Hello. I am so glad I found you! I am just an ordinary, middle class woman who stumbled on a 60-year secret. My father is a WWII veteran. He is 89 years old and has an amazing memory. Until a few years ago, I thought I knew all there was to know about my father's time in the military. He sat behind a desk during the war. He went on liberty with friends. He made it sound like Boy Scout camp. But then he started having flashbacks and nightmares at the age of 80. That didn't fit with what he had told us. So, I started having breakfast with him once a week to see if talking about it might help. Nothing. Jump forward a year. On his 81st birthday, he placed two notebooks full of letters on my lap. He'd written them during the war to his "folks." The short version of the story is that I decided to transcribe the letters, which lead to more questions and mostly vague answers. I do believe that at this point, I have most of the story. He was part of a team that broke a top secret code called Kana (katakana). This has been the most amazing journey and one that brought my father and I together. I have now written a book and would love to have it published some day. We will see! In the meantime, I am still trying to fill in blanks for him. The lack of information out there makes him feel crazy. Sorry this is so long. Looking forward to getting to know you all! ~Karen
Welcome to this fine place Karen. You are welcome to share whatever you wish on this forum. Rest assured it will be treated with great respect. As an aside, kana is the phonetic language of the Japanese. Since their written language is pictographic, there was no easy way for non-Japanese to learn to speak it. The kana symbols were a method of creating a pronunciation guide for Japanese. Here is a link to an article from 1942 explaining what it is. Some Examples of Katakana (Phonetic Japanese) Used in Communications, WWII Tactical and Technical Trends, No. 12, November 19, 1942 (Lone Sentry)
Welcome Karen. Please extend to your father best regards from my family and me. We appreciate his efforts when he was a young man. Please feel free to post anything you feel lead to add the forum. If you need any assistance, please let the trustees and moderators know.
Thank you both! Thank you for the bit on Katakana. My dad has explained it to me, but it still eludes me. Obviously, his mind is sharper than mine...lol. He was part of a 7-man team which included two who copied the code, two who analyzed it, two technicians and an officer. I recently found and read a book called, Katakana Man. In that book, he explains it as a Japanese version of Morse code. That is not entirely true, but as with all things on this journey, pieces are. I'm just here to try and find the right pieces and then put them together. Haven't looked around here much yet. But I plan to. There are a few questions I have but I should probably find the right category to put it under. Thanks so much. I have felt so alone on this journey and it's nice to know there is someone out there to bounce things off of. ~K
Karen, we're always happy to assist in any way we can. Any questions you might have can be placed in the Information Request forum. Let me explain katakana a bit. The Japanese written language is a pictographic one, like Chinese. The symbols for various terms have no pronunciation guides in them. A child must learn not only the pictogram, but also its pronunciation. Each symbol must be learned independently, and new words are often made by combining older symbols. A totally different sound is also created, not related to the originals. In an attempt to render the written language reflective of the spoken language, kana was developed. If you look through the article I posted, the symbols of kana represent sounds, just like our alphabet does. Thus, many fewer symbols are required. Written Japanese requires knowledge of 10s of thousands of symbols, whereas kana can be written using far fewer. For example, any word in English can be made by combining only 26 symbols. Kana was an effort to do the same thing. I hope that makes sense. I was a Geography teacher, and one of the series of lessons I taught related to pictographic languages. It's a difficult one for English speakers to grasp.
I agree; very hard! I sent the link to that site to my dad. So, the part that makes it even more complicated is that my dad "copied" the code as he heard it, in dots and dashes. It was typed into a machine that printed it on a roll that was then fed into another machine. That is where the cryptanalysts came in. It was not his job to know what was being said, but he said he was around it so much that he got so that he could. He was on a submarine off of both Iwo Jima and Okinawa.
Well, if I may chime in here; it must be remembered that the pictograph style is difficult if not nearly impossible to translate into any type of system which can be utilized in "dots and dashes". I wouldn't be surprised if in there somewhere is the answer to what you Father was involved in. Just a WAG.
Whatever it was that he did, he was told that he would be breaking a top secret Japanese code called Katakana. Several years after the war, when he had married my mother, they both remember two men, dressed in suits coming up the walkway. They asked for my father and told him that he was now released to talk about what he did during the war. He did not know what they were talking about. He had seen something on television about codebreaking and believed it was already declassified. But the other part is that he had a traumatic event happen (which he kept secret for 60+ years) and was profoundly affected by it. I wonder if he didn't repress the whole thing, code and all to protect his mind from this event? ~K
Welcome to the forums Karen. Your father must have contributed greatly by doing this service in deciphering this code. Katakana in Japanese is normally used to describe "foreign" articles such as アイスクリーム "ice cream" and ピストル "pistol", relatively new terms that are not embedded in Japanese culture and thus the language. Looking forward to your contributions and hearing more about your father's work.
