# Military Japanese

Military Japanese
Yukuo Uyehara
Military Japanese
A Manual in Japanese for the Armed Forces
by Yukuo Uyehara Assistant Professor of Japanese University of Hawaii
1943 P. D. and Ione Perkins South Pasadena
Copyright 1943, by P. D. and lone Perkins South Pasadena, California
Printed in U. S. A. Commonwealth Press Los Angeles
Military Japanese
Foreword
Confronted with the necessity of teaching the Japanese language to men in the armed forces in a minimum period of time, and yet interested in giving a basic, practical training, I have prepared this little manual—the result of my experiences with several different types of classes in Military Japanese in the past few years. I do not claim that this manual is a complete language text in any respect. Its object is to teach the essentials of conversational Japanese in the simplest form. I do not expect the students who complete this volume to attain any mastery of expert interpretation, such as would be needed for intelligence work, and so forth. Such training must be acquired by other means, and by both extensive and intensive study.
This manual is intended for those who are primarily interested in acquiring the ability to speak and to understand simple, practical colloquial Japanese. The primary purposes for which the manual is intended are to enable the student: (1) To question prisoners of war and to understand their answers; (2) To question Japanese civilians and to understand their answers; (3) To understand and to employ simple military commands; (4) To identify some simple written Japanese.
The manual is divided into three parts: (1) the language lessons. (2) helpful material for interpretation and translation, and (3) the English-Japanese dictionary of military terms. Part One consists of seventeen chapters of language lessons, of which the first fifteen are devoted to the study of the type sentences. The grammatical structure introduced in the sentences progresses from simple to complex. The last two chapters serve as review of the type sentences useful in questioning prisoners and civilians. Part Two needs no further explanation. Part Three contains approximately 1400 words, either used in the lessons or likely to be particularly useful for military purposes.
As the lessons had to be condensed into only seventeen chapters while still covering as many type sentences as possible, there is some occasional deviation from idiomatic usage. This was necessary in order to standardize the grammatical structure so that students would not be burdened with memorizing varied forms of expression. In the English translation they will find many artificial constructions. These have been used purposely in order to make the Japanese idiomatic expressions more understandable.
​The lessons are written in Romanized Japanese, the transliteration of the Japanese sounds in the Roman alphabet. This is done because for the present purposes we are not concerned with the reading of the native script. The Hepburn system of Romanization is used throughout the manual, but the spellings adopted by other schools are found in the section on Japanese Romanization.
Reference is made several times in this manual to Japanese (kun) and Chinese (on) ways of reading. Kun is the pure Japanese pronunciation and on is the pseudo-Chinese pronunciation of the kanji (Chinese characters) adopted by Japan during the early period of its history.
The following are a few facts that students of this manual should constantly remember:
| (a) | Frequent drill is more valuable than a longer time spent in study with less frequency. Specifically, the result would be better if one studies three times a week for an hour at a time than if he spends four hours continously, only once. |
| (b) | The only way to speak a language is by speaking. Therefore, when one reads the lessons in this manual, he must be sure to read them aloud. As soon as he has the general sentence structure, he should no longer depend on his eyes. Spoken language must be acquired as far as possible through the mouth and ears, and not through the eyes. |
| (c) | One must be aggressive and bold in learning to speak a language. He should not be afraid of making mistakes; he should seize every opportunity to practice what he has learned. |
| (d) | One should never analyze any other language on the basis of English grammatical construction. He must not try to fit the foreign language into English; he must learn to fit English into the language he is learning. Each language has its own characteristic grammatical construction, and one must study it as such. This is particularly true of the word order in Japanese. |
| (e) | There is no “trick” in learning a language; the whole secret is drill, drill and more drill. One should repeat the type sentences over and over as they are introduced until they become automatic and part of oneself. |
| (f) | When one has advanced sufficiently in the lessons he should select some new words from the dictionary section of the text ​to employ in various sentence patterns in place of the vocabulary already learned. If he keeps on doing this he will readily increase his vocabulary. |
The author wishes to express his deep appreciation for the encouragement and suggestions given him by the staff of the Army Contact Office, G-2, Hawaiian Department, President Gregg M. Sinclair and Dr. Laura V. Schwartz of the University of Hawaii, and his colleague Mr. Akiyoshi Hayashida.
Yukuo Uyehara.
University of Hawaii February, 1943
Contents
Part I Language Lessons
Part II Helpful Material for Interpretation and Translation
Part III
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