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

Harry Fukuhara was born in Washington and grew up in the idyllic little town of Auburn, the son of Japanese immigrants on the make. Life was perhaps a bit complicated – an older brother and sister were sent to live in Japan with extended family and never did quite settle back into the rhythm of American life upon their abrupt reentry, for example – but generally good. This changed dramatically when Harry’s father died in the midst of the Great Depression and his mother had to sell everything and move the family to Japan. To Hiroshima, I should add.

Harry hated Japan, longed for America, and finally returned in 1938. The America he encountered was a bit different from the one he’s left, particularly in regards to the treatment of anyone with a Japanese name, and particularly on the West Coast. Yet, as terrible as Harry’s timing may seem, it could have been worse, at least for a Japanese-American who longest for this country: shortly after Harry returned to the U.S., it became much, much more difficult to do so.

And so Harry settled into a somewhat tenuous existence, which he led right up until he was interred – along with his older sister and niece and thousands of other law-abiding Japanese whose crime, of course, was their ethnicity. Here Harry’s story becomes particularly interesting, for despite his anger and bitterness toward his current treatment, he volunteered to serve in the U.S. Army as a translator. Sometimes he interrogated prisoners. Sometimes he deciphered reeking, blood-splattered documents. Sometimes he waded ashore under enemy fire. And in the most improbable way, he encountered an enemy he knew in another life.

This story alone would be book-worthy enough, but while Harry slogged his way through the South Pacific, three brothers found themselves cogs of war in Imperial Japan. To say nothing of the whole atomic bomb bit. And the fact that, after the war, he rose to become one of the highest ranking military officials in Japan, and certainly the highest counterintelligence official. 

All of which makes Midnight in Broad Daylight a fascinating – and chilling – read. Pamela Rotner Sakamoto has captured the essence of two cultures, as well as the inexorable march of time and conflict and the political process. She sprinkles a liberal helping of Japanese terminology throughout the book so that the reader, too, is constantly pulled between Japan and America, Japanese and English. Most critically, Sakamoto appears to write without judgment. She presents the issues from multiple vantage points, letting readers feel the individual and collective dilemmas of the time. In that way, this book is similar to Flyboys, in which James Bradley succeeds in creating a wholly objective portrait of the war in the Pacific. There’s no question, though, that Sakamoto’s portrait is more personal, and perhaps more searing. (It is certainly less grisly, which is my only complaint about Bradley’s work.)

Above all, Midnight in Broad Daylight is a book to make the reader think. About the lives each of us has lived, from the stranger on the bus to the neighbor three doors down. About loyalty and resiliency. About how life is so seldom black-and-white, right-and-wrong. About the human lives impacted by government decree, and about how capricious it all is.