EAVESDROPPING ON THE EMPEROR
When Britain found itself at war with Japan, it was desperately short of fluent Japanese speakers to help with the many translation tasks – including codebreaking. Young men and women with a language talent were urgently recruited and given crash courses in Japanese and sent overseas with their new skills. Some went to India, some to Mauritius and a secret radio intercept station, some to Australia to work with Australian and American codebreakers.
Prof. Peter Kornicki tells the story of linguists at war – and how the Brisbane decrypting and translating team included a young man from Orkney, David Eunson, who would in the post-war world return to his studies at Edinburgh University and eventually teach Latin at Stromness Academy.
In association with the Orkney Japan Association
Supported by the Institution of Engineering and Technology (the IET)
Peter Kornicki is Emeritus Professor of Japanese at the University of Cambridge. The son of a Polish WWII fighter pilot, he has taught in Australia and Japan and is the author of many books on Japanese history.
“Translating the despatches of the Japanese ambassador in Berlin after his conversations with Hitler; retrieving filthy but valuable documents from the battlefield in Burma; monitoring Japanese airwaves to warn of air-raids … Many lives depended upon them, so they had to get the translations right – and they did.”
