Yamamoto's English ability: any recordings?
 

We all know Yamamoto studied at Harvard, and was the Japanese Naval Attache in Washington, so we know he could read/write English quite well. I was wondering: are there any recordings of him speaking in English? I think that would be fascinating to listen to.

I doubt there would be any recordings of him speaking English though he was certainly fluent and spent several years in the US.He was actually fascinated by the America he saw a good portion of the country in his spare time and he also had an understanding of the industrial capacity of the US and an understanding of American resolve.

The reason I doubt that there are any recordings is because in Japan in the years leading up to WWII(an during of course) there was a lot of propaganda to be anti western that the Japanese cloud do anything that a westerner could do better so a major military leader would not be keen on being recorded speaking English.Not surprisingly the inverse propaganda occurred in the US.

I have no doubt that Yamamoto had many in depth conversations with his American counterparts during his tenure in the US.Of course what was said would always be guarded because both Japanese and American military thinkers knew that sooner or later the nations would confront each other.

What is less well known is that many US navy naval officers did stints as naval attaches in Japan in the 20's to mid 30's their underlying goal was to learn Japanese so that they could later help with code breaking the Japanese did not have this foresight and only the wiser officer such as Yamamoto expanded their knowledge while serving as an attache.

Not perfect:

http://www.framepool.com/en/bin/0,25...n,1930_-_1940/

That link is a 504 timeout for me.

Good idea to check before posting. It's Yamamoto speaking in japanese with someone dubbing it in english.

I'm afraid this is the only other link I can find:

http://www.framepool.com/en/search/y...9485279041076/

LOL your right :):oops::/\\!!

I suspect somewhere there IS a recording of Yamamoto speaking English, but is not publicly available.

On another note, I wish to brag that I scored The Reluctant Admiral for five and a half bucks on Amazon, today. In hardback!! :D

There is also the situation in Japan after the war; a very large portion of written, published, recorded, and filmed material made prior to the surrender was destroyed after the war as a means of stifiling possible dissent to US rule over Japan duriing the Occupation. Some of the material was destroyed by the Japanese themselves, but a larger proportion was ordered destroyed by the Allied Occupation HQ (OHQ). There are a lot of very classic Japanese films (some by people such as Akira Kurosawa) that vanished because the OHQ deemed the films to "martial" in nature. The move to 'demilitarize' the Japanese nation by OHQ caused the loss of many, amny treasures of Japanese culture, literature, and media...

<O>

Nice one...just under $4 here in the UK :)


http://www.amazon.co.uk/Reluctant-Ad...uctant+Admiral