obituary, Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 50, 1963, 353–4.

50 He is mistakenly listed as Pilot Officer D. Lees in the list of staff in the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics (see note 19, above). Andrew Lees (1908–66) received an MA in mathematics and natural philosophy from the University of Glasgow in 1930. How he came to know Japanese is unclear, but he may, like his fellow Glasgow graduate Duncan McGhie, have done one of the SOAS courses and then been retained as a teacher.

51 Possibly an error for Lomax (see Cortazzi, Japan and Back and Places Elsewhere: a Memoir, 18–20). According to “Lecturers in the Japanese department” (SOAS archives: SOAS/REG/01/01/01), his initial was J., not F.; the Air Force List for July 1945 includes both an F. and a J. Lomas but no F. or J. Lomax. Like Sq/Ldr A. Summers (see below), he has no page entry in the Air Force List, only an entry in the index (pp. 1671 and 1878, respectively), presumably because he had been seconded to SOAS. Since they were both Squadron Leaders they must have had some experience in the RAF, rather than being students retained as teachers, but I have been unable to trace either of them. Neither of them appears in the lists of Language Officers trained in Japan, so it is unclear how they acquired their knowledge of the language: Best, Antony, British Intelligence and the Japanese Challenge in Asia, 1914–1941 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 94–95, 108Google Scholar.

52 Barry Sloan MacKay (1922–65) took First Class Honours in Part I of the Classical Tripos at Trinity College, Cambridge, in 1942. He was deemed unfit for war service owing to high blood pressure. It seems that he completed one of the SOAS courses and was then employed as a teacher in 1943 before being transferred to the Department of Phonetics and Linguistics where he remained until 1946. He was a schoolmaster from 1947 to 1953, then studied theology at Ridley Hall, Cambridge and was later chaplain there; finally, he was Fellow and Chaplain at Selwyn College, Cambridge, until his death. Selwyn College archives, “Report of the Fellowships Committee”, 27 October 1961.

53 Matsukawa Baiken 松川梅賢 (sometimes referred to as Baikin or Byken; ?–1959) came to London in 1915 and was a correspondent in London for the Dōmei Press. His English translation of Tsugi no sekai sens ō 次の世界戰爭 by Ishimaru Tōda 石丸藤太 (1936) was published in Britain in 1937 as The Next World War. Although married to an Englishwoman named Helen Stanford, he was interned on the Isle of Man until released for teaching duties. He compiled the reference tables in Otome Daniels’ Dictionary of Japanese (Sōsho) Writing Forms (1944). Ōba, The “Japanese” War, 21; Itoh, Keiko, The Japanese Community in Pre-War Britain: From Integration to Disintegration (Richmond: Curzon, 2001), 98, 163, 184, 195Google Scholar.

54 Matsuyama Eiichi 松山英一 had a Japanese father and a British mother and was serving with the Canadian Army in Britain. On 13 October 1945, the magazine The Illustrated carried a photograph of Matsuyama, described as a Sergeant-Major, practising Japanese conversation with one Private Lewis: reproduced in Brown, The School, 88; Ōba, The “Japanese” War, 27.

55 Edwin McClellan (1925–2009) was born in Kobe, where his father worked for Lever Brothers; his mother was Japanese but died during his infancy. In 1942 he and his father were repatriated and he taught at SOAS before joining the RAF in 1944. “Edwin McClellan: a biographical note”, in Dennis Washburn and Alan Tansman (eds), Studies in Modern Japanese Literature: Essays and Translations in Honor of Edwin McClellan (Ann Arbor: Center for Japanese Studies, University of Michigan, 1997), 1–2.

56 Sub-Lieutenant D.L. McGhie was a teacher before the war. Duncan Livingstone McGhie (1912–92) graduated in 1932 from the University of Glasgow, where he studied French and Italian. He worked as a teacher until the outbreak of war, when he joined the Royal Naval Volunteer Reserve. According to his biography on the website of the University of Glasgow, he performed so well on one of the SOAS Japanese courses that he was retained as a teacher (see the page on The University of Glasgow Story website dedicated to him).

57 Douglas Mills (1923–2005) went up to Cambridge in 1941 to read Modern Languages but in January 1943 he joined the Japanese translators’ course at SOAS. By the end of the year he had made such progress that he was retained as an instructor. While teaching he also studied for a degree in Japanese. He subsequently did a PhD at SOAS and taught there, at the University of California at Berkeley and finally at Cambridge. Bowring, Richard, “Douglas Mills (1923–2005): scholar of Japanese at Cambridge”, in Cortazzi, Hugh (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 10 (Folkestone: Renaissance Books, 2016), 371–3Google Scholar.

58 Major-General Francis Stewart Gilderoy Piggott CB (1883–1966) spent some of his early years in Japan when his father was a legal advisor to the Meiji government. In 1904, as a young army officer, he spent two years in Japan as one of the first Language Officers. After WWI, he served as military attaché in Tokyo from 1922 to 1926, and again from 1936 to 1939. He was considered in official circles to be strongly pro-Japanese but once war broke out with Japan he devoted his energies to the SOAS courses. Anthony Best, “Major-General F.S.G. Piggott (1883–1966)”, in Hugh Cortazzi (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 8, 102–16.

