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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Harry talked to the POWs in hospital tents, where, often wounded, they lay bandaged, bleary-eyed, and bewildered. He offered them cigarettes to ease the tension and explained the Geneva Conventions, the international treaties that protected human rights. Japan had pointedly not signed the 1929 Convention concerning prisoners of war. Unlike American soldiers who had been trained to provide only their names, ranks, and serial numbers, Japanese soldiers received no instructions in the case of capture. ATIS’s Colonel Mashbir deplored the “ridiculous fact that the Japanese government, having officially boasted that no Japanese ever permitted himself to be taken prisoner, could not instruct its men in the proper procedure if they were captured.” Yet, despite their despair about their status, prisoners rallied when they realized that they would receive medical treatment, which they might have been refused in their own unit. They were treated humanely. The majority opened up and began to talk.