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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Creeping militarism or not, Kinu had always known that in the tight quarters of overpopulated Japan, walls had ears. “Hitori ieba sannin kiku.” “If someone says something, there are three people listening.”

If nisei thought they could mask their identity and fool their Japanese classmates, they were mistaken. Frank stood out from the beginning. Frank may have looked Japanese, but he did not act it. Most Japanese expressed themselves with ambiguity; Frank said exactly what he thought. Most students listened to their teachers without comment; Frank argued back. There was something rough and rebellious about him that raised eyebrows and probably irritated upperclassmen who demanded respect.

Around the time Frank entered Icchū, people began greeting one another with a sigh, “Not enough, not enough.” “Tarin, tarin.” No sooner had this phrase caught the public’s imagination than it gave way to “Zeitaku wa teki da,” “Extravagance is the enemy,” a command on what to think and how to act. The government plastered posters and hung banners to this effect, and people took the phrase to heart.

Students proved receptive to military ideals. Reared on a diet of fables elevating the martial as supreme, they no longer dreamed of becoming physicians or professors. Instead, they saw themselves as helmeted tank drivers and scarf-draped pilots.

Everyone, even primary school students, knew soldiers were destined to die. Japanese education prepared citizens to sacrifice themselves for the emperor and the nation, in victory or defeat.

Frank envisioned an escape route: If he excelled in athletics, he could delay his draft. With practice and determination, he could, literally, outrun it.

Icchū mandated that students walk to school if they lived within three miles; otherwise, they could take the train to the three-mile point. Takasu lay slightly farther away, but Frank traveled entirely by foot anyway. He ran each way six days a week. “Ame ni mo makezu, kaze ni mo makezu.” “Not losing to the rain, not losing to the wind . . .” So went the beloved poem by poet Kenji Miyazawa.

The ethics teacher chalked the Imperial Precepts of 1882 on the blackboard for the students to learn by heart. Military men should never forget, explained one of the crucial passages, that “duty is weightier than a mountain, while death is lighter than a feather.”

Channeling his fury, Frank ran the 100- and 200-meter dashes his second year of school.

ON THE MORNING OF MONDAY, DECEMBER 8, 1941, Frank rose early to attend a track meet. At 7 a.m., he was standing on the platform at Takasu Station, having decided to catch a train to conserve his energy before the race. Housewives were heading to market despite the latest government slogan chiding them, “Kawanu kesshin, kachinuku ketsui.” “Decide not to buy, resolve to triumph!” Frank focused on staying warm. He limbered up, jumping on tiptoe until the train rolled into the station. Above the clamor of the screeching wheels, a man behind him yelled—something about a victorious assault on Hawaii. Frank hopped on the train. Bewildered, he grasped that the news was important. “I was excited and didn’t know what was going to happen.” After the meet, he ran home to find that his mother had already heard about Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor. Everyone had. A Japanese naval hymn had trumpeted forth from strategically positioned loudspeakers, jarring citizens before they sipped their first cup of green tea that morning. “Defend and attack for our country,” the announcement blared. No one knew what would happen next. The next day, Kinu opened her local Chūgoku Shimbun newspaper to martial headlines from official Japanese news sources throughout the Pacific. The titles were so bold, they roared. “Surprise attacks” in “every direction”—“first air raids on Honolulu”; Singapore “under bombardment,” too; Davao, Wake, Guam, as well. In Shanghai, the British fleet “sunk,” the American one “...

On December 12, 1941, the government announced that the war against the United States and Great Britain, as well as the Sino-Japanese conflict, would be called the Great East Asia War, a title imbued with a sense of holy mission. Regardless of nomenclature, Japan had been at war for one agonizing decade. Those Amerika-gaeri returnees who had once lived in the States were pessimistic about Japan’s prospects. “Japan shouldn’t fight the United States,” said Masako’s father, who had labored in Hawaii for three years when he was younger. Even in that sleepy island outpost, he had seen industrial resources—mammoth tractors, plows, and trucks—that dwarfed the Japanese versions. “You don’t go to war against a country like that!” But now that Japan had attacked, he was resigned to an uncertain future.

