Review of Eavesdropping on the Emperor: Interrogators and Codebreakers in Britain’s War with Japan by Peter Kornicki

Abstract

Preparing for war requires training. Codebreaking and intelligence require training a sufficient number of translators of enemy languages. On 7 December 1941 when Japan attacked British territories in the Southwest Pacific and the U.S. Navy base in Pearl Harbor, Britain did not have the necessary translators of Japanese. It was necessary for Britain to establish training programs to supply the translators who would be needed for codebreaking, interrogating prisoners of war, translating captured documents, and interpreting unenciphered voice. Eavesdropping on the Emperor is the story of how Britain trained Japanese translators for the war and the tasks that those translators undertook. It is an interesting story but one that has been explored too late. The author Peter Kornicki, who is an Emeritus Professor of Japanese at the University of Cambridge and a Fellow of the British Academy, notes that: