Midnight in Broad Daylight

Midnight in Broad Daylight is a 2016 novel by Pamela Rotner Sakamoto. It concerns the real account of a Japanese American family that was divided by national loyalties during World War II. It utilizes meticulous research on the Fukuhara family to highlight many other tensions inherent in the Japanese-American experience during this fraught period in United States history. Among them are the everyday trials of immigrant life in the United States, and the experience of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima. The book focuses mainly on the five Fukuhara siblings, Pierce, Frank, Mary, Harry, and Victor, who grow up in the United States’ Pacific Northwest. As the family’s conceptions of America as a place of acceptance, strength, and protection are challenged by racist and xenophobic sentiments that are only deepened and further validated during the war with Japan, they ultimately go on to reformulate the American Dream.

The novel begins with the death of the Fukuhara siblings’ father. A very intelligent man who excelled in the business world, he had helped to facilitate Japanese-American relationships in their hometown of Auburn, Washington. After his death, the Fukuharas move with their mother to Hiroshima, their ancestral home and Japan’s main port of trade. They are eager to experience life in Japan, but retain their strong ties to American life. In the 1930’s, two of the older siblings, Harry and Mary, return to the United States out of a desire to resume their American lives.

Their decision proves inopportune, as Japan’s Pearl Harbor strikes occur shortly after. In the American response, led by President Franklin Roosevelt, the FBI starts gathering what they call “subversives,” many of whom are innocent Japanese Americans. Harry and Mary are taken in, due to an executive order that bestows military officials with the right to take populations they suspect of containing subversives from any community in the United States. Not long after, another executive order emerges authorizing the War Relocation Authority to create 10 concentration camps around the United States, which imprison over 100,000 Japanese. While Mary is spared, Harry is sent to one of these internment camps at Gila River in Arizona, where he lives in poor and overcrowded conditions for a while. After a few months, army recruiters begin to screen the camp’s inhabitants. He learns of a demand for Japanese translators to assist in the war effort in the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section. Feeling a duty to support his home country, Harry volunteers, and is moved to the entity’s headquarters in Brisbane, Australia.

Meanwhile, in Hiroshima, the two brothers Frank and Pierce are drafted as soldiers for the Imperial Japanese Army which is engaged against the United States military. As the war progresses and seems to become ever more violent, Harry becomes one of the best interpreters between Japanese and English. He utilizes his reputation to move between islands in the Pacific, trying to get closer to Japan and have a chance of reuniting with his younger brothers. At the same time, he knows that their opposing roles in the war means that they are technically mortal enemies. In the Pacific Islands, Harry observes many wartime atrocities and gets firsthand experience of tropical disease. Ironically, there are almost no prisoners for him to interrogate because the army kills mercilessly. At several points, Harry is nearly killed by American GI soldiers who mistake him for a Japanese enemy.

Before Harry encounters Frank or Pierce in combat, the United States drops the atomic bomb on Hiroshima. The explosion seriously injures tens of thousands of innocent people, including many of the Fukuharas’ extended family. Radioactive rain, the color of tar, ravages the surrounding regions of Japan, inaugurating decades of nearly inhabitable public health conditions. Cancer rates spike even among those victims who are initially non-symptomatic. Harry returns to California, and experiences persistent discrimination for the rest of his working life. Finding that the military was the only industry where Americans would give him work, he becomes a lifelong liaison between the two countries’ armies.

Midnight in Broad Daylight alternates between the Fukuharas’ perspectives in the United States and Japan to capture the gravity and instability of the soldiers’ situations. It also gives an account of the rapidly deteriorating conditions of Hiroshima that have historically lacked a well-researched translation into English. Sakamoto uses the historical account of one family’s resilience in the face of a war that threatens to tear them apart as a proxy for the emotional and ideological struggle occurring on a global scale. It is also a narrative of disillusionment, exploring how the Fukuhara family’s optimistic conception of America as a place of solace and opportunity was met with racism and xenophobia. In time, the forces of war and conflicts of national identity introduce a new modern ambivalence about the American dream.