Midnight in Broad Daylight

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

• Publisher: Harper
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9780062351951
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

Meticulously researched and beautifully written, the true story of a Japanese American family that found itself on opposite sides during World War II—an epic tale of family, separation, divided loyalties, love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption—and a riveting chronicle of U.S.–Japan relations and the Japanese experience in America

After their father's death, Harry, Frank, and Pierce Fukuhara—all born and raised in the Pacific Northwest—moved to Hiroshima, their mother's ancestral home. Eager to go back to America, Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry was sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators and he dutifully volunteered to serve his country. Back in Hiroshima, his brothers Frank and Pierce became soldiers in the Japanese Imperial Army.

As the war raged on, Harry, one of the finest bilingual interpreters in the United States Army, island-hopped across the Pacific, moving ever closer to the enemy—and to his younger brothers. But before the Fukuharas would have to face each other in battle, the U.S. detonated the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, gravely injuring tens of thousands of civilians, including members of their family.

Alternating between the American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight captures the uncertainty and intensity of those charged with the fighting as well as the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima—as never told before in English—and provides a fresh look at the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Intimate and evocative, it is an indelible portrait of a resilient family, a scathing examination of racism and xenophobia, an homage to the tremendous Japanese American contribution to the American war effort, and an invaluable addition to the historical record of this extraordinary time.

PART ONE

AMERICAN BORN, BICULTURAL BRED

昔の剣今の菜刀

Mukashi no tsurugi ima no na-gatana

Fortune is made of glass.

1

At Home in Auburn

Once Harry made a decision, he rarely looked back. The injustice was minor, but it scratched the eight-year-old boy’s pride that afternoon in 1928. Dashing from his house in Auburn, Washington, he pedaled his bicycle over the backyard grass, crunching onto the gravel lane. He raced to West Main Street and, three blocks later, clattered over the Interurban railroad tracks, avoiding the live third rail. When he reached the West Valley Freeway, he sped toward Seattle. The metropolis lay a formidable twenty-two miles away.

Harry bumped over the two-lane highway, where dense evergreens cast shadows over his path. Occasionally, a roadster rumbled by, splattering mud. Harry pedaled harder.

The road, offset by a leaden sky, rose and fell before him. When the waning sun broke through the White River Valley’s cumulus clouds, shafts of light lightened his journey. As he coasted down inclines, he caught the scent of cedar and a whiff of rain, never more than a cloudburst away.

The farther he traveled, the more convinced he became that his impromptu plan would succeed. He was certain he could hide out at his friends’ house. After that, he didn’t know what would happen. When he began to recognize the rolling farmland outside Seattle, his spirits soared.

By the time Harry reached the Bitows’ house, it was long after dark. As soon as he ground to a dirt-spewing halt, Mr. and Mrs. Bitow ushered him inside and dialed his father, their close friend. Harry had an inkling that they had been alerted in advance and were waiting by the window all along.

A short time later, Katsuji Fukuhara stood holding his bowler hat and bowing before the Bitows, apologizing for Harry’s insolence in showing up uninvited. His father’s humility was practiced etiquette but Harry couldn’t dismiss how grim his father looked. He roped his bicycle to his dad’s Buick and slumped into the backseat. The rush of adrenaline was long gone; his legs and shoulders were beginning to throb. Yet he felt buoyed by his daring jaunt. His parents now understood the strength of his resolve.

Secretly, he was relieved to return home. His mother wouldn’t greet him with open arms and tears of relief; Japanese parents were not demonstrative. But the corners of her mouth might crinkle when she filled his rice bowl, set his favorite takuan pickled radishes on the table, and ladled him a generous helping of miso soup. His kid brother Frank would sit wide-eyed by his side, while Harry sank his chopsticks into his dinner.

Katsuji did not lecture or punish Harry that night. Perhaps, he concluded, miles of bumping over brick pavement was agony enough. Surely he breathed easily that Harry, who had once walked in circles for hours until he found his way home from school after dark, had not become lost on unfamiliar roads. But if Katsuji reckoned that Harry would regret his impulsive behavior, he was underestimating his son’s optimism, resilience, and penchant for adventure. Harry’s bicycle sprint to imagined freedom would not be the last time that he escaped in order to come home.

HOME WAS AUBURN, A TOWN LATTICED WITH railroad tracks and berry and vegetable farms, a pocket of the White River Valley at the foot of glacial, snow-capped Mount Rainier. Japanese farmers were drawn to the valley, in part because it reminded them of the landscape of Japan, and cloud-swathed, volcanic Rainier of Japan’s most sacred peak, Mount Fuji. The immigrants called Rainier “Tacoma’s Fuji” and lovingly translated the valley’s name into Japanese. Shirakawa. The soft syllables rolled off their tongues, like a whisper with a finger to the lips, for someplace intimate and empyreal.

Auburn itself, population five thousand, was a young town, born the same month and year as Katsuji, in February 1886. It soon shed its original name Slaughter, in memory of a Lieutenant William Slaughter killed in an Indian uprising, when the unwelcoming moniker became the butt of local jokes. The name Auburn, a nod to a stately New York cousin, gave a gloss of worldliness. As the western frontier was settled at a furious pace, Auburn hitched itself to progress, vying for railroad routes. By 1920 steam whistles punctuated the air as up to 180 trains—from the Seattle-Tacoma Interurban Railway, the Northern Pacific Railway, and the Milwaukee Road—hustled through town each day.

