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

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

By May 1942, thirty graduates of that first class were dispersed to a vast battleground, ranging from Alaska in the north to Guadalcanal and Papua New Guinea in the Southwest Pacific. At first, Army and marine units didn’t know how to utilize the few linguists and regarded them as suspect. They were kept far from the front, translating captured material—enemy numbers, disposition, plans—that arrived weeks after it might have had any tactical value. But by autumn, a paltry dozen or so nisei had proved their worth on short assignments to forward units in the Southwest Pacific, providing timely intelligence that influenced battles.

At 6 a.m., the morning reveille blasted Harry awake. Breakfast in the mess hall began at 7 a.m., to be followed by classes at 8 a.m. The men devoted seven hours daily to class, two to homework, and Saturday mornings to exams. They worked on reading, Japanese-to-English translations, and interpreting skills. The students were expected to memorize fifty to sixty kanji daily, a frenzied pace to learn one of the world’s most difficult languages.

There was no question that the nisei, and particularly the kibei, with their fluent, if not native, Japanese and innate understanding of Japanese psychology, were needed near the front. “Without front-line intelligence,” wrote army historian James C. McNaughton, “units could only blunder into the enemy.” Yet truly bilingual men were so scarce that forming pairs, each with a corresponding strength in Japanese and English, would become the norm.

Angel Island, the Ellis Island of the West, had processed sixty thousand Japanese when they landed in the first two decades of a bright century. Here was hallowed ground where young issei men had queued for immigration processing, followed later by their kimono-clad picture brides. Now it was the temporary home for nisei bound for war and German POWs.

THE DISAPPOINTING NEWS, HOWEVER, WAS MITIGATED BY a surprise visit from none other than the first lady herself. Eleanor Roosevelt arrived at Gila the same day that the leave cancellations were announced. In her floppy hat and sensible tie shoes, Mrs. Roosevelt engaged the residents in conversation, toured the facilities, and signed autographs in the burning heat. Utterly unflappable, she moved freely, without her FBI detail, never betraying a wink of fatigue or a blink of irritation. When she arrived in Los Angeles after her stop at Gila, she promptly gave a press conference. Responding to charges from fervently anti-Japanese senators and pundits who viewed the internees as coddled, Mrs. Roosevelt stated emphatically, “They are not being pampered—I would not choose their situation as a way to live.” Her statement was a righteous arrow shot in the bosom of the Western Defense Command.

Elmer L. Shirrell, the WRA relocation supervisor in Chicago, would describe the city as the “nation’s warmest and most generous host to thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry.”

The nation was in the throes of another metal collection effort. In its insatiable hunger for scrap metal to manufacture armaments, the government no longer paid for contributions as it had in the massive drives of 1939 and 1941. The latest appeal, beginning in March, clamored for donations, particularly of iron. As Hiroshima emerged from a moss-damp winter into a willow-green spring, priests unscrewed temple bells from their mountings, city workers dismantled streetlights, and mailmen detached mailboxes from their posts. The large cone-shaped bronze bell that Katsuji had generously donated to his favored Gion temple, Shōsōji, where his ashes were interred, tumbled into the arms of bureaucrats.

Twenty-four thousand Japanese soldiers had died during the brutal six-month battle of Guadalcanal, the first of many campaigns where desperate troops, educated from childhood to never surrender, made their final attack in suicidal banzai charges. Called gyokusai, literally meaning “shattered jewels” and signifying “glorious self-destruction,” this act of violent futility proved gruesome. On the battlefield there was little dignity in dying in a fusillade of enemy bullets. Those who were not killed instantly often perished crying “Okāsan,” a last gasp for their mother.

The government advocated military songs—poignant ballads or solemn marches. But Kinu couldn’t get excited over “Hawaii Naval Battle,” “At the Corner of Manila,” and, the latest hit, “It’s Getting Late in Batavia.” In a nod to the times, Kinu no longer played the piano. Chieko and Masako still visited, but making music was frowned upon since the whole neighborhood could hear. Kinu couldn’t risk it. Besides, her piano might be misconstrued as excessive wealth. Restricted but not silenced, Kinu and Kiyo plucked the koto and strummed the shamisen, summoning their comforting twang. Chieko watched. And Masako danced, her soft-socked feet barely making a sound.

