The Grant K. Goodman collection documents the establishment and daily operations of the Army Intensive Japanese Language School (AIJLS), operating on the University of Michigan campus during World War II, as well as Goodman's later efforts to organize AIJLS reunions. The files are divided into seven series, and consist of papers, photographs and AV materials: Army Intensive Japanese Language School, Correspondence, "Nips in the Bud," Photographs, Publicity, "Random Recollections of the Second Class, AIJLS", and Videotapes.
Grant Kohn Goodman was born in 1924 in Cleveland, Ohio. He was a student at the Army Intensive Japanese Language School (AIJLS), hosted at the University of Michigan from 1943 to 1944. The AIJLS was created by the United States War Department to build a corps of Japanese-speaking officers to do intelligence work and provide support for combat troops. Course work consisted of intensive Japanese language and culture classes, as well as military drills, inspections, and army exercises characteristic of U.S. military training camps.
Goodman's class (Company A, 3651st Service Unit), graduated from AIJLS on January 4, 1944, and continued to further training at the Military Intelligence Service Language School in Minnesota (MISLS). There, they underwent courses in the more technical and complicated aspects of intelligence work and graduated on November 18, 1944. The soldiers were then sent to basic training at Fort McClellan in Alabama, and went on to join combat units in China, Burma, India, New Guinea, the Philippines, Australia, and Hawaii, where they served as translators and interrogators for Japanese prisoners of war. After the surrender of Japan was signed by Emperor Hirohito on 1945 September 2, most of the AIJLS graduates became part of the US occupation force in Japan.
After the war, Goodman returned to academia. He received his Bachelor of Arts from Princeton's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs in 1948. He then returned to the University of Michigan, receiving his Master of Arts in Far Eastern Studies in 1949, and his PhD in Japanese History in 1955. While at the University of Michigan, he studied under Professor Joseph Yamagiwa.
Goodman worked as a professor of Japanese history at the University of Kansas (KU) for thirty years, retiring in 1989, though he continued working with KU in various capacities until his death in 2014. He traveled and taught in several countries, including the Philippines, Hong Kong, Japan, Australia, England, Ireland, Poland and Germany. Goodman spent time in the late 1980s and early 1990s at the International Research Center for Japanese Studies in Kyoto, Japan. During his career, Goodman authored the autobiographical Amerika no Nippon gannen (translated as America's Japan: the first year, 1945–6), published by Fordham University Press in 2005. He authored an additional six books and two memoirs.
Goodman was instrumental in organizing reunions for students in the first two AIJLS courses at Ann Arbor. In May 1990 the last major reunion of the Ann Arbor AIJLS students was held in Ann Arbor.
