Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds

Midnight in Broad Daylight

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto’s engrossing book opens simultaneously in Los Angeles and Hiroshima on Dec. 7, 1941. In Los Angeles, a 21-year-old Japanese-­American gardener named Harry Fukuhara is mowing a lawn when his white employer steps out of her house and tells him, “Harry, Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.” In Hiroshima, a 17-year-old high school student named Katsutoshi is about to board a train for a track meet when he hears a garbled shout behind him. During his race, Katsutoshi keeps turning over in his mind what he thought he heard. Had someone really shouted “our victorious assault on Hawaii”?

The two young men, it turns out, are brothers. The events that led to their being divided by World War II, and their family’s struggle to survive the war, are the subject of “Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds.”

Most Americans know that 120,000 people of Japanese ancestry, both issei (immigrants born in Japan, who were not allowed to hold United States citizenship or own land) and their nisei ­(American-born) children, were sent to internment camps during the war. Fewer know that before the war, thousands of nisei were sent to Japan, to receive a Japanese education and because career opportunities in the land of their birth were dismal. Many of those young people returned to the United States before the war; known as kibei, they were interned after the Pearl Harbor attack with other West Coast ­Japanese-Americans. Some remained in Japan, as did some of their issei parents.

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The Fukuhara family experienced even more complicated migrations and ­identity-shifting than most such families. Katsuji, the family’s issei father, emigrated to the United States in 1900; his wife, Kinu, was a Japanese “picture bride” whom he married sight unseen in 1911. They sent the two oldest of their five children to Hiroshima, one in 1919, the other in 1923, bringing them back to the United States in 1929. But the family reunion did not last long: After Katsuji died, in 1933, Kinu moved back to Japan with four of her five children. Her eldest son, Victor, returned shortly after.

The family soon fractured again. Harry, the second son, was thoroughly American and disliked Japan; his sister, Mary, bitter at her mother, also wanted to return to America. By 1938, on the eve of World War II, the two siblings were back in the United States. The rest of the family would remain in Hiroshima for the duration of the war.

Sakamoto’s book recounts the ­challenges both sides of the divided family had to deal with. Harry and his sister battled prejudice and were interned in Arizona; across the Pacific, in militarized and jingoistic Japan, Frank (Katsutoshi) and his siblings had to conceal the fact that they were despised nisei. Harry risked his life while serving as a translator in the Pacific theater, while his brothers faced induction into the Japanese Army, which exalted death over shameful surrender. The book reaches its climax after the atomic bomb explodes above Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and Harry sets off to find his family in the ruined city.

Deeply reported and researched, Sakamoto’s book provides a fascinating close-up of the travails of wartime life in an increasingly fascistic Japan. (Her accounts of the extreme brutality of Japanese schools, and the omnipresent thought police, called kempeitai, are eye-­openers.) Sakamoto tells her tale as a straight historical narrative, with little authorial intervention. This omniscient approach, and the vast scope of the subject, lends her tale a novelistic sweep, but it can also flatten out her characters, who tend to be swallowed up by the story. However, nisei are not known for being emotionally demonstrative, and Sakamoto probably captures her low-key subjects quite accurately. “Midnight in Broad Daylight” not only tells one family’s remarkable story but also makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the Japanese-­American experience in World War II, on both sides of the ocean and the hyphen.

Source: The New York Times

>>>>> Sample Contents <<<<<

PROLOGUE: SHOCKWAVE
山雨きたらんと欲して風楼に満つ
San-u kitaran to hosshite kaze rō ni mitsu
When strong winds begin to blow, showers cannot be far behind.

Nothing  seemed  amiss  that  first  Sunday  in  December  1941.  Ponytailed beauties  strolled  the  boardwalk,  bodybuilders  paraded  for  show  at  Muscle Beach, and children shrieked aboard the Whirling Dipper coaster as it clattered over the metal track at the Santa Monica Pier. The day was young, the nation placid, and Christmas was just a few weeks away. No one could have guessed that at that moment, 2,500 miles across the Pacific, Japanese planes were zeroing in on military installations throughout the island of Oahu.
So  it  was  that  sometime  before  noon,  a  twenty-one-year-old   gardener working in the scorching sun had no cause for alarm when his employer emerged from the shade of her house. He stopped the mower to catch her words. “Harry,” she said, “Japan has attacked Pearl Harbor.”
“Oh, is that so?” The news meant little to him. He nodded and the woman returned inside.
When she reappeared a short time later, he was puzzled. She said, “Japan has invaded Pearl Harbor.”
“That’s terrible.” Harry didn’t know what else to say. He had never heard of
Pearl Harbor. Was it a bay fed by the Pearl River in China, where Japan had long been at war? He vaguely remembered a headline about an American ship sunk by the Japanese there a few years earlier.
The woman paused. “I think maybe you should go home.”
“Why?” Harry asked and added without thinking, “I had nothing to do with it.”
She stiffened. “Japan has invaded the United States.” When Harry hesitated
because he hadn’t finished the job, she fired him. Stunned, he loaded his mower into his Model A Ford and drove home to Glendale fourteen miles away.
Harry  had  been  let  go before—at  the  end  of a harvest  picking  peas  and strawberries  in Washington State. But this departure, from a normally friendly employer for whom he worked regularly, had struck out of the blue. Much later, he would  recall  feeling  “wounded,”  as if a knife  had  drawn  beads  of blood without warning.

