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A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
Book Reviewed by:Alternating between American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight provides a fresh look at the dropping of the first atomic bomb.
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 his own land - America - Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Despite being sent to an internment camp, Harry 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 and provides a fresh look at the dropping of the first atomic bomb.
Author Pamela Rotner Sakamoto brilliantly captures the hardships and anxieties of the Fukuhara family...continued
Full Review
(636 words)
(Reviewed by Mollie Smith Waters).
In Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds, Harry Fukuhara, his sister Mary, and his niece Jeanie were forced into internment camps built to house people of Japanese descent who were living in the United States during World War II. Over 127,000 Japanese Americans, mostly from the West Coast where anti-Japanese sentiment ran highest, were sent to the camps.
Life in the internment camps was difficult, and little privacy existed. People had to use communal showers, toilets, and laundries. While libraries were available, Japanese language books, except for dictionaries, were not allowed. Even under these trying conditions, internees published their own newspapers. The two papers the Fukuharas would ...
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Herbert Bix, Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Hirohito and the Making of Modern Japan
Midnight in Broad Daylight is a deeply moving, well-written work that ranks among the better accounts of the injuries inflicted in wartime on civilian and ethnic populations. Students of war crimes and crimes against humanity are sure to notice this book.