Kinu and Frank needed rice. It had been rationed since 1941 and was regulated even more as farmers departed their fields for the front. When citizens lined up for their rationed portions, they were occasionally handed sweet potatoes instead.

In Japan girls and boys weren’t supposed to say more than “Konnichiwa” to one another.

Anyone whose behavior was considered unpatriotic could be interrogated by the kempeitai. Nisei were particularly at risk. Societal acceptance of the unobtrusive minority had worsened following Midway and the “sideward advance” of Guadalcanal. “Japanese could afford to feel some generosity toward the Nisei in the early days of the war, while Japan was winning one victory after another. But once Japan began to lose the war, they began to treat ‘American-borns’ as if they were spies,” wrote historian Rinjirō Sodei. Frank sensed the tension and devoted extra effort to appear wholly Japanese.

In Australia Harry wasn’t a “Jap” or a lowly Chinese cook but another “Yank.” The national penchant to “give a bloke a fair go,” as one of Harry’s Australian acquaintances would write, transcended racial and ethnic barriers.

That summer the army ordered that all photographs of the MIS language school and its graduates be considered confidential. The nisei were a covert intelligence tool, and the army sought to protect them from Japanese retaliation should they be captured. The less the enemy knew about the nisei, the better their chances of survival. This tiny minority became virtually invisible.

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.”

Zealous Japanese troops were known to infiltrate American lines disguised in American uniforms pulled off the dead. The translators would be difficult to distinguish from the enemy, especially at night, the time the Japanese favored for attacks.

Still, at the end of 1943, the Japanese military remained well indoctrinated, highly motivated, and, to varying degrees, adequately supplied. Although the prospect of victory was eddying in corpse-ridden streams on volcanic isles, Japanese soldiers did not—unlike their German and Italian allies—raise their hands in capitulation.

That month a massive send-off ceremony took place at the Jingū Gaien Stadium adjacent to Meiji Shrine in central Tokyo for more than twenty-five thousand students from schools all over eastern Japan. Amid a drenching downpour, the young men marched into the national stadium to the blare of bugles and trumpets. Sixty-five thousand student spectators sat soaked in the stands. Dignitaries, including Prime Minister Hideki Tōjō, addressed the audience atop a draped podium. The recruits sang the military ode “Umi Yukaba,” “Across the Sea,” vowing to die for the Emperor. After hours standing at attention in the chilling rain, they marched to cheer “Banzai” before the Imperial Palace. One of the soft-skinned soldiers that day was surely Pierce, whose entire class had been summarily conscripted. By December 1, the day that Pierce was officially inducted, there was so much that he did not know. His brother Harry was in the Pacific, preparing for his first landing in an active combat theater. The United States, Great Britain, and China would announce in the Cairo Communiqué their determination to obtain Japan’s unconditional surrender. The Manhattan Project was making progress. The air force would soon refit its Boeing B-29 Superfortress to transport a new and stunning weapon.

Pierce understood his mission. He knew his lines by heart. What the students-cum-soldiers had expressed before the Tokyo crowd that dismal October morn was true to everything that Pierce had learned in Japan. “Ikite kaeru koto o nozomazu.” They roared. “We don’t wish to return alive.”

Harry knew nothing about New Britain Island before landing there. Few did. On a map, it appeared as a 370-mile-long, forty-to fifty-mile-wide crescent above New Guinea south of the equator. Its topography was tropical: steaming emerald rain forests and smoking purple volcanoes, its terrain punishing. The official Marine history would call New Britain “one of the evil spots of this world.” In vine-threaded jungles with tree canopies smothering light, soldiers would confront alligators, pythons, wild pigs, leeches, and malaria-carrying mosquitoes, not to mention the enemy.

Live prisoners proved as rare as unbitten skin. During the first month or so of heavy combat, only three Japanese were captured. Harry would recall interrogating one, wounded, shocked, and incoherent. Harry thought the man was dying. A rapid death suited the intelligence officer in charge, who had made clear from the start that he did not want to take any prisoners at all.