59 Sir John Pilcher (1912–1990) joined the Japan Consular Service in 1936 and remained there learning Japanese until in 1939 he was posted to Tsingtao and then London. He served as British ambassador to Japan in 1967–72. Cortazzi, Hugh, “Sir John Pilcher, ambassador to Japan, 1967–72”, in Cortazzi (ed.), British Envoys in Japan, 1859–1972 (Folkestone: Global Oriental, 2004), 202–13Google Scholar.

60 Probably Harold Essex Reynell (1887–1972), son of the identically named founder of the firm of H.E. Reynell & Co., wine and spirit merchants of Kobe. He had evidently grown up in Japan and presumably knew some Japanese; during WWI he was a Captain in the Royal Flying Corps and later transferred to the RAF. The Directory & Chronicle for China, Japan, Corea, Indo-China, Straits Settlements, Malay States, Sian, Netherlands India, Borneo, the Philippines, &c: With Which Are Incorporated “The China Directory” and “The Hong Kong List for the Far East” (Hong Kong: Hongkong Daily Press, 1910), 662, 1710; http://www.airhistory.org.uk/rfc/people_index.html.

61 John Kennedy Rideout (c. 1914–1950) studied Chinese and then Japanese at SOAS from 1934 to 1940. After the war he was Professor of Oriental Studies at Sydney University, Australia, from 1948 to 1949; he was then appointed Professor of Chinese at the University of Hong Kong in 1950 but in the same year died there in mysterious circumstances; the newspaper report of his death states that he was an MI5 agent. Brown, The School, 88, n. 20; Sima, William, China & ANU: Diplomats, Adventurers, Scholars (Acton, ACT: Australian National University Press), 12–14Google Scholar.

62 Alan Russell is listed in “Lecturers in the Japanese department” (SOAS archives: SOAS/REG/01/01/01) as Sergeant C.A. Russell and apparently died young. Ōba, The “Japanese” War, 29.

63 Untraced. His name does not appear in the list of seamen internees contained in NA HO 215/251, “Transfer of Japanese merchant seaman from Isle of Man to Knapdale POW camp”.

64 See note 51, above.

65 Probably the merchant seaman named Kuniji Takaira (b. 1898) who was transferred from internment on the Isle of Man to Knapdale POW Camp near Argyll in 1942. His good command of English is apparent from a letter he wrote with K. Shimazaki on 6 April 1942 to the authorities at the camp on the Isle of Man requesting a transfer to Knapdale and expressing their willingness to act as interpreters for their fellow internees, who were not permitted, in spite of their ignorance of English, to write to their families in Japanese. Since they add, “We are quite prepared to live without any distinction with the seamen should the application be granted”, they were most likely officers of the Japanese merchant marine. NA HO 215/251, “Transfer of Japanese merchant seaman from Isle of Man to Knapdale POW camp”.

66 James Jitsuei Tsubota, Fumi Yamamoto and Peter Shogi Yamauchi all joined the Canadian Army before December 1941. Ito, Roy, We Went to War: The Story of the Japanese Canadians who Served during the First and Second World Wars (Stittsville, Ontario: Canada's Wings, Inc.: 1984), 153, 158–9Google Scholar.

67 Yanada Senji 簗田銓次 (1906–72) came to Britain in 1933 after graduating from Tokyo Imperial University and spending a year at Harvard; from 1935 to 1941 he was the London correspondent of the Yomiuri Shinbun; he was interned on the Isle of Man and was released to begin teaching at SOAS in September 1942. He co-authored Teach Yourself Japanese with Charles Dunn (London: English Universities Press, 1958) and An Introduction to Written Japanese with Patrick O'Neill (London: English Universities Press, 1963). Brown, The School, 89, n. 20; Oba, Sadao and Kaneko, Anne, “Yanada Senji (1906–1972): teacher of Japanese at SOAS”, in Cortazzi, Hugh (ed.), Britain and Japan: Biographical Portraits, vol. 9 (Folkestone: Renaissance Books, 2015), 413–24Google Scholar.

68 Saburō, Yoshitake 吉武三郎 (?–1942) was the author of The Phonetic System of Ancient Japanese (London: Royal Asiatic Society, 1934)Google Scholar and Japanese. A Series of Conversational Sentences in Colloquial Japanese. With Explanatory Notes on the Japanese Alphabet and Pronunciation, Phonetic Transcription, Romanized Transliteration, English Translations and Reproduction in Japanese Script of the Texts, etc. ([London]: Linguaphone Institute, 1932). He was a teacher of Japanese at SOAS before the war and died in 1942. Collected Writings of P.G. O'Neill (Richmond: Japan Library, 2001), 2; Daniels, Japanese Studies in the University of London, 18.

69 This is partly included as an appendix to the English version of Ōba Sadao's book, but there are omissions, so the complete text is included here.