The Storm on Our Shores

One Island, Two Soldiers, and the Forgotten Battle of World War II

Mark Obmascik

• Publisher: Atria Books
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781451678390
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Military Biographies
• Index: History

This "engrossing" ( The Wall Street Journal ) national bestseller and true "heartbreaking tale of tragedy and redemption" (Hampton Sides, bestselling author of Ghost Soldiers ) reveals how a discovered diary—found during a brutal World War II battle—changed our war-torn society's perceptions of Japan. May 1943. The Battle of Attu—called "The Forgotten Battle" by World War II veterans—was raging on the Aleutian island with an Arctic cold, impenetrable fog, and rocketing winds that combined to create some of the worst weather on Earth. Both American and Japanese forces tirelessly fought in a yearlong campaign, with both sides suffering thousands of casualties. Included in this number was a Japanese medic whose war diary would lead a Silver Star–winning American soldier to find solace for his own tortured soul.The doctor's name was Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi, a Hiroshima native who had graduated from college and medical school in California. He loved America, but was called to enlist in the Imperial Army of his native Japan. Heartsick, wary of war, yet devoted to Japan, Tatsuguchi performed his duties and kept a diary of events as they unfolded—never knowing that it would be found by an American soldier named Dick Laird.Laird, a hardy, resilient underground coal miner, enlisted in the US Army to escape the crushing poverty of his native Appalachia. In a devastating mountainside attack in Alaska, Laird was forced to make a fateful decision, one that saved him and his comrades, but haunted him for years.Tatsuguchi's diary was later translated and distributed among US soldiers. It showed the common humanity on both sides of the battle. But it also ignited fierce controversy that is still debated today. After forty years, Laird was determined to return it to the family and find peace with Tatsuguchi's daughter, Laura Tatsuguchi Davis.Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist Mark Obmascik "writes with tremendous grace about a forgotten part of our history, telling the same story from two opposing points of view—perhaps the only way warfare can truly be understood" (Helen Thorpe, author of Soldier Girls ).

PART ONE

TATSY

1

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Delivery

Paul Tatsuguchi needed a baby.

As a medical resident at White Memorial Hospital in Los Angeles in 1938, he could complete his training only by delivering a newborn. Three times he traveled to the home of an expectant mother only to discover that the reports of labor were false alarms. A fourth time, he and a nurse stayed with a laboring mother in her home for two full days. When the exhausted trio finally retreated to the hospital for the grand finale, the baby was delivered not by Tatsuguchi, but by a resident physician who pulled rank. Tatsuguchi wondered if he were jinxed. Would he ever supervise the miracle of birth?

He dreamed of becoming a doctor in California. Twelve years earlier, he had moved from his family home in Hiroshima to attend Pacific Union College in Napa Valley. He struggled with English but excelled at science, and he won admission to medical school at Loma Linda University of Southern California in 1933. He had spurned the Shinto religion native to his homeland and grew up as a Christian. He learned to love ice cream, the open road, and the Sierra Nevada. His classmates and teachers even gave him a Westernized nickname—Tatsy. By the time he started at White Memorial Hospital, Tatsuguchi seemed as much of an American as a doctor.

If only he could find a baby to cooperate.

Tatsuguchi’s friend and roommate, Harold Stout, who also was a medical resident, took pity on him. When a promising call for a home childbirth was phoned in to the hospital, Stout rushed into his car with a nurse to handle it. Then he saw Tatsuguchi, dejected after weeks without a baby delivery and trudging up the hill to work.

It was time for a change of luck. “Tatsy,” he called, “this is your case and it sounds like a hurry-up one. Take my car and go!”

Tatsuguchi jumped into the driver’s seat and rushed away with the nurse. Together they were finally able to deliver Tatsuguchi’s first baby. Mother and newborn were fine. Tatsuguchi rejoiced. He was one step closer to becoming a full-fledged doctor.

The next day, however, the delivery nurse confronted the man who had set it all up.

“What did I ever do to you?” she demanded of Stout.

The roommate was confused. “What did I do to you?”

“You turned me over to Tatsuguchi yesterday,” she said.

