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A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto
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A FEW HOURS LATER, HARRY AND KATSUTOSHI returned to their respective homes, in Glendale and Hiroshima, still thinking about how little they understood about the day's events. Harry, in a grass-stained T-shirt and jeans, joined his employers, Clyde and Flossie Mount, for whom he worked as a live-in houseboy. The sun poured through a leaded glass window in the living room. Outside billowed an American flag.
Katsutoshi, in his sweat-stained uniform, folded his legs beneath him at the low table in his mother's tatami-matted sitting room, where a hibachi brazier offered scant heat and the paper window screens flattened the pallid sunlight. Kinu had left a few panels open, through which he caught a glimpse of the garden with its spinney of persimmon, loquat, pomegranate, and fig trees. A crimson camellia blossom hugged the side of a weathered stone basin.
ON THIS DAY THE RADIOS, CRACKLING WITH static, consumed each household's attention.
After Katsutoshi had left the house early that morning, Kinu had been puttering in the kitchen when a naval hymn blared forth from loudspeakers positioned throughout the neighborhood. "Defend and attack for our country," roared a soldier. Kinu, chills coursing down her back, had turned on her radio.
The Mounts, too, had their first heart-clenching moment when they heard Stephen Early, the White House press secretary, step to the microphone for a live broadcast. In a clinical tone, he had said, "A Japanese attack upon Pearl Harbor naturally would mean war. Such an attack would naturally bring a counterattack, and hostilities of this kind would naturally mean that the President would ask Congress for a declaration of war."
By the time Harry took a seat at their table, they had begun digesting the news and considering the consequences. The white-haired, middle-aged couple, longtime teachers, looked at Harry, whom they regarded as a son. "This is going to bring up all kinds of problems," Mrs. Mount said even before Harry shared the news of his abrupt job dismissal.
A LOW-GRADE SENSE OF DREAD DESCENDED OVER Kinu and Katsutoshi in their corner of Hiroshima. Nothing unsettling had yet occurred, but the future held little promise. There would
be more fresh-faced recruits marching to the port to be dispatched to the front, greater rationing of essentials, and more mass funerals for the soldiers who would return in a year's time as cremated bone and ashes. Kinu thought of her four sons, who were draft age, and Katsutoshi of his brothers.
The next morning, Kinu opened her local Chugoku Shimbun newspaper to a stream of jubilant headlines from official Japanese news sources throughout the Pacific. "Surprise attacks" had stunned "every direction," including the "first air raids on Honolulu"; Singapore was "under bombardment," as well as foreign military bases at Davao, Wake, and Guam. In Shanghai, the British fleet had been "sunk," while the American one had "surrendered." Japanese raids were pummeling Hong Kong and the Malay Peninsula. Kinu, trembling, put the newspaper down and waited to confide in her son.
The Japanese headlines were accurate; Allied forces were struggling to repel Japan's lightning attacks and stunning advances. In Washington, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was wheeled into Congress, where he invoked in his inimitable baritone, "a day which will live in infamy." His entire speech lasted little more than seven minutes. Within an hour, Congress passed a declaration of war, with all but one dissenting vote. On Oahu, where the battleships moored at Pearl Harbor listed, smoldered, and burned, the tally of sailors, soldiers, and civilian deaths would soon surpass 2,400.
IN THE AFTERMATH OF PEARL HARBOR, A location of which he now had no doubt, Harry took a fountain pen to paper. Back in Hiroshima, Kinu dipped her horsehair brush in sumi (ink). Both wrote urgent letters to the other in vertical lines of intricate, cursive Japanese characters. Harry rushed to the post office en route to his part-time job and college courses. Kinu handed her envelope with its tissue-thin contents to Katsutoshi, who had, at an earlier age in a world apart, gone by the name of Frank. He ran to the Japan Red Cross, a concrete monolith near the copper-domed Industrial Promotion Hall close to the T-shaped Aioi Bridge downtown and the only place now accepting enemy-nation mail. Kinu prayed that her instructions to Harry, the only one of her sons still in America and Katsutoshi's dearest brother, would be delivered.
Excerpted from Midnight in Broad Daylight by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto. Copyright © 2016 by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto. Reprinted courtesy of Harper, an imprint of HarperCollins Publishers.
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