Author’s Historical Notes

Research into the extraordinary weeks surrounding December 7, 1941, took me back into the lives of people who were caught up in events that changed the face of Hawaiʻi, and ultimately the world. Given my own interest in secrets that move between past and present—in what some might call coincidence, and others destiny—I realized that in the characters of Merrylei Wentworth and Jamison Sumida I could recreate a piece of American history from a perspective that was not based on military action.

Most of the background story I tell is based on fact, and I have followed the timeline of the days before and after the attack on Pearl Harbor with conscientious attention to details of the period. The plunder of the King’s Crown nearly fifty years earlier is based on actual events, and the majority of the diamonds have never been recovered to present day. Every element of the crime and fate of Captain Ryan is torn right from the pages of news headlines of the day. However, the Wentworth family, Makana Valley, and Jamison Sumida are my invention, set within the social fabric of the times, when interracial relations had not been woven into the rich tapestry that we find in the Islands today.

In November of 1941, there was a Japanese population of 159,000 in Hawaiʻi, comprising fully one-third of the total. The first wave of immigrants had come as low-paying sugar plantation workers, bringing with them the traditions and heritage of bushido, the way of the warrior (loyalty, pride, and honor) and oya koko, the filial piety of obligation, tolerance, and respect for elders. These values would have still been deeply engrained in the second generation (Nisei) that Jamison Sumida’s character embodies.

Hawaiʻi was spared the truly staggering effect of President Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066, on February 19, 1942, that authorized the detention of Japanese American citizens for the duration of WWII. Governor Poindexter successfully argued against incarcerating the very laborers that kept Hawaiʻi solvent. Yet, by the evening of December 8, 1941, the FBI and police had taken into custody 345 Japanese men considered dangerous alien enemies in Honolulu. Among them were doctors, clergymen, newspaper editors, and in days to come, teachers and members of Hawaiʻi’s Territorial Legislature. By the war’s end in 1945, 1,500 Japanese residents of Hawaii, many of them American citizens, had spent up to a thousand days in internment, stripped of their businesses and families, yet loyal to the country they called home. Not one incident of sabotage was ever linked to local Japanese.

Jamison Sumida’s character is loosely patterned on the Nisei professional class that was emerging in the Islands during the 1930s. After December 7th, his character’s internment experiences and subsequent service as a translator to the United States forces in the Pacific, are taken from oral and written transcripts. Though the first military translation school was initiated in November 1941, the first class of Military Intelligence Service volunteers from Hawaiʻi was recruited in March 1943. For purposes of my storyline, I moved the date forward. Translators in that unit were assigned to JICPOA (Joint Intelligence Center Pacific Ocean) in Honolulu and were directly responsible for the capture of Admiral Yamamoto, the mastermind of the Pearl Harbor attack. Ironically, the Navy distrusted the Nisei, so they were stationed off-base, in a former furniture store on Kapiolani Boulevard. More than 6,000 Japanese Americans served as interpreters and translators during the war, accompanying units into battle throughout the Asia-Pacific theatre.

Merrylei Wentworth and her family are drawn from a composite of several families that owned and operated the major businesses in Hawaiʻi, including sugar plantations, public utilities, shipping companies, banks, hotels, and department stores. Outside of field labor and cannery jobs filled by immigrants, employment opportunities for women were limited in the pre-war era. Secretarial and telephone operator positions were going to women with an education beyond eighth grade, while teachers and nurses were drawn from those with teaching and nursing certificates. The Manoa Valley Inn had been in business since 1919, and tourism was bringing in nearly 40,000 visitors a year, giving Merrylei’s character the entrepreneurial opportunity she needed to open a guesthouse.

At the turn of the twentieth century, the number of interracial marriages of Japanese in Hawaiʻi was low, compared with other groups. During the period 1912-1916, when Jamison’s father and Merrylei’s mother would have known each other, only one half of one percent of Japanese men married outside their race; that had not changed substantially by 1941. There was no legal prohibition against intermarrying in Hawaiʻi, though it helps to remember that on the Mainland, up until the Supreme Court ruling in 1967, sixteen states had laws banning interracial marriage. For the Japanese in Hawaiʻi, it was a matter of binding cultural traditions and a common language. The effect of upward mobility and changing attitudes among the Japanese American community in Hawaiʻi, from 1915 to 1965, can be seen in the professions: from two percent to twenty-four percent among attorneys, from zero percent to twenty-five percent among architects, and from zero percent to sixty percent among optometrists. By 1985 nearly fifty percent of all Japanese marriages were to persons of another race.

The fledgling Hawaiʻi Blood Bank was started in the spring of 1941, but it matured overnight on December 7th. Dr. Pinkerton became the director that day, when what had started as a demonstration project became a vital unit of the U.S. Office of Civilian Defense. The 82nd (1941) Annual Report of the Queen’s Hospital reported that during the three weeks following the enemy attack, “the total number accepted as donors was 4,000…” Doctors at Tripler Army Hospital credited the unprecedented survival rate of men who were marked for death, to the miracle of blood transfusions.

This period of history has been well recorded. I'm indebted to the many historians whose works communicate a sense of the times, and to the poet who prefers to remain anonymous, whose haiku poetry adds a layer of word-painting to the story. My appreciation for the challenges faced by a small group of people, on a tiny island in the Pacific during extraordinary events, has grown immeasurably during the writing of this book.