Stout knew some people weren’t comfortable working with foreigners, especially ones from Japan, the source of much recent political tension with the United States. “He can’t help that he’s Japanese,” he told the nurse. “He pays tuition just like I do. It was his turn.”

“I didn’t mind that he was Japanese,” the nurse shot back, “but he had never driven a car before, and this is Los Angeles!”

Classmates loved to tell that story about Tatsuguchi, because it showed his grit and determination. A mere driver’s license would not stand between Tatsy and a required medical accomplishment.

But the same story also highlighted something darker. No matter how much Tatsuguchi shared with his new country—his medical training, his religious beliefs, his love of California—he was often viewed as different, an outsider. America might have been established on the shared ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence, but on the streets in the 1930s, skin color mattered.

He was insulted as a Jap, a yellow, a Chinaman. Never confrontational, he let the slurs slide, except for the last one. Tatsuguchi was precise and proud. He quickly corrected the classmate who called him a Chinaman.

In his first years in the United States, the animosity against him seemed racial. As his decade overseas progressed, however, the prejudice turned political. Though he tried to spend even his free time talking about the best ways to repair internal organs, Tatsy faced uncomfortable questions from classmates about the government of his home country.

Why had Japan invaded China? Did the Japanese really believe that Asia was only for Asians? Why was Japan allying itself with the likes of Hitler and Mussolini? What should the rest of the world make of Hitler’s declaration that the Japanese were honorary Aryans?

Truth was, Tatsy could answer few of these questions. He was interested in medicine, not politics. Yes, he was proud of his Japanese homeland and culture, but Paul Nobuo Tatsuguchi loved the United States. He wore American eyeglasses and an American wristwatch, and he slept, American-style, on a mattress with sheets, not on a futon. He excelled at Western music—classmates always circled around whenever he played Mozart or Bach on the school’s Steinway piano—and he loved Hollywood movies. He had lived more of his adult life in the West than the Far East. He even had learned to cook a few basic American meals, though he still preferred the miso soup and ramen of his homeland to the steak-and-potatoes of the California roadhouses.

In fact, he had acclimated to his new country so well that one of his medical school classmates, Joseph Mudry, concluded that Tatsy “was quite an American.”

In Japanese schools, Tatsy scored in the top of his class with grades in the high 90s, but in America, the challenges of learning technical terms in his second language of English knocked down most of his scores to the 80s. He worked harder and refused to complain. When Stout, his American roommate, lamented the difficulties of memorizing such medical terms as sternocleidomastoid, acromioclavicular, and brachioradialis, Tatsy shrugged and replied, “No different than rough, through, threw, ewe, you, yew, to, two, too, knew, gnu, new, speak, and speech.” Like the great movie star of the times, Ginger Rogers, who did everything Fred Astaire did except backwards and in high heels, Tatsuguchi was matching every move of his classmates, but in an adopted language thousands of miles from home and in a culture that would not fully accept him.

Classmates loved his wry sense of humor. While in a neighborhood Japanese grocery, his roommate found a bottle of soy sauce, at the time a rare ingredient for California cuisine, and called across the store to Tatsy: “Shall I get some of this beetle juice?” Stout had tried soy sauce once and hated it. Tatsuguchi’s tendency to add it onto so many different foods became a running joke between the roommates. Tatsuguchi responded in jest the next day by pouring the soy sauce into a glass-stoppered bottle usually reserved in the chemistry lab for nitric acid. Before placing the bottle on their tiny dining table, he added this label: SNAKE’S BLOOD.

Tatsuguchi remained acutely aware that most Americans did not know anyone Japanese, and that his actions would sometimes be seen as representative of his entire native country. He convinced himself to put on a good show. When Tatsuguchi’s roommate brought home some papaya nectar, Tatsuguchi felt obligated to try it. Not a good idea. The taste was so disgustingly sweet that Tatsuguchi ran to the sink, spit it out, and spent much time at the faucet rinsing out his mouth. The roommate chided Tatsuguchi: That papaya nectar doesn’t taste nearly as bad as the other stuff you brought home from the Japanese grocery store. Replied Tatsuguchi: “Yes, I know, but that was Japanese stuff. You ate it. So I had to, too.” To Tatsuguchi, fair was fair.

