"He didn't tell me anything," Tanaka Lucas said.
In 1942, he became part of its first graduating class. While his siblings and parents in California were rounded up and incarcerated, Walter Tanaka was being trained at Camp Savage. When Karen Tanaka Lucas moved to the Twin Cities in 1970 to attend the University of Minnesota, she had no idea her father once trained in the state at a secret language school. Many details were not publicly known until government records, albeit patchy and incomplete, were released under the Freedom of Information Act in the early 1970s.
The students were instructed not to talk about what they learned, or were simply reluctant to pass down stories of their wartime experiences. The language school - which operated at Camp Savage from 1942 to 1944 before moving to Fort Snelling - was, after all, a classified military endeavor. "They did not want me to probe that deeply." They shut me down right away," he recalled. Oshiro asked for discharge papers or other documents that would offer confirmation of the veterans' deployment. He also cold-called family members of the veterans. Louis, photocopying 6,000 pages of microfilm. He and his late wife, Vici, even spent three weeks at the National Archives in St. But he kept at the project for decades, plugging in missing pieces. Despite his old-school computing background, he didn't even know Excel. Oshiro wasn't naturally equipped to be the keeper of this vast information trove. In 2000, Oshiro began compiling a more complete list along with Grant Ichikawa and Paul Tani, both MIS veterans who have since passed away. "That's what caused us to work, to make to make them more visible to the community." "I felt that this was a real slap in the face for the Niseis," said Oshiro. Smith" in the Japanese American community, and you can begin to grasp the columns of anonymity that populated those pages. He was rummaging through materials at the Minnesota Historical Society library when he came across a 1946 album, sort of like a yearbook, for graduates of the MIS language school.īut the graduate list identified the soldiers only by their first initial and surname. She said many of these soldiers, told that they "looked like the enemy," were motivated to prove they should be treated like any other U.S. "I think about that all the time: Why would you fight for a country that put you in a prison camp?" said Kimmy Tanaka, program supervisor at Historic Fort Snelling, who has been educating visitors about this often-missed chapter. government deemed them a national security threat due to their Japanese ancestry. The irony is that many of these men and women, or their families, were incarcerated because the U.S. He helped create a database of more than 8,000 names of those who, like him, served in the Military Intelligence Service (MIS). Yet their contributions are unknown to most Minnesotans.įrom his daughter's home in Savage, just a few miles from the site of the former Camp Savage language school, 94-year-old Seiki Oshiro has been trying to preserve this piece of history. Douglas MacArthur, estimated the Nisei shortened the Pacific war by two years and saved a million American lives. Charles Willoughby, chief of military intelligence for Gen.
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