After the attack on Pearl Harbor, U.S. military leaders realized they needed lots of Japanese translators — and fast. They recruited the children of Japanese immigrants, or Nisei, to serve as military translators and help win the war in the Pacific. As other Japanese Americans were being sent to internment camps and forcibly removed from the West Coast, the military’s Nisei recruits ended up in Minnesota, a state with only a handful of Asian residents at the time, where they studied Japanese for hours a day at Fort Snelling. More…