Katsuji, who had been at one point Katsuji Fukumoto, had also shed his name. By the time he reached Auburn, he was, to Americans, Harry K. Fukuhara—Harry because it was accessible and easy to pronounce, K for Katsuji, and Fukuhara his rightful surname. Katsuji’s father in Japan had loaned out the once-noble name in return for funds to defray a debt. When the duration of the loan was up, the name reverted to the family. Both Katsuji and Auburn aspired to a prosperous future.

Yet, in 1926, the same year that the Fukuharas moved to town, the Northern Pacific pulled out of its Auburn terminus. Meanwhile, Japanese dairy farmers, with whom Katsuji had recently opened a creamery, were abandoning their plots due to plunging milk prices. Katsuji held his ground as the local economy slowly soured.

Nothing struck Harry as amiss. He loved Auburn. Chilled bottles of fresh milk topped with cream left outside the front door before dawn. The crunch of a tart Gravenstein apple plucked from the Fergusons’ tree next door. Salmon flopping on the front lawn when the White River flooded. An inner-tube ride down Easy Canyon Stream, the sockeyes’ coral scales shimmering in the sunlight. The perfume of ripe strawberries wafting from the loamy soil on Japanese farms. The gentle touch and steady beat of cool drizzle. Harry’s images were as collectible as snapshots from the new, pocket-sized Kodak Vanity camera taking the nation by storm.

Harry was an American citizen by birth, born in Seattle on January 1, 1920. His mother, Kinu, had left the pristine island of Miyajima, outside Hiroshima, at eighteen to wed Katsuji in 1911. For a picture bride—her marriage was arranged in Japan, her knowledge of her husband limited to a photograph—learning English was an afterthought and never came easy. She could not quite master her r’s, rolling them in her mouth like marbles. “Harry” sounded a lot like “Hurry.”

“Hu-ri!” Kinu called from her kitchen perch, glimpsing her son, as skinny as a somen noodle, loop out the front door to meet his friends waiting outside. Catching her voice before the door banged shut, he replied, “Itte kimasu,” “I’m going but will come back,” a proper goodbye before leaving Japanese courtesy behind.

As tall as his Caucasian friends, Harry had straight bangs, a direct gaze, and oversize ears with elongated lobes. In Japan, this size and shape were esteemed: fukumimi (ears of happiness) augured prosperity and good fortune. At least, Harry’s parents assumed that he would be able to hear well, and, maybe, when he was older, would listen. Harry disregarded the lore but his mighty ears did come in handy when he twitched them to his friends.

The boys took a hard right on to Main Street, with its packed-dirt thoroughfare, brick and shingled storefronts, open lots, and the guarantee—not necessarily available elsewhere—of the glories of electricity. They were headed to the Mission Theater, the local nickelodeon. Harry, who had a penchant for serial westerns with the lone cowboy pulling the trigger on Indians in a saguaro-spiked desert, didn’t care what was playing. What mattered was that he was with friends. Neither he nor his pals jingled much change, but, even if they had, they would have pulled their regular stunt.

One boy purchased a ticket and entered the theater legally, walking upstairs to the men’s room and opening the window, ostensibly for fresh air. The rest of the group headed to the back of the building, where a metal pole rose from the ground to the roof. One at a time, they shinnied up, crossed the roof, and dropped to the men’s room via the open window. There was one hitch: the roof turned slick in the rain. One slip and a boy would crash to the solid earth two stories down.

The risk, Harry had decided, was worth the reward. He sank into a plush seat, the warmth of the dark theater washed over him, and he surrendered to a double feature. Sometimes Charlie Chaplin bumbled across the screen in loose shoes, baggy pants, cane, and derby hat. In Hollywood, the actor was tearing up the Great White Way, cofounding United Artists, and producing and directing popular films in which he starred. But what Harry savored most was the idea that Charlie Chaplin was his father’s friend.

Katsuji had first met Chaplin through the actor’s longtime Japanese aide, Totaichi Kono, who hailed from the same rural Hiroshima district. Every time he visited Los Angeles, Katsuji saw the actor, who, he told his rapt children, kept his iconic costume in a glass case. In a photograph, Katsuji and Charlie, roughly the same age and height, in their early forties and about five feet five inches, stood wearing wool blazers accented by silk handkerchiefs, and knife-creased, light trousers. In front of the camera they appeared as equals. But they were not remotely equal before the law.

Though they were both immigrants, Katsuji—who had a head start on Chaplin, having arrived in the States a decade before, in 1900—didn’t land far from the bottom of the immigrant heap, inflating to more than 14 million between 1850 and 1930. America was changing rapidly, xenophobia flared, and the issue of citizenship turned on color. It always had.

