George O. Totten was born on July 21, 1922, in his parent’s home in Washington, D.C. His father was a Washington architect who specialized in designing embassies and legations. His mother was a Swedish artist.
From the age of six, his parents often took him and his younger brother along to spend summer in Europe. He learned Swedish and French from childhood and studied German in prep school, along with Latin. But he had to wait until he was a Columbia College freshman in 1940 before he had a chance to study Chinese. As a freshman, he had enrolled in the regular traditional first-year course in Chinese, but the pace was too slow for him and for some of the other students.
They rallied to institute a speeded-up summer course in Chinese. To his surprise, they succeeded! Columbia hired a young professor of Chinese from Yale, named John DeFrancis, to teach them an intensive summer course in Chinese.
After the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor in Hawaii in 1941, George volunteered for the U.S. Army at the age of eighteen. The Army thought he would be good at Japanese, because he had studied one-year-and-a-half of Chinese. So George found himself in a placed program for the intensified study of Japanese! Thus, it happened that he studied Japanese in the fastest-ever class taught by the U.S. military, first at the University of Michigan for a year and then in a “secret” school in Minneapolis for six months, before being shipped off to battle.
George was deployed overseas, with a fellow Military Intelligence Language Officer, in order to interrogate Japanese prisoners of war (POWs) on Moratai, an Indonesian island that belonged to the Netherlands. They were supplied with a group of Japanese-American enlisted men who had been brought up speaking Japanese. Very few Japanese soldiers were left behind by the retreating Japanese, when they fled to the Philippines to take up what soon proved to be their last stand. They stayed on, on Moratai, for the moment, because a few lost or hiding Japanese remained. Thus, for the moment, they did not have much to do.
At that point George came across a bunch of the “used books” that were made available for the American soldiers. One of them profoundly intrigued him. It was titled Song of Arirang: The Life Story of a Korean Rebel. Its authors were listed as Nym Wales and Kim San. It was published by The John Day Company, New York, 1941, with 258 pages.
George was immediately enthralled by this book. Just as he finished reading it, their 31st Division was ordered to invade Mindanao, the second largest and most southern island in the Philippines. It was still Japanese-held. After landing under fire, they had to take the winding main road from the south to the center of the island Malaybulay, the capital city of Mindanao. Their convoy was crowded, which made them an easy target for scattered Japanese fire from the hills on either side of their route. He was among those who were shot at on the way, but nevertheless George arrived unscathed. On their arrival at the capital, they learned that Japan had just officially surrendered!
George was immediately chosen to be the interpreter between the American General and the captured Japanese General, Harada, who had just surrendered. The American General wanted to talk to the Japanese General on a man-to-man basis, without any record. So, there they were: just the three of them! George was, of course, sweating away, but nevertheless each General was able to discuss his every move and every surprise. George was warned not to mention a word of the conversation to anyone.
Then George, with several other language officers, was assigned to be in charge of thousands of Japanese prisoners-of-war in the biggest city on Mindanao, Davao. That was a port for evacuating American soldiers to the US, as well as repatriating Japanese POWs to Japan. The latter were still emerging from the hills, day after day, waving white “flags.” At this huge concentration center, some of the most educated Japanese prisoners spoke English extremely well. They became instrumental in helping the other POWs to know what they should do. George thought this was the ideal time for him to introduce them to the Song of Arirang, so they could learn what Japanese imperialism had done in China, Korea, and beyond. George hoped this book might catch their interest and explain how horrible Japanese imperialism had been in the lives of the Chinese, whom they were fighting, and in the lives of the Koreans, who were their conquered subjects, until the end of WW II.
The responses of the Japanese prisoners were gratifying. They immediately organized teams to translate the book, section by section. Some of them had excellent command of English and good writing ability in Japanese. In a short time, they had sections of the book translated and turned out copy after copy of sections of the book, until they were mimeographing the whole book, by the dozens -- all in Japanese translation for these Japanese veterans, now POWs, to read there and on their way home to Japan.
They came to understand that the enemies they had been fighting were really as human as they themselves. George answered all kinds of questions they posed. They learned about the Chinese Communists and Korean resistance to Japanese rule. As prisoners-of-war themselves, they learned to relate with their hitherto victims. They realized that they, the Japanese, were the aggressors, who had attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7th, 1941. The Japanese prisoners were also really impressed by the way they were being treated by the American GIs. The GIs exhibited no malice toward them: no torture, no beatings.