One of the last Navajo code-talkers died on October 19th, aged 107

It's worth noting just how extreme the levels of crime against humanity committed by the Japanese were.

The Germans (and Swiss...) for the most part imprisoned / shot PoWs.

The Japanese used PoWs for chemical and biological weapon testing and vivisection, and they would find the most depraved ways to draw out mass torture of PoWs.

For example, they would do things like put US soldiers into baskets so small PoWs could not move at all inside them, load them into unventilated railroad boxcars with no water, then load them into ships, sail out to sea, and drop them overboard into shark-infested waters.

Then there's the Nanjing Massacre where in a matter of days Japanese soldiers slaughtered something like 300,000 Chinese civilians at a rate of around 7,000 civilians a day. That was just one of the more than a dozen massacres. It's widely believed that Japan slaughtered more civilians than the Germans.

The sheer level of depravity is astounding. And what's especially disturbing are the lengths conservatives in the Japanese government have gone to over the last several decades to rewrite history and erase these atrocities, while pushing harder and harder against the restrictions on their armed forces.

That's kind of interesting because the limited understanding I had based off an interview I watched was the code talkers were not actually using Navajo as some form of steganography. Even a direct translation to Japanese by an expert in both languages would give you a seemingly meaningless sentence. I specifically remember the guy saying "potato" was used to refer to hand grenades for example.

That last link title from a decade ago seems at odds with the title of this article.

And this is another great one, also in the vein of 'the last one' about the death of the last of the Beguines: https://www.economist.com/obituary/2013/04/27/marcella-patty... (https://archive.is/ClVez)

If an AI could research and write as well (and as accurately) as that, I'd say they've finally surpassed us.

I just visited Monument Valley and it was spectacular. Inside the Visitor Center they have a whole room devoted to the Navajo code talkers. I only spent a few minutes in it but it was very interesting and very nicely presented.

"The Navajo are speakers of a Na-Dené Southern Athabaskan language which they call Diné bizaad (lit. 'People's language'). The term Navajo comes from Spanish missionaries and historians who referred to the Pueblo Indians through this term, although they referred to themselves as the Diné, meaning '(the) people'."

From: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Navajo

Bizarrely, Germans call themselves Deutsche and the Dutch call themselves all sorts of crazy things. Swiss, Spanish, oh the whole of Europe.

As for Japanese, Chinese, Russia ... errm most of the rest of the world 8)

In English we don't really get America(n) "right", and they are one of the larger populations that speak the bloody lingo! Oh and lingo: lingua - Latin with a twist, that's how we Anglo-Saxons keep it real!

English speakers don't call anyone by their own name. "Japan" is another good example here.

Interestingly, the Japanese term for other countries/languages are frequently much closer than the English versions. So while English speakers call the Deutsch "German" and Deutschland "Germany", Japanese speakers call them "doitsu", which is just as close as you can transliterate "Deutsch" to the syllables allowed in Japanese. It's not a rule though: the proper term for the USA is "beikoku", which translates to "country of rice". (The colloquial term for USA however is "amerika", which is exactly what Americans call themselves colloquially.)

It has twice been proposed in the Navajo Nation Council to officially change the name from Navajo to Dine and both times the proposal was voted down. This was largely because the proposal was unpopular among members of the tribe. There are multiple generations that have grown up being Navajo, they think of themselves as Navajo, and they want to continue to be referred to as Navajo.

Also, growing up (white) on the Navajo reservation, I was taught that Dine was the native language word for themselves, but no one ever expressed any desire for white folks to refer to them as Dine. They tended be private about their culture - there were aspects that were for them not for us, sometimes plainly and other times more subtly. Dine sometimes had that feel, like it was a private name amongst themselves, not a public name for outsiders to use. In other ways it was similar to German vs Deutsch, just a different word in a different language.

It is more recently that some Dine activists have cast off the name Navajo as colonial and wish to be referred to as Dine, but as far as I can tell it still isn't the majority opinion.

Perhaps Ainu[1]? Biggest problem there is that after 600+ years of contact with Japanese, a lot of vocabulary is common between the languages.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ainu_languages

I don't know the history on that...but the Imperial Japanese Government's decision-making was frequently impaired by overconfidence.

More fascism = less peripheral vision

Context is an interesting key here, I think. That point in the US coincided with a increased interest in First Nations, and in some places a renewed attempt to preserve their heritages, especially linguistically. The US generally sees itself as a nation of immigrants and one axis of its "Freedom of Speech" has historically seen the usefulness to speak one's own language, whatever it may be. Diversity of languages has been a goal for the US at various times in its cultural history. In that context, "what's the most diverse language that Americans speak?" is a question you can ask, and an answer you can find without much difficulty.

Japan had one and only one national language. Japan didn't have the culture of thinking of itself as a melting pot where many languages might meet. It probably wouldn't have thought to ask that question at all "what's the most diverse language that the Japanese speak?" In practice, we can assume that's also why it confused the Japanese for so long in the war, it wasn't a question to think of themselves, it probably was a hard question to ask of Americans if they saw "English" as the national language they might also not think to ask "what other languages do Americans speak?" or maybe even "why isn't this English or a derivative of/code for English?"

Apparently they did: I've heard it claimed there was at least one submarine that used Kagoshima-ben, a famously impenetrable dialect spoken in southern Kyushu, for precisely this purpose. I can't find any reliable source though.

More generally though, Japan now and Imperial Japan in particular was very big on there being "one Japan" with one Japanese people and one standard language. Dialects were not encouraged and Okinawan, which is really a different language, was ruthlessly suppressed (kids punished for speaking it in school etc).

Japan is (and was) a pretty ethnically homogeneous place; the largest indigenous minorities are the Ryukyuans and the Ainu. The Ryukyuan languages aren't all that different from Japanese in the first place, and the Ainu were subjected to forced assimilation that has made many ethnic Ainu unable to speak the language, and while I'm not sure of the speaker count in the 1940s, I doubt it was that high. While their imperial possessions at the time would have included lots of other ethnicities, incorporating Korean or Chinese code talkers wouldn't have been that helpful (not that hard to find people who speak those languages), and the size of their Pacific Island groups would have likely struggled to produce enough adequate code talkers. Although the institutional racism of the country was probably enough to forestall any plans in the first place.

It's also worth pointing out why the use of Navajo code talkers was so successful. Part of that is that it's from a language family that was poorly known by linguists at the time. But even within that language family, Navajo is pretty different (compare how different English is from other Germanic languages, or indeed most Indo-European languages). It's also a fiendishly complex language; like, there's no regular verbs--that would make attempts to crack it via standard cryptanalytic techniques rather more difficult. (Also worth pointing out, it was a code within Navajo so that even when the Japanese pressed a Navajo POW into translating the messages, they couldn't crack it).

There were footnotes I've seen on Navajo topics that they tried Satsuma(Kagoshima) dialect for the same purpose, but there were no shortages of speakers at the Allied side and the use ended quickly.

Uniqueness of Navajo and other Native American languages was that they were all complete multi millennia isolate from English thanks to how USA came to be. Japan wasn't like that so dialects aren't divergent enough for this use case. Ainu might be a candidate but it's way too high profile.