In 1790, Congress had restricted naturalization to an alien who was a “free white person,” thereby excluding slaves. Almost a century later, in 1870, five years after the Civil War, former slaves became eligible for citizenship. But Japanese nationals, who had first legally immigrated to Hawaii in 1868, were, like the Chinese, excluded. By the early 1920s, more than twenty-five thousand legal immigrants from Hiroshima lived in the United States, more than from any other area in Japan. Yamaguchi and Kumamoto prefectures sent many immigrants, too. They were all aliens in a foreign land.

Although nisei (second-generation) children like Harry and his siblings were citizens because they were born in the United States, their immigrant issei (first-generation) parents continued to be rebuffed. In 1922, the Supreme Court, in Ozawa v. U.S., stated that issei were “aliens ineligible to citizenship.”

Harry sat entranced by the comedian on the silver screen. Just as his dad and the dashing Chaplin shared a friendship, so did he with his buddy Elgin, a rugged blond football player. When it came to best friends, nothing, he figured, would ever come between them.

DURING THE WEEK, HARRY AND HIS BROTHERS attended the Washington Elementary School, a short walk off East Main Street. Harry, though he preferred play to study, skipped two grades. He developed an enduring crush on Helen Hall, a lithesome blonde who sat in front of him in the back of the room. When he tugged her long, wavy hair, Helen giggled, all the more reason to pull it again.

Harry cast a wide berth around the stern principal, Flora Holt. Mrs. Holt was not receptive toward Japanese American students, who comprised 20 percent of the school’s population. Her attitude set the tone at a time when teachers wielded fierce authority, often rapping their charges with rulers. Katsuji, the rare issei influential in community affairs, took note.

Generally, Harry blew into the house late, calling out breezily, “Tadaima!” “I’m home!” He ran by the formal living room with its Japanese ceramic figurines, the love seat with the kimono-silk pillow, and his mother’s mahogany Monarch piano. He had forgotten to remove his metal-soled shoes and, despite Kinu’s reproof in Japanese—“Hu-ri!”—he clanged up the stairs.

In the attic bedroom where the bedposts touched, Harry confided to his brothers Pierce and Frank about sneaking into the Mountain View Cemetery at night to gape at Auburn twinkling below. Cautious like his mother, Pierce was awed by Harry’s exploits but had no desire to partake. Frank, the baby, four years younger, who looked up to his big brother, couldn’t wait to take the exhilarating journey with him. He never wanted to be left out.

Frank couldn’t imagine a better brother. He called Harry by his first name in English and switched to the honorific “Onīsan” (“elder brother”) when he spoke in Japanese. He felt especially fortunate to have Harry as his eldest brother since, in the sibling hierarchy, oldest brothers were generally serious, responsible, and dull. Not Harry, who dragged Frank in a red Radio Flyer wagon up and down the street and balanced him on the edge of his bike seat for heart-thumping rides down steep hills. Harry agreed that Frank and Pierce were lucky to have him. The three boys, it seemed, had forgotten about their other two siblings Mary and Victor who had been absent from family life for their seminal early childhood years, having been sent to live with their wealthy maternal aunt in Hiroshima. Victor, the eldest, was brought to Japan at age five in 1919, before Harry, Pierce, and Frank were born. In 1923, Katsuji deposited a baffled seven-year-old Mary, too.

Kinu believed the time abroad was for the good of their eldest children. She stressed to Katsuji how important it was to start them early so they could attain native fluency in Japanese. Otherwise, it would be impossible to catch up with the three written alphabets, including the two thousand kanji (Chinese characters) required to be functionally literate. Kinu was too busy to instruct Victor and Mary herself. Katsuji grudgingly admitted that even paying room and board would be cheaper than providing for the children in the United States—so favorable was the exchange rate and low the cost of living in Japan.

Kinu dreamed of the day Mary, draped in a heavy ivory silk kimono embroidered with golden cranes, would follow her groom with mincing steps. After the ceremony, the young bride would don a lace wedding gown, its gauzy veil trailing on the floor, and stand next to her tuxedoed mate. She would lead a gratifying life as a yoki tsuma, tsuyoi haha, or good wife and wise mother, in the United States. A Hiroshima girls’ school diploma would bolster her chances of finding a suitable mate—of Japanese descent, of course.

Kinu and Katsuji could not envision Victor’s future unless he obtained a proper Japanese education. Racial discrimination toward Americans of Japanese descent was so pervasive that even a nisei who graduated summa cum laude from a university could not find a job. At the time a Stanford representative remarked, “Many firms have general regulations against employing them; others object to them on the ground that the other men employed by the firms do not care to work with them.” A representative at the University of California, Berkeley agreed: “It seems a tragedy that these intelligent men should spend four years in college to find there is no market for their qualifications. Isn’t there some channel through which they could be informed?”

But if Victor were truly bilingual—literate, polite, and adept in calibrated cross-cultural situations—he might secure a post with a Japanese trading company or consulate. Katsuji hoped that all his sons would graduate from college, ascend the professional ranks, and purchase their own homes. He had attained white-collar status and attended some college, but a sheepskin diploma and a land deed remained beyond reach; he had run out of money to complete school, and issei were prohibited by law from buying land. When Katsuji and Kinu sent their firstborn youngsters five thousand miles from American shores to be immersed in all things Japanese,...