Karen, I may have found a sort of "left-handed reference" to the code breaking duty your Father was involved with. Two additional codes augmented the Japanese Black Code beginning on 1 June 1939: the "Flag Officers Code," which saw very limited use and was never broken, and a five-digit enciphered general purpose code given the designator "JN-25." The Flag Officer's Code was one of Hawaii's principle tasks until mid-December 1941. The JN-25 system required three books to operate: a code book, a book of random numbers called an additive book, and an instruction book. The original code book contained some 30,000 five-digit numbers which represented Kana particles, numbers, place-names, and myriad other meanings. A key characteristic of this system was that, when the digits in a group were added together, the total was always divisible by three. The book of random numbers consisted of 30 pages, each of which contained 100 numbers on a 10 x 10 matrix. These numbers were used as additives -- they were added to the code groups digit by digit without the carryover used in customary addition -- thus enciphering the code. The instruction book contained the rules for using the aperiodic cipher. The number of each page and the number of the line on the page where the selection of additives began served as "keys" which were included in each message at the beginning and end. This code subsequently became the most widely distributed and extensively used of all of Japan's naval cryptosystems. (bold mine) See: Pearl Harbor Revisited: U.S. Navy Communications Intelligence, 1924-1941 Thought you might enjoy reading that section, the whole page is informative as well.
Thank you. His service was from 1944 to 1946 and of course, the war ended in '45. I'm going to see if I can find an email from several years ago where he explained the code and how he did it and then copy and paste it here for one of the forums. In fact, I am writing a book, so I intend to launch a website in October. One of the planned features will be to interview him and post a new video of him answering various questions, every Wednesday. I have jokingly referred to my weekly breakfasts with my dad as, Wednesdays with Murray. I will be sure to have questions so that he can explain the code. Thank you for the response. I wish my brain could understand this stuff better. I wish there were a movie I could watch of him doing it. I'm a very visual person. I truly appreciate all of the help here! ~Karen
Karen, be sure to let us know when you launch your website. Those interviews ought to be seen by a wider audience. Also, please do post the email with the explanation. It should be worthwhile.
Thank you, Lou. I just checked my email and sadly, the email I was thinking of has been lost. It's a long story, but basically, someone hacked into my hotmail account a few years ago. After months of frustration, I had to just abandon it and open a new account. Very frustrating. There is no way to contact Hotmail, apparently. If you Google the problem, you will see that it is a common one and ticks a lot of people off. I lost all of my contacts and valuable conversations with my father. I did copy and paste some of them, so it's still possible that I'll find something. And I WILL video tape him explaining it. And speaking of that, yes, I will let you know when I launch it. The interesting thing is that when I speak with random people I meet and now, people I have met here, there is a lot of interest in my father's story. But when I pitched it to a very well-known NY agent a few weeks ago, she said, 'So your father went through this stuff during WWII. That was a long time ago. Who's going to care about it now?" Obviously, she wasn't the agent for me! Fortunately, not everyone feels that way and I do have an agent and editor who requested more information, as well. So, we will see. But I have decided that I WILL publish this book, one way or another. My father and I have a story to tell and it's time. I've been working on it for almost 10-years now. Anyway-thank you for the encouragement. I appreciate it! ~Karen
Good for you. You should tell that NY agent to go check a bookstore some day and peruse the WW2 section. It seems to be getting larger every time I go in. Somebody cares, and I suspect that people will continue to care because people like you keep it in the forefront. Tell your dad we all wish him the best. I wish we could all talk to him; but I guess we'll settle for your interviews.
Well, I wanted to tell her more than that. lol But unfortunately, I believe that the marketability of a book like this is unseen to many NY agents and editors. It's sad really. Our vets have a story to tell and those from WWII are dying without ever telling their stories. There are grandchildren here on this forum who are trying to research their deceased grandfathers. The time to ask questions and get those stories written down is when they are alive. It's so much harder once they are gone. And in most cases, the veterans find peace in having someone to listen to their story. Your comment gave me an idea. I think when I set up the website, I'll try to figure out how to have a place for comments below each video. That way, if there are things that someone thinks of, that Dad didn't mention or answer, I can do so either in a written response or by adding the question in the next video. He is very internet savvy but he's funny about forums like this. He'll hang around for a while, but if someone says something that triggers something, he'll never go back. Not everyone on forums think before they post a comment. I'm hoping that with the website, he will be interested and maybe I can even get him to chat with people like you. But I will probably have to moderate the comments. Anyway-thanks for the chat. It's helping me form a plan. ~Karen
Karen: I'm no code breaker but I have some knowledge based on some collaboration I did with WWII cryptologist Lt. Cdr Phil Jacobsen. I'd be interested in helping out if you want to contact me; either PM or via e-mail on my site.