ON THAT SAME MORNING,  FOUR THOUSAND  MILES from Pearl Harbor, a seventeen- year-old  high school student named Katsutoshi  walked from his house to the local  train  station  in Takasu,  an affluent  district  of country  homes  in greater Hiroshima. He passed wooden and ceramic-roof-tiled  homes set back from the street, the post office staffed by a newlywed woman who loved to gossip, and the police kiosk manned by officers intent on prowling the neighborhood. In the haze of sunrise, Katsutoshi, blurry with sleep, saw the station platform awash in khaki and indigo. Soldiers,  shouldering  rucksacks,  paced back and forth, and housewives, dressed in bloomers, huddled, clutching empty duffels.
Katsutoshi  did  not  blink  at  the  scene.  Soldiers  were  always  coming  and going in Hiroshima, a major port of departure for the war in China. Women, too, were on the move daily, but they were traveling to black markets in rural areas, where they hoped  to scrabble  up radishes,  pumpkins,  and sweet  potatoes  for dinner. His mother often made this trek as well.
Nothing seemed amiss. The day was young, the nation long at war, and New Year’s a few weeks away. Katsutoshi was conscious only of his extravagance. He wasn’t supposed  to take the train to school, but he had a track meet that morning  and didn’t  want  to tire himself  out before  his twelve-mile  race.  He patted his calves, stretched his hamstrings, and stood on his tiptoes to limber up.
As the train rumbled into the station, Katsutoshi moved toward the edge of the platform, peering for a spot inside the crammed coach. Above the din of the screeching wheels, he heard someone yell from behind. Before he could look for the source, the train doors opened. He jumped on, and the train rattled toward the city. The coach was quiet. All the way to school and during his race, lap after lap, he kept turning over in his mind the phrase that he had caught in passing. It had to have been garbled, or had he really heard “our victorious assault on Hawaii”?

A FEW HOURS LATER, HARRY AND KATSUTOSHI returned to their respective homes, in Glendale and Hiroshima, still thinking about how little they understood about the day’s events. Harry, in a grass-stained T-shirt and jeans, joined his employers,
Clyde and Flossie Mount, for whom he worked as a live-in houseboy. The sun poured through a leaded glass window in the living room. Outside billowed an American flag.
Katsutoshi, in his sweat-stained uniform, folded his legs beneath him at the low table in his mother’s tatami-matted  sitting room, where a hibachi brazier offered scant heat and the paper window screens flattened  the pallid sunlight. Kinu had left a few panels  open,  through  which  he caught  a glimpse  of the garden  with its spinney  of persimmon,  loquat,  pomegranate,  and fig trees. A crimson camellia blossom hugged the side of a weathered stone basin.

ON THIS DAY THE RADIOS, CRACKLING WITH static, consumed each household’s attention.
After  Katsutoshi  had  left  the  house  early  that  morning,  Kinu  had  been puttering in the kitchen when a naval hymn blared forth from loudspeakers positioned throughout the neighborhood.  “Defend and attack for our country,” roared a soldier. Kinu, chills coursing down her back, had turned on her radio.
The Mounts, too, had their first heart-clenching  moment when they heard Stephen Early, the White House press secretary, step to the microphone for a live broadcast. In a clinical tone, he had said, “A Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor naturally would mean war. Such an attack would naturally bring a counterattack, and hostilities of this kind would naturally mean that the President would ask Congress for a declaration of war.”
By the time Harry took a seat at their table, they had begun digesting the news and considering the consequences. The white-haired, middle-aged couple, longtime teachers, looked at Harry, whom they regarded as a son. “This is going to bring up all kinds of problems,” Mrs. Mount said even before Harry shared the news of his abrupt job dismissal.

A  LOW-GRADE  SENSE  OF  DREAD  DESCENDED  OVER  Kinu and Katsutoshi in their corner of Hiroshima. Nothing unsettling had yet occurred, but the future held little promise. There would be more fresh-faced recruits marching to the port to be dispatched to the front, greater rationing of essentials, and more mass funerals for the soldiers who would return in a year’s time as cremated bone and ashes. Kinu thought of  her four sons, who were draft age, and Katsutoshi of  his brothers.
The next morning, Kinu opened her local Chūgoku Shimbun newspaper to a stream of jubilant headlines from official Japanese news sources throughout the
Pacific. “Surprise attacks” had stunned “every direction,” including the “first air raids on Honolulu”;  Singapore  was “under bombardment,”  as well as foreign military  bases at Davao, Wake, and Guam. In Shanghai,  the British fleet had been “sunk,” while the American  one had “surrendered.”  Japanese raids were pummeling Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula. Kinu, trembling, put the newspaper down and waited to confide in her son.
The Japanese headlines were accurate; Allied forces were struggling to repel Japan’s  lightning  attacks  and  stunning  advances.  In  Washington,  President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wheeled into Congress, where he invoked in his inimitable baritone, “a day which will live in infamy.” His entire speech lasted little more than seven minutes. Within an hour, Congress passed a declaration of war, with all but one dissenting vote. On Oahu, where the battleships moored at Pearl  Harbor  listed,  smoldered,  and burned,  the tally of sailors,  soldiers,  and civilian deaths would soon surpass 2,400.

IN THE AFTERMATH  OF PEARL HARBOR, A location of which he now had no doubt, Harry  took  a  fountain  pen  to  paper.  Back  in  Hiroshima,  Kinu  dipped  her horsehair brush in sumi (ink). Both wrote urgent letters to the other in vertical lines of intricate, cursive Japanese characters. Harry rushed to the post office en route to his part-time job and college courses. Kinu handed her envelope with its tissue-thin contents to Katsutoshi, who had, at an earlier age in a world apart, gone by the name of Frank. He ran to the Japan Red Cross, a concrete monolith near  the copper-domed  Industrial  Promotion  Hall  close  to the T-shaped  Aioi Bridge downtown and the only place now accepting enemy-nation  mail. Kinu prayed that her instructions to Harry, the only one of her sons still in America and Katsutoshi’s dearest brother, would be delivered.