Midnight in Broad Daylight

October 12, 2015
In this sweeping portrait, historian Sakamoto explores family dynamics as she profiles U.S. Army Col. Harry Fukuhara (1920–2015), an eminent linguist whose brother served in Hirohito’s army during WWII. Sakamoto draws on extensive interviews as well as a long acquaintance with her subject and his family to infuse the narrative with great poignancy. Opening in Seattle with the 1929 stock market crash, Sakamoto’s account introduces Harry, his brothers Frank and Pierce, and their sister, Mary, whose world crashed with the 1933 death of their father. Desperate, their mother whisks them to her hometown of Hiroshima, where the children suffer culture shock. Unable to assimilate, Harry returns to the U.S. in 1938, a year and a half after Mary does, but both of them end up in an Arizona internment camp in 1942. When Army recruiters scouted the camp looking for translators, Harry passed the test, embarking on a career in U.S. military intelligence. Despite their efforts to avoid battle, his brothers in Japan were drafted in a 1945 last-ditch “mass mobilization.” Frank’s experiences as a teenager in the Japanese Army provide the counterpoint to Harry’s wartime reminiscences. Sakamoto presents a gripping story of colorful individuals, though her novelistic tone often undermines the gravity of the story she relates.

Starred review from October 1, 2015
An intimately detailed look at the agony of a Japanese-American family struggling to maintain American loyalty amid discrimination and war. Historian and teacher Sakamoto weaves a richly textured narrative history of the Fukuhara family, who moved from Hiroshima to Auburn, Washington, in 1926. However, financial issues after the death of the father forced them to move back in 1933. Somewhat typically at the time, the family was made up of the first-generation immigrants]businessman Katsuji and homemaker Kinu]and their five American-born children. The two eldest, Mary and Victor, were sent back to Hiroshima to help their aunt in her lucrative candy-making business, then subsequently returned to the U.S. as teenagers, culturally confused kibei whose English had been mostly forgotten. Harry, the spirited middle son and the one most thoroughly Americanized, was not happy about the move back to Japan, though his five-year stay allowed him the language immersion that would be invaluable during World War II, when, interned with his sister Mary at the Gila River Relocation Center, Arizona, in the fall of 1942, he was plucked by the Army for intelligence translation in the Pacific theater. The Japanese-speaking author offers fascinating research into the lives of these conflicted immigrants. At the time, Japanese-American youth who served in the Japanese army automatically relinquished their American citizenship, which Harry, by moving back to the U.S. at age 18, refused to do, unlike his other brothers. The specter of the atomic bomb hovers ominously over the narrative, and while most of the Hiroshima family managed to survive, the physical and psychological scarring were gruesome and lasting. American soldier Harry's resolution to return to Japan in October 1945 to find his family forms a poignant closure to this remarkable tale. A beautifully rendered work wrought with enormous care and sense of compassionate dignity.

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Starred review from November 1, 2015

This is an epic chronicle of the Fukuharas, a Japanese family living in the Pacific Northwest in the early 20th century who moved to their mother's ancestral home in Hiroshima during the Great Depression, only to have two of the children return to the United States, while others were conscripted in military service. Sakamoto's scrupulously researched story employs material gathered through interviews with surviving Fukuhara family members to show how the war in the Pacific affected both the Japanese and Japanese Americans. Chapters alternate between events in the United States and Japan as the author follows three of the brothers, two in the Japanese Imperial Army and one in the U.S. Army. Before the brothers meet on the battlefield in the Philippines, where all three are stationed, an atomic bomb is dropped on Hiroshima. This history is evocative of Junichiro Tanizaki's The Makioka Sister in scope but provides a richer look at the human costs of war. VERDICT Sakamoto succeeds in telling a new, compelling, and essential World War II narrative by presenting a story about family caught on both sides of history.--John Rodzvilla, Emerson Coll., Boston

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