By mid-January 1944, the night raids and fighting had diminished, and the combat and support staff had tripled to 4,750 men. The soldiers and marines had accomplished their mission.

As the fighting ebbed, Harry learned to improvise. Like many, he had contracted jungle rot, a fungal infection from damp conditions nicknamed the New Guinea crud. His body itched, his groin reddened. When he scratched, his skin peeled in blood-streaked chunks. To relieve his discomfort, he threw away his olive-drab underwear. The army wanted its men healthy and well nourished. Harry—who had tired of dry, dehydrated rations—would toss grenades into the ocean. When they detonated and fish rose to the surface, he would grill a fresh-catch dinner for the team and repurpose the remaining rations as padding in his leather boots.

Harry also addressed his isolation. He needed pen pals to combat his pathetic lack of mail. Terry had a large, devoted family and a girlfriend, but he joined the effort. They posted a letter to the Pacific Citizen, the newspaper of the Japanese American Citizens League that was popular among nisei readers. It appeared in March 1944 under the headline “Lonely Sergeants.” For your information I’d like to say that mail out here is few and far between. Letters from back home are what we look forward to the most out here, except for maybe going home again. As the fellows leave the camps for the outside world and the girls marry some 4F-ers because they think it’s too long waiting for us to come back, gradually our correspondence dwindles and morale lowers. So, sometimes in the future, when you have some space in the paper you don’t know what to do with, could you sort of mention in a casual way that there are a lot of lonely nisei soldiers out here living in foxholes day in and day out who would appreciate a “sugar report” or “morale booster,” especially from some cute chick. The editor promised to forward all “sugar reports” and in no time, the sugar began to flow. “Thirty to forty girls each,” Harry boasted. Some sent photos. Harry and Terry, savoring the sweetness, wrote back. Problem solved.

Harry held one letter dear that he did not share, lest anyone doubt his sympathies. Found on the body of a Japanese soldier killed in action, its pages were worthless in terms of intelligence. A woman named Kashiko had given birth to a healthy boy eighteen days earlier. “The baby has grown bigger and is very cute,” she wrote in a new mother’s hurried hand. “When I think about how much we would be overjoyed together if you were here, I become teary-eyed, but the situation cannot be helped.” Harry’s eyes traveled down the vertical lines running from right to left. Kashiko wrote of stroking her newborn’s face, adding, “If this letter reaches you somewhere in the south, please be happy. I will raise our little boy tenderly, tenderly until you return.” She begged, “If this letter reaches you, please write back immediately. Please take care.” Harry didn’t doubt that the man would have killed him given the chance. Harry would have shot him, too, had they confronted each other in combat. Like any GI, Harry called the enemy “Japs,” but unlike many of his hakujin colleagues, Harry knew his foe was not a fanatical, bloodthirsty man. A fearsome, dedicated, often savage fighter, yes, but hum...

For Kinu the spring of 1944 was disheartening. In the press, the government urged citizens to consider weeds, bees, and insects as viable ingredients. Sweet potatoes could be grown atop roofs both as camouflage and cuisine, “killing two birds with one stone.”

It was true: on occasion, Japanese troops devoured their own and others. Japanese provisions were running short, in part owing to the vast number of ships sunk. Malaria, dengue fever, and scrub typhus were ravaging the ranks of able-bodied men expected to forage for food and fight. Approximately two-thirds of Japan’s total military deaths in the Pacific would arise from illness or starvation. Cannibalism stalked the troops, and some succumbed. “It’s a matter of survival,” recalled linguist Min Hara, who had taken confessions from wild-eyed POWs.

Harry talked to the POWs in hospital tents, where, often wounded, they lay bandaged, bleary-eyed, and bewildered. He offered them cigarettes to ease the tension and explained the Geneva Conventions, the international treaties that protected human rights. Japan had pointedly not signed the 1929 Convention concerning prisoners of war. Unlike American soldiers who had been trained to provide only their names, ranks, and serial numbers, Japanese soldiers received no instructions in the case of capture. ATIS’s Colonel Mashbir deplored the “ridiculous fact that the Japanese government, having officially boasted that no Japanese ever permitted himself to be taken prisoner, could not instruct its men in the proper procedure if they were captured.” Yet, despite their despair about their status, prisoners rallied when they realized that they would receive medical treatment, which they might have been refused in their own unit. They were treated humanely. The majority opened up and began to talk.

