Grant K. Goodman is a professional historian of Japan, specializing in the relations between the Dutch and the Japanese in the Edo Period, and the development of Dutch Studies (Rangaku) in Japan. But here he writes on the basis of his personal experiences as a translator/ interpreter/interrogator in the U.S. Army in the last stages of the war and the first year of the Occupation.
He begins with a chapter detailing his initial fascination with Japan, through news articles, stamps, and matchbook covers of the 1930s.
The outbreak of the Pacific War coincided with Goodman's last year of high school and first at Princeton University. He was determined to enter the training program for Japanese language intelligence specialists and was sent to the famed Army Japanese Language School at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor, which, together with its sister Navy Japanese Language School in Boulder, Colorado, trained so many of the specialists who not only served the United States during the war and occupation, but went on to lay the foundations of postwar Japanese studies in the United States. (The author Yukio Mishima allegedly remarked at a banquet that since U.S.-Japanese studies had made such unprecedented strides during the Pacific War, he thought perhaps it was time for another one. The foreign minister, also present, demurred.)
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