Pamela Rotner Sakamoto

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto's new book is Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds.

From her Q & A with Deborah Kalb:

Q: At what point did you decide to write the story of the Fukuhara family, and how long did it take to write and research the book?

A: I met Harry [the son who fought on the American side] in Tokyo in 1994. He eventually told me his story, over four years. He was in San Jose and I was in Tokyo; he would go to Tokyo several times a year, and he would call me to have lunch. Slowly, the story would trickle out.

Part of it may be that he was coming to terms with telling a story he hadn’t told. He was a career military intelligence colonel and wanted to be sure he could tell his story to someone he could trust.

I was doing Holocaust Museum work at the time. I was so fascinated—I was an East Coast Jewish girl raised in the Boston area, and I was never exposed to the [Japanese-American] internment at school.

I said, in 1998, Harry, this would be an important story on multiple levels: Japanese-American relations, the Japanese-American story, your generation, your own legacy for your family….I think you should be thinking about a book…

Harry was the patriarch of the surviving family. They were on...[read on]

Visit Pamela Rotner Sakamoto's website.

--Marshal Zeringue