Gofuyo Yempuku, a nisei who had relocated from Oahu to an island near Hiroshima in 1933, would recollect, “We knew it would be a tough, tough struggle for Japan. But we couldn’t talk about this with others because we feared possible police action.”

Kinu was patriotic, but she couldn’t allow herself to become overwrought. She did not say what she sensed, did not divulge what awakened her with terror in the deep of night. The military would seize her sons. Victor, having survived a tour in China and Indochina, would be called up again. Wounded once and recovered, would his luck hold? Pierce, a college student in Yokohama, would be drafted next. Susceptible to sickness, would he cope? In their boot-thumping footsteps, little Frank would follow. And, far away in the States, what would happen to her second son, her irrepressible American, her Harry? Kinu ached for each one.

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...

French by birth, Mrs. Biddle was more attuned to the war in Europe than most Americans. On June 14, 1940, Nazi German troops had goose-stepped down the Champs-Élysées and through the Arc de Triomphe, parading their occupation of France. Two months later, on September 27, 1940, Japan concluded the belligerent Tripartite Pact with Germany and Italy in Berlin. Mrs. Biddle reviled the Axis powers and worried about her son. On edge, she perceived Harry as the enemy.

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.

That New Year’s Eve in Los Angeles, thousands of revelers stayed away from the downtown district, where the annual festivities had been canceled owing to the threat of an air raid. Nor did Little Tokyo residents wander down East First Street warbling “Auld Lang Syne” in Japanese. Instead, behind blackout curtains in light-dimmed apartments they raised thimble-sized sake cups, whispered a prayer for peace, and sipped in silence. A short trolley ride away at elegant hotels, white partygoers raised champagne flutes to a midnight toast, clinking expressly for the demise of the Imperial Japanese Navy, yelling “Bottoms up!”

One evening in class, he approached a classmate, whom he viewed as a fellow Asian American. “I thought she would have some empathy.” But when Harry tried to engage the young woman in conversation, her eyes narrowed. The Japanese were terrible to have attacked Pearl Harbor, she said. She was Korean, and her father and brothers did not want her talking to a Japanese. It was true that Japan had annexed Korea in 1910 and was treating it harshly. Koreans had been assigned to forced labor in abysmal conditions in Japan and other areas. But this encounter was personal, between two Americans. Harry smarted from his classmate’s derision.

The atmosphere in the City of Angels was degenerating. Dining establishments placed signs in their windows banning ethnic Japanese patrons. “This Restaurant Poisons Both Rats and Japs.” Right-wing extremists stuck stickers saying, “Remember a Jap is a Jap,” depicting a rat with a Japanese face, on their windshields. The words and images translated into action. Harry heard from friends that their parked cars were rear-ended and the windows of their homes shattered in what he would later call a “climate of harassment.” Chinese residents took to wearing badges, “I am a Chinese,” lest they be mistreated.

On February 2, columnist W. H. Anderson wrote in the Los Angeles Times, “A viper is nonetheless a viper wherever the egg is hatched—so a Japanese American, born of Japanese parents—grows up to be a Japanese, not an American.” He proposed to “limit and control their activities.”

On Valentine’s Day, DeWitt—demonstrating a marked absence of affection for fellow Americans—wrote Secretary of War Henry Stimson, “The Japanese race is an enemy race and while many second and third generation Japanese born on United States soil, possessed of United States citizenship, have become ‘Americanized,’ the racial strains are undiluted.” He added, in a feat of paranoia and contorted logic: “The very fact that no sabotage has taken place to date is a disturbing and confirming indication that such action will be taken.” Five days later, on February 19, 1942, President Franklin D. Roosevelt signed Executive Order 9066, according military commanders the authority to remove suspect populations—alien and citizen alike—from any area. The decree would ultimately be regarded as one of the most shameful moves of his presidency, but at the time, Attorney General Francis Biddle, who opposed it, noted of the president, “I do not think he was much concerned with the gravity or implications of this step.” Given carte blanche, in less than two weeks DeWitt would begin carving exclusion zones from Arizona, California, Oregon, and Washington, the first step to a massive evacuation effort and long-term internment.

The trigger for what would subsequently be called the “Battle of Los Angeles” was a single wayward weather balloon whipping across the sky in haphazard flight. Regardless, the next day, all residents of Japanese descent on Terminal Island were given forty-eight hours to evacuate.

