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gky: Another document that you translated was the Z Plan, and there were only two Nisei involved in that.

SI: Yeah.

gky: So, was your knowledge of it by what you read and what you've done some research?

SI: Yeah.

gky: Will you describe to me what wound up happening with that, how the Z Plan got translated?

SI: Well, as you know, there were two Niseis who were on the translation team, and there was Anderton who was an executive officer to Mashbir and Bowers was the translator, and the other fellow, Bagnall. The story that I got, I don't know whether you've heard this, but, you know, the combined fleet was the fleet, the Japanese combined fleet was the fleet. And the commander in chief was a fellow named Koga, and his exec officer was named Fukudome. Now they had planned to move their headquarters from Palau to [inaudible]. And on their way, they're on two flag boats, and the both of them crashed in a big storm. Koga was killed, but Fukudome and his staff, about eleven staff officers, survived, and they were captured by Filipino fishermen and taken ashore and then turned over to the guerrilla unit that was headed by a fellow named Cushing. So Cushing sent a cable back to, a message back to Brisbane, saying that we have eleven staff officers and one who seems to be a very high-level officer with a briefcase of documents. Apparently, there was one fellow, a Filipino, who had gone to school in Japan, so was able to do some reading. I don't know how true that is, but that -- he went through the documents and realized they were very important, so then Mashbir cabled back and said, "Well, we're going to send a submarine out to pick it up." So a submarine picked it up and brought it to a place where they could have it shipped to Australia by plane. So that's how it got to ATIS. So when Mashbir realized what it was, he organized this team with Anderton and he said that they will work after hours so that the other people would not get suspicious of what they're doing. So these guys, when they did a translation, they worked the whole day and then they'd go back and work on this document. They did this in fairly good order, and then they translated the whole thing. The document, according to one version, the documents were returned after they were photographed and returned to the Philippines, and I understand they were turned back to Fukudome. I don't know how true that is.

[Interruption]

gky: We were talking about the Z Plan.

SI: Yes. Well, as I say, I wanted to look into the section which caused some disagreement in translation. I wanted to get it from Rocky, not Rocky but Yoshikazu Nabata and check it out against the Japanese.

gky: Why do you think it was a significant document for the United States to have translated?

SI: Pardon?

gky: Why do you think it was a significant document for the United States to have translated? How did it help us?

SI: How'd it help us? Well, at Midway, the Japanese naval air was pretty well decimated, and what they wanted to do was to have what they called the one decisive blow. And in order to do that, they had to devise a plan so that they would maneuver, if they got in contact with the American fleet, they would maneuver the engagement in such a way that they would take advantage of what strong points they had. Now, their strong points were, one: they still had some pilots who were land based, who were not carrier trained in certain areas. Then they had, of course, they had a limited number of aircraft carriers so they had their other surface craft. And so the plan was, originally, they had certain belts, areas, of defense, so called. But this was designed to maneuver the whole thing in such a way that they would take advantage of their strong points and strike one decisive blow against the American fleet. That, in essence, is just the gist of it.

gky: What other documents did the Nisei, did the MIS, translate that were significant?

SI: Well, there were a number of documents. One was the inventory of the Japanese equipment. And this located the storage of different types of weapons and the number and so forth. The interesting thing is that that was sent back from the Central Pacific with no translation at all. It came to PACMIRS and a fellow named Yamane, Kazuo Yamane, is the one who found it. So when that was discovered, then everybody was put on the translation of this document because if we were able to locate the inventory of the Japanese arsenals, which they did, they hit most of them. And also, after the war, it would serve as a point of examination of Japanese weapons.

gky: How did you feel when you heard about, or actually maybe you never heard about this during the war. Did you ever hear that a Nisei translated this document, or we found out such and such thanks to a Nisei during the war?

SI: Did I?

gky: Yeah. Did you all hear that other Nisei were doing these translations and finding, you know, working little pockets of intelligence, or not?

SI: Well, yeah, of course. I was in the MIS. But I don't understand the question.

gky: Did you, were you hearing about what other MIS guys were doing in other parts of the Pacific or here, back in the States?

SI: Well, no, not in the States. I knew pretty much what they were doing. I was in what we call the Southwest Pacific, which was under General MacArthur's command. And, of course, I knew pretty much what they were doing, mostly New Guinea and then in the Philippines.

gky: How did it make you feel when you heard that a Nisei translated this, or you knew that a Nisei had to have been involved in the translation?

SI: Well, I felt that we were doing a good job. Another very important document was the army directory, directory of army officers. This was picked up -- I forgot the location now. Anyway, it was picked up and it was only about a year old, and this was around 1943. And our Order of Battle information of the Japanese army was really lousy, nothing. It was useless. So when we picked this up, everyone was put on it, and we spent about three or four days just concentrating to get this out. You know, Japanese names are very difficult. They have peculiar readings for some of it, so they have a dictionary, Japanese name dictionary, that even the Japanese have to use it to find how you can read a name. So we had to translate that, but then when we didn't know the name, we gave what we call the Chinese telecode number for each character, they'd put that on. And this directory gave the name of the officer, including reserve officers on active duty, the location, the unit, the training, and so forth, and we sent this directly to the Pentagon which is built by that; and they set up a special OBT, Order of Battle Team, to organize this material. That was the first time that the army was able to get accurate Order of Battle information of the Japanese army.

<End Segment 10> - Copyright © 2000 Bridge Media and Densho. All Rights Reserved.