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gky: We have seen this to be mostly a male story. There were, particularly towards the end of the language school, some women who were involved.

JM: Right. It's actually interesting if you look at that, that chapter that I just showed you this afternoon. I have a page or two on, on that. Army Intelligence at the highest levels was actually very interested in using women in noncombat jobs. From the very beginning when the Women's Army Corps was organized in '42 and '43, the, for some reason the language school initially was not interested in using Nisei women, and it wasn't until 1944, late in '44, that they organized one class of Nisei women who had joined the Women's Army Corps and put them in their special class at Fort Snelling. And they graduated shortly after the end of the war and as a group were flown to Tokyo.

gky: To do what?

JM: To be discharged immediately. [Laughs] Because MacArthur's headquarters had established an initial policy in the first few weeks of the occupation, right after the surrender, of not allowing any women in theater. And so the school, this is the story I've heard from people like Yaye Herman, the school trained them, graduated them, put them on an airplane, and they flew all the way to Tokyo. When they got to Tokyo the personnel officers there were aghast and said, "We're not authorized to have any WACs in the occupation of Japan," and this was, I believe, in January of '46, but what they did was they offered them all civil service jobs. And what Yaye tells me is they all then took voluntary discharge and took jobs as civil servants doing what they were gonna do anyway. That's the peculiarity of that particular story. Yes, the MIS did accept some Nisei WACs toward the end of the war, and they arrived shortly after the beginning of the occupation.

<End Segment 9> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.