Perhaps it all came down to a name, they suggested. If Harry changed his surname to an Anglo one like theirs, he might escape suspicion. Their feelings for Harry did not waver; he was more a son than an employee. Clyde and Flossie Mount offered to legally adopt him. Touched and intrigued, Harry considered the idea, but he had to run it by his mother. Names were linked to ancient bloodlines in Japan. Adoption was employed to perpetuate a name, not disguise it; a prosperous family without an heir might adopt a son or son-in-law to prolong the line. Forfeiting Fukuhara for expedience could estrange Harry from his family; masquerading as a Mount would hurt and disappoint them.

On March 24, the Western Defense Command imposed a 9 p.m.–6 a.m. curfew and five-mile travel restriction on ethnic Japanese, hobbling Harry’s ability to reach his far-flung jobs and return to Glendale on time.

In Little Tokyo, the liquidation sales turned legion. At Asahi Dye Works, where old clothes could be dyed a vibrant hue, the owners had penned, “CLOSING We won’t take it to OWENS VALLEY for U.” Owens Valley, the location of the Manzanar War Relocation Center, would hold ten thousand issei and nisei.

The Japanese army had seized rubber plantations in the Dutch East Indies upon which the United States depended. Scarce rubber was rationed by the end of April. By recycling rubber goods, Harry was doing his civic duty and earning a small profit.

Resigned to his own evacuation, he was adamant that he did not want to enter camp with Mary and Jeanie alone. He turned to Kaz and the Matsumoto brothers. Harry instinctively understood that these friends—thick as family—would give him a sense of context in a place where he did not belong. He would do everything possible to make sure these Hiroshima neighbors, bonded over their shared American identity and no small amount of fun, would be incarcerated together in the country they called home. ON APRIL 30, 1942, CIVIL EXCLUSION ORDER No. 30 appeared in southwest Los Angeles on doors, posts, and windows in a fury of hammering and taping between noon and midnight. Harry, Kaz, and the Matsumotos were living in Compton, falling under the order’s jurisdiction. They had until noon, the latest, on Thursday, May 7 to evacuate. On Wednesday, May 6, 1942, the same day when General Jonathan Wainwright surrendered all American and Filipino forces to the Japanese in the Philippines, Harry pulled up to the curb at the Firestone Park train station with Mary and Jeanie. Only permitted to bring what they could carry, they had packed the requisite bedrolls and linens, clothing, toiletries, dishware, glassware, and utensils, as well as a few personal effects. On the curb lay mountains of bamboo trunks, wicker cases, leather suitcases, and twine-bound, paper packages.

Frank knew the necessity of counting to twenty. This skill was called gaman (self-restraint). In Japan, where it was essential for a pressed population living in limited space, gaman had been elevated to an art.

Anti-American sentiment abounded, even among the most innocent. Two decades earlier, American schools had donated 12,700 dolls to Japanese schools in a gesture of goodwill. Shortly after Pearl Harbor, elementary schools nationwide were ordered to immolate them, the dolls’ glassy blue eyes melting in crackling bonfires. Some dolls were impaled with bamboo spears. Only two hundred would survive. In the neighborhoods Frank ran through, young children played war, complete with backpacks, helmets, and bayonets. Instead of playing house, the girls acted as nurses at the front. The enemy was always America.

On January 1 ration booklets were issued for salt, without which the delicately seasoned Japanese cuisine was disappointingly bland. Women would find it more difficult to conserve without pickles, essential to the Japanese diet. In February, ration tickets were distributed for miso (soybean paste) and soy sauce, as well as clothing. The tickets guaranteed only a portion of what was necessary to maintain basic food needs, a measurement that vacillated according to government inventory.

At a time when white rice was scarce and the populace was expected to demonstrate its patriotism, Kinu prepared Frank a hinomaru bentō (boxed lunch), named after the hinomaru flag, with its rectangle of white rice and a red umeboshi (pickled plum) in the center. The lunch symbolized the home front’s solidarity with its troops, who were probably eating much the same. If this humble fare were enough for the troops, the conventional wisdom went, so too for civilians. Everyone knew that this austere bentō arose from expedient bravado: no one had the ingredients for the fish, vegetable, and savory side dishes.