He kept in touch with life back home by subscribing to a Japanese newspaper and using his shortwave radio to tune in news broadcasts from Tokyo. He knew far more about world events than most of his classmates, who had little reason to focus on life outside the United States. Still, he genuinely enjoyed his fellow students and medical residents, who were open and friendly and helpful. They banded together in misery under the brutal around-the-clock hours of a medical residency that left little time for much outside the hospital. White Memorial was a hectic but comfortable cocoon. Dedicated to becoming the greatest possible surgeon, Tatsuguchi centered his life around his career. No one ever disputed his work ethic.

Life outside the hospital was more complicated. Resentment of Asians in general, and the Japanese in particular, was building. Starting in 1913, fifteen Western and Midwestern states, including California, had enacted alien land laws, which banned Japanese immigrants and other Asians from owning real estate. (As a reflection of the prejudiced times, California continued enacting other anti-Japanese laws through the 1920s that, among other things, banned the leasing of farmland to Asian immigrants and even their American-born children.) In Washington, D.C., and Sacramento, race-baiting politicians warned of the rising Yellow Peril that would lower wages for whites and destroy the values of Western Civilization. Congress in 1917 had overridden President Woodrow Wilson’s veto of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, which denied citizenship to “all idiots, imbeciles, feeble-minded persons, epileptics, insane persons”—and most Japanese (as well as most other Asians). That law was followed by a series of other anti-Asian laws, including the Emergency Quota Act of 1921, the Cable Act of 1922, and the national origins quota of the Immigration Act of 1924. When a Berkeley, California, high school graduate named Takao Ozawa applied for U.S. citizenship by claiming he was as light-skinned as any white man, the United States Supreme Court disagreed, issuing an ugly ruling saying the man “is clearly of a race which is not Caucasian and therefore belongs entirely outside the zone on the negative side.”

The anti-Japanese laws were just a symptom of the racist sentiment in the street. Japanese Americans were routinely denied the ability to rent an apartment, shop in some stores, attend certain schools, join labor unions, and work some jobs. White mobs in Portland, Oregon, and Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, harassed and chased out Japanese railroad workers. Another mob in Toledo, Oregon, evicted thirty-five Japanese working at the Pacific Spruce Corporation. There were forced evictions of Asians in Tacoma, Seattle, and Rock Springs, Wyoming. The Anti-Alien Association railed against land ownership and citizenship for Asians. The San Francisco Labor Council organized a boycott against all Japanese-owned businesses.

Many Americans did not distinguish between Japanese, Chinese, Koreans, or Filipinos. Popular books like The Insidious Dr. Fu-Manchu—“the greatest genius which the powers of evil have put on the earth for centuries”—only reinforced the perception of Asians as crafty, shifty double-dealers bent on world domination.

Tatsuguchi could not ignore the contradiction: Inside the hospital he saved the lives of white people with emergency surgery, but outside in the parking lot he was persecuted as a Jap. He was winning his career dream. He was struggling to win cultural acceptance.

Many days Tatsuguchi felt like a lonely atoll in the Pacific, buffeted by conflicting winds from the east and west. He was an L.A. guy who shunned cars, a man who prized the modesty and dignity of Japan, but still craved the fun and energy of Southern California. He would never fit in perfectly in either the East or West, but he wondered who lived as more of an outsider—the Jap in America, or the gaijin in Nippon.

He longed for someone who knew what he felt, a friend who loved the best of both countries, a confidante who could join him to chart a new, wonderful, blended life.

What he longed for was a girl named Taeko Miyake.

2

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Love

He hadn’t realized how much he had missed her—until he couldn’t see her. Paul was supposed to meet Taeko at her ship in Los Angeles. She had spent weeks sailing across the Pacific, from Tokyo to her new college and life in California, and Paul intended to meet her at the dock. But now Paul stood at the Port of Los Angeles, a long passenger liner stretching in front of him, and Taeko was nowhere to be seen.

Paul worried that he wouldn’t recognize her. He had known her more than twenty years, when they were both schoolchildren in Japan, but since he had moved to the United States they had kept in touch only by letter. He certainly had changed during his years in America. He was more confident, more open, more accepting of new things. But what about Taeko? He knew she was no longer a girl. She was a woman, an excellent student, who was both thrilled and a little scared to be moving to a new country for classes. In the United States, Paul felt sure that he and Taeko would be friends. As he scanned the docks searching for her, though, he felt they might be something more. Where was she?

