ABSTRACT
The State Scholarship Course was the first and began in May 1942. In July three more courses were started: the Services Interrogators’ Course, the Services Translators’ Course, and a Translators’ short course. The course consisted of general training in reading, writing and speaking, with some military terms introduced at the end. Students on this course were taught Japanese through the medium of the colloquial grammar with the emphasis on reading and writing. The Translators’ and Interrogators’ Courses had been reasonably successful in terms of teaching students, in just over a year, either to speak the language to a standard high enough to interrogate prisoners. The SOAS Report for 1944 attributes the remarkable competence of the State Scholars in writing essays and Japanese characters to the fact that much of the teaching was done by Japanese instructors in Japanese.
