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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Driving through Little Tokyo between gardening jobs, Harry was struck by how swiftly the neighborhood was losing its sparkle. Christmas and the New Year normally attracted shoppers, but they had fled the enclave. Once-packed eateries looked forlorn with empty tables; going-out-of-business sales proliferated overnight as owners sought to move deeper within California or to the heartland, where they could evade exclusion, already a burning topic in the press. Americans were shunning commerce with “enemy aliens,” the new term for Japanese legal immigrants, which would soon also include nisei. Ethnic Japanese bank accounts had been frozen; nisei had to show birth certificates to release their funds and issei accounts remained untouchable. Business was drying up. Little Tokyo, having survived and prospered for half a century, bore the dingy air of a neighborhood in distress. Behind the shuttering storefronts lay, Harry suspected, disrupted lives. Many of his nisei friends were anxious; their fathers and brothers had been picked up, for no clear reason, by the FBI and incarcerated. No one knew where they were or when they would return.