Posted on: Monday, January 24, 2005

Presidio school loses an original

By Dennis McLellan
Los Angeles Times

Shigeya Kihara, the last surviving original instructor of the first U.S. Army language school, which was founded just prior to World War II to teach Japanese to American soldiers, died Jan. 16 in Castro Valley, Calif. He was 90.

Originally known as the Fourth Army Intelligence School and based at the Presidio in San Francisco, the language training program later evolved into the Defense Language Institute Foreign Language Center at the Presidio of Monterey.

A Nisei, or second-generation Japanese-American, Kihara was one of the first four civilian instructors at the original school, which opened in 1941 in a converted airplane hangar.

Classes began on Nov. 1, with 60 students, 58 of them second-generation Japanese-Americans. Some five weeks later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor, plunging America into World War II.

Born in Fairfield, Calif., Kihara had earned a bachelor's degree in political science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1937 and, after receiving a master's in international relations in 1939, he moved to Japan to study and travel.

Although he had promised his father he would study in Japan for two years, Kihara said in a 2001 interview with the Monterey County Herald, "war fever" made studying difficult. Japan had invaded China in 1937 and when it invaded French Indochina in July 1941, Kihara feared he would be trapped in Japan if war broke out with the United States.

After Kihara returned home, a UC Berkeley professor suggested that he take a job teaching Japanese to soldiers. Kihara reported to the Presidio and received an appointment to the U.S. Civil Service as a civilian Army employee and instructor in Japanese.

The government's decision to launch the language school, Kihara said in a 1991 interview with the Herald's weekend magazine, was "an unprecedented, historical decision."

"Heretofore, Japanese-Americans were considered second-class-citizens, linked to Japan, and not to be trusted," he said. "Here they were asked to do something of vital service to the United States, very critical not only for the U.S. Army but for Japanese-Americans."

Kihara's son, Ron, said his father "was always a loyal American."

"I remember a friend of mine once listening to my dad talking. He said, 'Shig, you make me feel like I need to stand up and salute.' Dad was that way," said Kihara. "He really felt this was his country and there was no question where his allegiance was, regardless of the fact that he had the irony of his own family and parents being behind barbed wire in relocation camps."

Because he worked for the language school, Kihara and his wife, Aya, were exempt from being sent to a relocation camp in early 1942. His parents, in-laws and siblings, however, were sent to a camp in Topaz, Utah.