Not at the port, it turned out. Taeko’s ship had arrived hours earlier. She had come and gone from the docks.

Paul scrambled and found Taeko later that day at the home of a mutual friend. Paul apologized for missing her at the port. Taeko said she was just grateful that he found her. They started talking and did not stop. She was enrolling in a Seventh-day Adventist college, La Sierra Academy in Riverside, where she planned to study the Bible, English, and the violin. She was the daughter of a minister from Tokyo. He was the son of a Hiroshima dentist. Both families were dedicated to Jesus Christ and the Seventh-day Adventist Church.

They talked about old times and new, family and friends, hopes and dreams. And for the first time in a long time, he was overcome with a singular, fantastic realization: Taeko Miyake knew him.

For starters, she didn’t call him Tatsy, the nickname all his classmates used. To Taeko, he was Paul, the apostolic name his parents had given him to signal the Tatsuguchi family’s deep faith. Like Paul, Taeko knew what it felt like to be outside the mainstream. They had both grown up Christian in a Japan dominated by Shinto and Buddhism, a country suspicious of most things Western. As part of a scorned religious minority, Paul’s parents, like Taeko’s, deemed it important to learn about life outside the Japanese cultural island. They had sent Paul years earlier to study for his undergraduate degree at Pacific Union College, a Seventh-day Adventist school in Northern California.

While he was away at college, however, both his parents died within a month of each other. Following Japanese tradition, the Tatsuguchi family inheritance went to the oldest son, not Paul.

Taeko was the only person in the United States who knew just how devastating this turn of events had been to Paul. The Tatsuguchi family was extremely wealthy—so rich that Paul and each of his five siblings had been assigned two servants. (The cooking, cleaning, and gardening was left for ten additional family servants.) Paul grew up with the best clothes, the best food, and the best tutors. His parents were major contributors to the Seventh-day Adventist Church in Japan and prime backers of a church tuberculosis sanitarium in Tokyo. His parents had shown him the good life as well as the Christian philanthropic obligations that came with it.

The death of Paul’s parents meant the end of his financial support. Stranded on the other side of the Pacific Ocean with no clear way to pay for anything, Paul pleaded with his older brother for money to let him finish his medical studies at Loma Linda University. Weeks passed, and Paul grew more nervous. Would he be forced to return to Japan without a medical license? Could he even cover his current school bills? And what would happen to his younger brothers and sisters still home in Japan? Eventually the older brother agreed to give Paul the family house, which was sold quickly, at a cut-rate price, to pay for his medical school tuition, plus other expenses for his brothers and sisters.

It was a testament to Paul’s own sense of dignity that his medical school roommate, Harold Stout, had never heard about his financial crisis. In the minds of Stout and other classmates, Tatsy was a quiet, sincere, and modest medical student. They never knew that he was rich, because he didn’t tell anyone, and they didn’t know that Tatsy was now poor, because he didn’t say anything about that, either. What they did know was this: Tatsy was a skilled surgeon who performed top-quality appendectomies faster than anyone. In the true American spirit, he was working harder to get ahead faster.

Taeko, however, knew more. She knew all about Paul’s problems back home because her family had helped him through his money woes. Her parents were religious missionaries from Tokyo, now living in Hawaii, who had contributed a modest sum to help continue Paul’s schooling. Others in the church had donated as well. Seventh-day Adventists were all about community and sticking together during times of adversity. If the orphaned son of a church committee member needed help to pay for medical school in America, then the church would deliver that help. It was expected that Paul would pay back the favor someday.

Paul liked that Taeko knew all this about him. America was invigorating, but it also could be lonely. He wanted someone to confide in. Yes, Taeko was an antidote to homesickness, a connection to the customs and culture of a native land far away. As they talked on their first evening together in a new country, she started to ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Dedication
• Preface
• Part One: Tatsy
• Part Two: Laird
• Part Three: War
• Part Four: Peace
• Afterword
• Photographs
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Bibliography
• Illustration Credits
• Copyright