Kinu began to seek other sources to augment rations. She rose earlier—in the black of night—to catch a train before dawn and carried a large satchel on her back for a foray into the countryside, where she frequented the yami (black markets). Some called these makeshift areas “aozora” (“blue skies”) since the farmers displayed their wares on blankets outside, all the easier for packing up and disappearing as soon as they earned a profit.

UNSETTLING NEWS ABOUT NISEI IN AMERICA rippled across Japanese airwaves. Early in March, the government-controlled radio broadcast the impending evacuation of “70,000 American-born Japanese” as a case of “‘diabolic savagery.’” The newscaster editorialized further, “The viciousness of the American government in persecuting a helpless, strictly civilian and manifestly innocent minority will remain in history as one of the blackest crimes ever committed by the so-called great powers.”

on March 18, 1942, the War Relocation Authority (WRA) was created by executive order to manage the detention of all ethnic Japanese on the West Coast. Within a few short months, the agency would supervise the construction and administration of ten concentration camps scattered in remote areas across the United States.

By May, the letters from Harry ceased. Kinu had no idea that Harry could no longer enlist because of his ethnicity. She had no idea that he could no longer reside in California. Her daughter, granddaughter, and son were transient and trapped in Los Angeles, on the verge of being interned.

From December 19, 1941, on, every letter that crossed borders was slit open by government employees and perused for problematic details. By September 1942, almost one million envelopes and packages were investigated each week, including the correspondence to and from 3113 Sparr Boulevard in Glendale and 244-7 Furue in Takasu, Hiroshima. Censors blackened the objectionable portions of letters with markers or excised areas with a blade, carving the sheets into puzzles of ragged pieces. In a worst-case scenario, an entire letter could be condemned. Kinu’s three messages would have, at the very least, raised eyebrows. In rejecting adoption, she most likely alluded to the importance of filial piety to one’s Japanese parents. Adoption in the States was controversial, as well; for Harry to be adopted by a Caucasian family could have been rightly viewed by the censor as a ruse to avoid internment. Kinu’s second message about Ohio again concerned a strategy to evade incarceration. Her third thoroughly rejected her son’s desire to enlist, a demonstration of his loyalty to the United States. Her letters wrestled with fundamental issues of loyalty to one’s family and country. In theory, Kinu’s charged correspondence should have been returned to sender. In reality, her letters were probably disposed of at the overworked censor station in Los Angeles.

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 ...

Breakfast began at 7 a.m. A line of as many as five hundred snaked in front of the mess halls that could only accommodate one-third as many at a time. The Western-style breakfast of eggs, toast, coffee, and milk was served cafeteria style. Harry devoured his fare. Although he was disturbed by the surroundings, people were sociable. The immigrant farmers and small merchants, who had toiled for years without a break, were giddy with fatigue and unaccustomed to idleness. On one level, too, Harry acknowledged, “our financial situation was so bad it was almost a relief to go to camp and let the government take care of us for awhile.” As the mercury rose, his sense of relief evaporated. Tulare was scalding: temperatures routinely soared above 90 degrees. Within weeks, the hospital and mess halls would dispense sodium chloride tablets gratis in order to thwart heat exhaustion.

Harry spent most of his time outdoors with a crowd under the shelter of a large tree, the only one in the area.

Pay ranged from six dollars a month for unskilled labor to sixteen a month for professional and technical workers. By June 1, Harry was employed as a clerk in the accounting office, where he made eight dollars a month. He would parlay it into a small managerial job, hiring three or four cobblers to repair shoes, a service in high demand since residents could not leave the premises and, using their cramped “apartments” only to sleep, were often on their feet. His salary rose to twelve dollars a month as a “skilled” worker. With three meals a day at the mess hall, Harry now had access to more food than he had had since leaving the Mounts several months earlier. At the camp stores, he bought briefs and pajamas for himself and a slip and pink dress for Mary. Yet, even with an in-house swing band, jitterbug dances—which Harry could not resist—and an outdoor movie screen at the grandstand showing dated Hollywood “flickers,” Tulare beat the life out of its residents.

