Midnight in Broad Daylight

by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

ISBN 978-0-06-235193-7

“The kibei were among the most disillusioned. They felt as if the nisei blamed them with their fluent Japanese and broken English for having attracted undue negative attention to the entire ethnic group. In Japan, the kibei had been scorned as children of emigrants, suspect for their fluent English. Nowhere did they belong.”

In 1933, following the death of the family patriarch, Katsuji, the Fukuhara family returned to Kinu Fukuhara’s home city of Hiroshima. Two of her children, Victor and Mary, had previously lived there with her sister, Kiyo, though like her younger children, Pierce, Harry, and Frank, they were American-born. The family had already lived a life divided between two countries, but that division would become a vast rift as Japan set a course for war. Harry and Mary both returned to America after they completed school, and were trying to rebuild their lives on the West Coast when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbour in December 1941. While Harry and Mary faced internment in America, their brothers in Japan saw their schools militarized, and tried to stay one step ahead of the inevitable creep of the draft. Despite failing the physical exam on his first attempt to enlist in the army due to poor eyesight, Harry would eventually volunteer for a valuable position in the Military Intelligence Service, one of very few truly bilingual men who could help translate a growing load of documents and prisoner interrogations in the Pacific Theater. However, this set Harry on a looming course towards the invasion of the Japanese mainland, and a potential confrontation with his family. Unbeknownst to them all, but ever-present to the reader, decisions being made in Washington would drive history astray from the confrontation they feared, placing the family in the middle of a historic deployment of new military technology that none of them could have imagined.

Midnight in Broad Daylight zooms in and out between the minutiae of the Fukuhara’s wartime lives, and the broader context of the global conflict that was shaping their everyday experiences. Pamela Rotner Sakamoto—a Holocaust scholar who spent seventeen years living in Japan—focuses largely on Harry and Frank, the two brothers who shared their stories, and helped her conduct her research. Mary features in the story during the internment, but when Harry enlists as a linguist in the military, and Mary takes resettlement to the East, she mostly fades from the book. The other two brothers, Victor and Pierce, are enigmatic figures. For Victor in particular, the author has noted that it was difficult to find people with enough recollections of him to help flesh out his story. As the eldest, he was conscripted first, beginning his service while Japan was still at war only with China. Matriarch Kinu, and her larger-than-life sister Kiyo, also play a prominent role in the narrative. While I would have liked to know more about Victor and Pierce, as well as Mary’s wartime life in Chicago, I understand that the breadth of this already long book had to be limited somewhere, and certainly the juxtaposition provided by Harry and Frank’s situations is the most compelling.

On the Japanese side of the Pacific, I was interested in how little information Kinu and Frank had access to. Daily news was extremely limited, and access to the outside world was cut off. Mary and Harry’s whereabouts and circumstances throughout the war were unknown to their mother. Once Frank was finally conscripted, reading or accessing what little outside news was available was actively discouraged; it was expected that soldiers, especially lowly foot soldiers, needed no information but what their commanding officers saw fit to provide them. And the Japanese military command was actively shaping the information that both enlisted men and the public were receiving, even coining a new term, “sideward advance” to euphemistically describe the Empire’s worsening position in the Pacific Theater. Focused on day-to-day survival, the author is able to effectively show how Japanese civilians and low-level military conscripts had their broader world view slowly whittled away, until the only alternatives were hardscrabble survival, or a sacrifice of life in service of the Empire.

Midnight in Broad Daylight combines both primary research and family narratives. In some cases, the author’s research uncovered details the family was unaware, such as the exact date of Katsuji Fukuhara’s immigration. When primary sources conflict with historical accounts, she notes both what has been passed down in the oral history, as well as the evidence that might refute these memories. The book was written at a remove of many years; the author met Harry Fukuhara in 1994, and Midnight in Broad Daylight was finally published in January 2016. While four of the five Fukuhara siblings were alive when the author began her work, unfortunately none of them lived to see its publication; Harry and Frank, the longest survivors, passed away within months of one another in early 2015. However, Midnight in Broad Daylight is a compelling legacy of their family’s unique history.

___
You might like also Forgiveness by Mark Sakamoto