Soldiers’ sense of hearing heightened; the scratch of a scuttling hermit crab could be terrifying. A single grenade tossed in panic ignited a barrage of gunfire. Harry pulled his trigger, too. “Everyone was firing. It feels better to fire.” The risk of being so tightly wound? “There was a lot of friendly fire.”

Life magazine published a photograph of a young woman with a Japanese skull sent by her navy boyfriend in the Pacific. A few months later, after flying missions over New Guinea with the air force, the renowned aviator Charles A. Lindbergh touched down in Hawaii, where a customs official nonchalantly asked whether he had packed bones in his luggage. Lindbergh was not surprised: in New Guinea he had heard that soldiers routinely worked over corpses—removing shinbones to carve into letter openers and pen trays, extracting teeth to pocket the gold fillings, and placing heads in swarming anthills—all the better, Lindbergh was told, “‘to clean them for souvenirs.’”

Harry understood that his brothers might be in the Japanese Imperial Army. Victor was serving when Harry had left for the States in 1938. He had a “hunch” that Frank and Pierce might be too, but he could not possibly know that Pierce was heading his way.

If Pierce went overseas, he could end up in a place like New Guinea. In Japanese they called the mammoth island Nyū Ginia, the G hard and guttural, spoken with a groan. New Guinea, lamented bereaved families, devoured the young. New Guinea, declared survivors, was a disaster. New Guinea “will be your grave,” warned Allied propaganda.

Harry was heartened that biracial children did not appear to raise eyebrows in Australia. In California, where he had lived the longest as an adult, miscegenation for whites and Japanese, among others, was against the law.

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.

in December 1944, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Ex parte Endo that the government could not hold “concededly loyal” persons against their will. In January restrictions against resettling on the West Coast would be stricken and general release from the concentration camps, including Gila River, would commence. This decision was a vindication, but it was not unequivocal. In another case, Korematsu v. United States, the Supreme Court had upheld the constitutionality of the original exclusion order. A wave of vigilante incidents shook the West Coast to discourage ethnic Japanese from returning to their hometowns; in one incident, the American Legion removed the names of sixteen nisei soldiers from its county honor roll in Hood River, Oregon.

3 also marked the date of an ancient Japanese ritual called Setsubun. On the cusp of spring, people dispatched the evil of the previous year and welcomed luck by tossing roasted soybeans outside their entrances. “Oni wa soto. Fuku wa uchi!” “Demons out! Luck in,” they called. Harry had once celebrated this custom in Hiroshima, where children wore devil masks and chewed one crispy bean for each year of their lives.

Banzai charges were occurring with greater frequency across battlegrounds throughout Asia. On July 9, 1944, this concept of gyokusai (shattered jewels)—or sacrifice for the sake of the Empire—metamorphosed to include civilians. Allied forces advancing in Saipan watched in horror as hundreds of Japanese residents killed themselves en masse—exploding hand grenades or jumping from rocky cliffs to the whitecap-tossed ocean far below, a phenomenon that would be repeated elsewhere. Three months later, on October 25, 1944, six Zero fighters loaded with 551-pound bombs, so-called kamikaze—named after the “divine wind” typhoons that had rescued Japan in 1274 and 1281 from Kublai Khan’s convoys—crash-dived into carriers in the Leyte Gulf. The decimated Japanese navy had few other weapons at its disposal. Like the banzai charges, the element of terror exceeded military effectiveness.

When 111 B29s lifted off from Saipan and Tinian to bomb Tokyo on November 24, 1944, Japan’s future darkened. Over the coming months mass raids would spread to sixty-three other cities, becoming so common that residents would call these formations teikibin (regular flights).

Close advisors had tried and failed to convince the emperor to surrender in early 1945. Instead, the embattled nation persevered abroad and at home, for worse. “March on! 100,000,000 United in One Fireball!” beseeched a popular slogan. Citizens knew these words by heart, even if privately they struck some as hollow.

