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

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Harper, $29.99

In the jungle of New Guinea during the World War II, American soldier Harry Fukuhara meets Japanese Imperial soldier Shigeru Matsuura, a bully who had attacked him when they were teenagers. “Against all odds,” Pamela Rotner Sakamoto writes, “he had come face-to-face with an enemy he knew. He knew now what he hadn’t wanted to admit. ‘There was the chance that I might run across someone else. A friend or relative or even a brother.’”

Sakamoto’s “Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds” is the true story of the Fukuhara family, divided by circumstance and war.

It begins with a description of halcyon days in the 1930s in Auburn, Wash., where Katsuji and Kinu Fukuhara, immigrants from Japan, have worked hard in their adopted homeland to provide a comfortable life for their daughter and four sons, all born in the U.S. Describing Katsuji’s long days as a small-business man, Sakamoto writes, “The children would rarely remember their father at home.” When he dies of pleurisy, the Fukuharas’ typical American life is turned upside down. Kinu takes the family back to Japan, seeking help from her sister, the owner of a successful store in Hiroshima.

Raised as Americans, the children struggle to fit into Japanese society, particularly Harry, the headstrong and proud son. His sister, Mary, returns to the United States against Kinu’s wishes, and when Harry graduates from high school, he hurries to join her. Arriving in Auburn, he discovers that relationships dear to him have changed and he cannot resume the life he had.

The family is now split: Harry and Mary in the U.S. and Kinu and Harry’s brothers — Victor, Pierce, and Frank — in Japan. As nisei — second-generation Japanese-Americans — Harry and Mary struggle to survive economically. Anti-Japanese sentiment is strong, and after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, it escalates into virulent racism. Harry and Mary are interned, first in California and then in Arizona.

While in the second camp, Harry sees an announcement encouraging bilingual internees to apply to a newly formed “language school.” In the interview, Harry reads the Japanese text he is given and smoothly translates it into English; the meeting is abruptly terminated, and he is stunned to be informed that he has been accepted. He is inducted into the Army and sent to Camp Savage, Minn., where he begins training for the Military Intelligence Service.

Sakamoto takes great care to trace Harry’s development as he matures into an experienced officer, filling “Midnight” with rich, memorable detail and enabling us to live through him as he interrogates Japanese POWs and collects intelligence in the Pacific. With dignity and heroism, he survives the horrors of World War II and persistent anti-Japanese prejudice. Among the book’s most poignant moments are the reunion of the family amid the devastation of postwar Japan, and the death of Victor from wounds incurred during the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

A teacher of history at Punahou School, Sakamoto has written an unforgettable and powerfully moving book.