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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

The train lumbered into Tulare Assembly Center on Wednesday evening, May 6, 1942. It had taken eleven hours to journey north through the Mojave Desert. But Tulare seemed far more distant than a day trip. They disembarked from the train in the gray wash of dusk. The Assembly Center, situated in central California’s San Joaquin Valley, was a county fairground leased by the army. They crossed the road, lined by guards, and approached the grandstand around the racetrack, where they would be processed. In less than one month, Tulare—one of fifteen assembly centers in California and the West Coast—had been transformed into a temporary detention center for approximately five thousand ethnic Japanese from Los Angeles and central Californian coastal communities, as well as the Southern California coast. Already 2,400 had arrived, 680 on May 6 alone. With 171 barracks, a barbed-wire fence around the perimeter, watchtowers, and armed guards, there was no mistaking Tulare’s latest incarnation. The detention center, in its haste to prepare for its “volunteers,” hadn’t completed its transformation. Assigned to J-6-10—another dehumanizing bureaucratic detail like their family number 10464—Harry, Mary, and Jeanie trudged along a dirt path. Although contractors had raced to fill the fairgrounds with new barracks at an astonishing rate of one every forty-five minutes, the family’s assignment was in an older section, where the buildings had been judged solid. Without street names, it wasn’t ...