70 percent of Tulare’s interned population, or 3,440 persons out of a total 4,893, were nisei native-born citizens of the United States; the remaining were issei first-generation legal aliens.

Harry had to request permission from the administration and mail an official permit to the Mounts, who were saving gas-ration coupons to make the journey. When the time came, they drove 170 miles over the Tehachapi Mountains at a “victory speed” of 35 miles an hour on rationed gas and tires.

Telephones were installed in boxes outside the mess halls, and those outside Tulare were welcome to call anytime. For the internees, however, only emergency calls within the complex were possible. The morning and evening roll call was scaled back to mornings only at six, but the 11 p.m.–6 a.m. curfew stood. A five-man council was elected in early June, but the Western Defense Command and Fourth Army office decreed a reelection one month later, after ordering that aliens could neither vote, hold office, nor be appointed to any self-governing committee at any assembly center. When the election of three issei was summarily overturned, Harry lost hope.

On June 6, 1942, the United States Navy routed the Japanese Combined Fleet near the islands of Midway, placing the Japanese forces on the defensive. If there were ever a rationale for removing an allegedly suspicious population from the West Coast, it was lost in the churning waters of the Central Pacific. Nothing changed at Tulare, however, or at the other fourteen assembly centers. The internees languished, misjudged and forgotten.

For all the drum rolls, applause, and patriotism, nightfall brought anxiety to Tulare that Fourth. While residents had savored the merry break in routine and a rare menu of strawberries and watermelon, it was difficult to reconcile the celebration with reality. The back pages of that day’s issue of the Tulare News—filled with articles touting American independence and freedom—bore the dreaded announcement: “11 CENTERS PLANNED FOR EVACUEES.”

ON AUGUST 31, 1942, HARRY, MARY, AND Jeanie, along with the Nagatas and Matsumotos, walked through the Tulare Assembly Center gate past rifle-toting sentries to an idling, soot-stained locomotive. Gray plumes of smoke curled over the 516 people assembled for the trek. On their twenty-eight-hour trip, they would cross their second desert in four months, the Gila, moving farther inland to another dust-clogged basin. Harry, Mary, and Jeanie took their seats. The soldiers pulled down the shades, allegedly for the evacuees’ own safety from belligerent mobs. Harry and Mary knew better. They were being kept invisible, lest the unexpected flash of their faces pressed against the coach windows disturb the citizens of the towns they passed through. Harry, Mary, and Jeanie settled in for the journey away from the West Coast, the repository of their family’s collective dreams, the site of their individual sorrows.

The drill leaders overlooked archaic equipment because emotional fortitude, essential to the philosophy of bushidō, was paramount. Almost twenty-five years earlier, the government had proclaimed, “In future combat we shall not be able to surpass our enemy in military forces. Neither can we expect to excel the enemy in weapons and materials for arms. On any battlefield we should steel ourselves to winning glorious victory despite military forces and weapons inferior to the enemy’s. Since we must be prepared for such a situation, it is self-evident that more spiritual education is necessary.”

Kichiku Bei-Ei caricature: it proliferated throughout Japan. The demonic imagery appeared in political cartoons printed in every medium. It was widely discussed in general conversation. On elementary school grounds, ten-year-olds bayoneted straw bags with Kichiku Bei-Ei labels, attacked paper targets of President Roosevelt and British prime minister Winston Churchill, and tacked posters on their school walls, urging “Kill the American Devils!”

The cinemas had stopped running American and European films, except for those from Axis ally Germany. And despite the Japanese love affair with Charlie Chaplin, The Great Dictator—his satire of Adolf Hitler and critique of fascism—was pointedly prohibited. Japanese actors had already abandoned stage names written in katakana, the syllabary for foreign words, which had once lent them an exotic cachet.

Milton S. Eisenhower, the youngest brother of Lieutenant General Dwight D. Eisenhower and the first director of the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the federal agency that administered the ten concentration camps, had found the overall camp construction “so very cheap that, frankly, if it stands up for the duration, we are going to be lucky.” He called the camps “sand and cactus” centers. By the time Harry and Mary moved into 49-7-B, Milton Eisenhower had resigned in protest over the anti-Japanese prejudice he had encountered in trying to institute a benevolent resettlement.