By the end of 1944, Hiroshima residents rushed preparations to repel an air raid. Mobilized citizens dismantled buildings in November to clear fire lanes and create open spaces to contain conflagrations at 133 locations designated the previous March. Central neighborhoods reverberated with the clatter of saws and axes, the heave-ho of workers pulling ropes attached to buildings, and the crescendo of crashing timber. By the end of the year, the first stage of the process was complete. More than one thousand buildings had been destroyed and 4,210 citizens evacuated. According to plan, the city—prior to any bombing—was being systematically taken apart.

Throughout the country, women were sharpening bamboo-laundry rods to a point, lining up in monpe-clad formation, and jabbing back and forth, housewives-cum-foot soldiers. Their sessions were deadly serious preparations for war when it reached the homeland.

Kinu had reason to slack off. She was fifty-two years old, a ripe age in Japan, where, Masako said, “fifty years was a lifetime.” In 1945, the average life span for women in Japan was 37.5 years, a milestone Kinu had passed before the war had even started.

Food by-products that would have been discarded in times of peace were now part of daily meals. People used aburakasu (the oil-cake residue from cooking oil), instead of fish or vegetables in their daily soup. The greasy clots had flavor, an antidote to the bitter, tasteless, and rotten ingredients that all too often comprised rations. Masako explained, “We were malnourished but we could live.”

Whatever fragile equilibrium residents of Hiroshima and its suburb of Takasu maintained would totter, however, after March 10, 1945, the day that Tokyo burned. From the night of the ninth, more than three hundred B-29s buzzed low over the city, releasing almost 2,000 tons of seventy-pound napalm bombs over the course of two hours. The jellied gasoline ignited houses made of pine, paper, and bamboo; fires rampaged and screamed through vast swaths of the city. When the raid was over, sixteen square miles of the nation’s capital had been reduced to smoldering debris, more than one million homeless residents sought shelter, and as many as 100,000 had perished.

That same March, the city lost not only lively neighborhoods but its most cherished population. More than 23,000 young children were evacuated by train to rural temples and shrines, and to country homes of friends and relatives. As steam rose from the idling trains at Hiroshima Station, mothers wiped their eyes with handkerchiefs.

A day or two into his visit, Frank received a bright pink postcard in the mail. His heart skipped a beat. He didn’t need to read the contents to understand. The mere sight of the akagami (red paper) destroyed his world. The paper was the deep pink hue of the sakura (cherry blossom) long appropriated as a symbol for the fleeting lives of youthful soldiers. At age twenty, at the height of the once-joyous cherry blossom season, Frank had been drafted. Calculating his odds of survival, he figured on a year or two. His draft notice was nothing less than a “death sentence.” During the course of Japan’s excruciatingly lengthy conflict, from 1931 to 1945, every family would point to specific days to commemorate, often in sorrow. Frank would describe his own in a letter, and the delivery of his conscription notice became “THE DAY I CANNOT FORGET.”

The previous July, the draft age had been raised from forty to forty-five and in the autumn, it had been lowered from nineteen to eighteen.

On April 10, 1945, Frank reported to the military grounds south of Hiroshima Castle, now the Second General Army Headquarters under Marshal Shunroku Hata. Frank’s official assignment: the 417th Infantry Regiment of the 145th Division, Imperial Second Army; the First Army was based in Tokyo. Frank’s status: a second-class private, an untrained recruit, the lowliest of the low, nicknamed issen gorin (one sen, five rin), the equivalent in change of less than a penny. Frank despaired. “I thought this was the end.”

Three days into Frank’s draft, on the evening of April 13, Tokyo was bombed for the third time that year. A wing of the Imperial Palace was unintentionally hit and burned; the emperor and his family emerged unharmed. No one realized then that earlier that same day, an event of greater consequence had passed without incident in Hiroshima. An American reconnaissance plane had hovered over the city during daylight hours. Through a window, an army photographer angled, framed his scenes, and shot.

Luzon—the largest, most populous, and central of more than seven thousand tropical isles forming the ragged green lace of the Philippine archipelago—represented a turning point in the war. If the Allies succeeded, a final victory against Japan seemed likely. If not, the war could become—on Luzon’s humid rice-latticed central plain and in its chilly, soaring northern mountains—a protracted quagmire.