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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Over the next few months in late 1944, Harry realized the war was changing for the better. Little by little, Japanese troops were emerging in greater numbers from the jungle to surrender. GIs throughout the Pacific were recognizing the value of taking prisoners alive and holding fire. Harry and his team shelved their hinomaru-flag assembly line and began running off propaganda and surrender leaflets on a rackety mimeograph. Weren’t soldiers, they wrote, tired of dying of hunger? Wouldn’t it be better to surrender and be sent alive to Australia? After the war, the soldiers could devote their energies to Japan. All POWs would be treated in accordance with the Geneva Conventions. These papers, written in native Japanese with perfect kanji characters, were written from an American perspective. Japanese soldiers were sick at heart over the prospect of dying of hunger, but Japan had been at war in China and Asia for much of their youths, and the idea of returning to a munificent, pacific Japan bordered on the delusional.