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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

The marine division had just completed nine months rest in Melbourne after the battle of Guadalcanal, the first American land offensive against Japan. The troops were haunted by the horror. Men slaughtered in a bullet-and-bayonet ambush where the Japanese had pretended to surrender. Beheaded buddies. Genitals stuffed in the mouths of corpses. The rules of engagement were, the marines concluded, different with the Japs. Already roused by “Remember Pearl Harbor—keep ’em dying” and “A good Jap is a dead Jap,” the leathernecks sharpened their motivation further. “Kill or be killed!” they warned. This angry ethos—born of hatred, blood, and loss—meant that not many Japanese prisoners were brought in alive. The rare Japanese—invariably an enlisted man as opposed to a proud officer—who did surrender was often shot on the spot. “When we began our work the feeling was so bitter because of Japanese brutality that it was almost impossible to get either the Australians or the Americans to take prisoners,” Colonel Mashbir would comment, “and it took a terrific amount of indoctrination to make them see the importance of it.”