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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

JAPS OPEN WAR ON U.S. WITH BOMBING OF HAWAII,” “Japan’s Daring Attack on Hawaii Designed to Cripple U.S. Fleet,” “Attacks Climax Ten-Year Crisis,” and “Bombers Roar Out of Manila.” The news mirrored what Kinu was reading almost six thousand miles away. Harry discovered for the first time that the front-page news related to him. Several articles concerned ethnic Japanese, the issei first-generation legal aliens and the nisei second-generation citizens. Altogether, the community on the West Coast was 120,000 strong; two-thirds were American citizens by birth. Within hours of the attack on Pearl Harbor, FBI agents in fedoras embarked on a “man hunt” for alleged ethnic Japanese subversives. Immediately, they barricaded three hundred issei fishermen on Terminal Island twenty-five miles south of Los Angeles and labeled them “classified for internment.” Two hundred more Japanese—it was unclear whether issei or nisei—were rounded up in Los Angeles that afternoon. By evening, Harry read, the agents were fanning out through Southern California, bearing a list of three hundred suspects. Within a day, they anticipated arresting an additional three thousand. The FBI sweep paralleled deteriorating attitudes toward Japan. Although all eyes had faced eastward toward Europe since Nazi Germany had attacked Poland in September 1939, tensions with Japan had taken an alarming turn in the latter half of 1941. In July, Japan had occupied French Indochina to strengthen its Southeast Asian presenc...