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?Visit Pamela Rotner Sakamoto's website.
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]
--Marshal Zeringue