When Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in December 1941, the British government realized it urgently needed more Japanese speakers and put out an appeal to the nation's schools for talented linguists.

The War Office offered a scholarship for boys aged between 17 and 18 to undergo an intense 18-month period of training in Japanese at London's School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS).

"The war with Japan created this amazing generation of people who fell in love with the country and, it could be argued, played some part in Japan's rehabilitation after the Second World War," said Ian Brown, an emeritus professor at SOAS who just finished writing a history of the institution, in a recent interview.