The students were primarily second generation Japanese Americans (Nisei) from the West Coast, who had learned Japanese from their first-generation parents but were educated in the US and whose Japanese was somewhat limited, the "Kibei", Japanese-Americans who had been educated in Japan and spoke Japanese like the Japanese themselves, along with two Caucasian students who were born in Japan as the sons of missionaries. Even for the native Japanese speakers, the course curriculum featured "heigo" (兵語) or military specific terminology that was as foreign to the Japanese speakers as US military slang is to the average American civilian.