Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds
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"This deeply researched and elegantly written history is a rare human drama that spans the Japanese American experience as few, if any, books have done." — USA Today
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 America, Harry returned in the late 1930s. Then came Pearl Harbor. Harry was sent to an internment camp until a call came for Japanese translators and he 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 as well as the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima—as never told before in English—and provides a fresh look at the dropping of the first atomic bomb. Intimate and evocative, it is an indelible portrait of a resilient family, a scathing examination of racism and xenophobia, an homage to the tremendous Japanese American contribution to the American war effort, and an invaluable addition to the historical record of this extraordinary time.
"[A] fascinating close-up of the travails of wartime life in an increasingly fascistic Japan. . . . Midnight in Broad Daylight not only tells one family's remarkable story but also makes an important contribution to our knowledge of the Japanese-American experience in World War II, on both sides of the ocean and the hyphen." — New York Times Book Review
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About the author
Pamela Rotner Sakamoto is an American historian. Fluent in Japanese, she lived in Kyoto and Tokyo for seventeen years. She works as an expert consultant on Japan-related projects for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C., and has taught in the University of Hawaii system. She is on the faculty at Punahou School in Honolulu.
