Chapter 3

In Japan, Kats Miho’s sister, Fumiye, was teaching English in her classroom in suburban Tokyo when a young Russian teacher named Miss Zabriaski burst in. “Miss Miho, Miss Miho! War between Japan, America!”

Fumiye smiled and laughed her off. “No, no, that’s just propaganda,”[11] she said, and went on teaching. Miss Zabriaski looked exasperated, muttered something in Russian, and ran from the room.

Fed up with the racial discrimination she experienced growing up in Hawaiʻi, Fumiye had come to Japan in the spring of 1940, shortly after graduating from the University of Hawaiʻi. A famous scholar, Dr. Junjiro Takakusu, saw Fumiye’s academic potential and suggested she enroll for graduate studies at Japan’s most prestigious university, Tokyo Imperial.

Fumiye set sail for Japan almost without a second thought. It was only after she arrived that she discovered Dr. Takakusu had overlooked one crucial detail: women were not allowed to enroll at Tokyo Imperial. Nevertheless, she decided to stay in Japan and moved in with her older sister, Tsukie, and Tsukie’s husband, a dentist.

With great enthusiasm, Fumiye threw herself into her new life. She found jobs teaching English part-time. She took lessons in ikebana—the Japanese art of flower arranging—and dressed in a kimono for the tea ceremony every Friday. She developed a deep interest in Kabuki theater.

For the first time in her life, she felt that she was fully a part of the society in which she lived, as if she truly belonged. She knew that she would not be judged by her appearance or held back by her race.

Sure, tensions between the country where she had been born and the country where she chose to live were on the rise, but no matter. There were many good, kind people in both countries. So that morning, when Miss Zabriaski rushed into her classroom shouting about war, Fumiye immediately put it out of her mind and focused on her students.

Walking home that afternoon, she realized that something was, in fact, going on. Then, on a newsstand, she saw a shocking headline: entire US Navy destroyed in Hawaiʻi. She ran the rest of the way home, burst into the house, and fell sobbing into her sister’s arms. The two women tried to comfort each other, wondering aloud and fearing silently what might be happening to their family in Hawaiʻi.

When the FBI came for him at the Miho Hotel, Katsuichi Miho had been frightened but not really surprised. He knew that his dedication to keeping Japanese culture alive in Hawaiʻi was likely to look suspicious to the American authorities.

He was taken to Sand Island, a bleak expanse of sand and dead coral in Honolulu Harbor, where soldiers herded him and roughly 450 other Issei men into a five-acre enclosure surrounded by a barbed-wire fence. Eight towers, guarded by soldiers with machine guns, stood at intervals around the perimeter. The Issei men were assigned canvas tents, each with eight cots laid directly on the mud and coral.

It rained for days on end that December, and the tents flooded. Several times a day, the men had to stand outside, in the driving rain, for roll call. They shivered in their wet clothes day and night. They had no access to phones, radios, newspapers, pens, paper, wristwatches, or even bars of soap. The guards referred to them as prisoners of war. They had little idea about what was happening in the outside world and no idea at all about what was going to happen to them.

For those outside the camp, with access to radios and newspapers, the war news just kept getting worse. Japanese imperial forces seized Hong Kong, invaded Thailand, and bombed Guam and the Philippines. On December 12 they landed troops in the Philippines, and on December 14 they invaded Burma.

They even returned to Hawaiʻi. At dusk on December 15, a Japanese submarine surfaced off Maui and lobbed ten shells into Kahului, damaging a pineapple cannery. Only two chickens died in the attack, but it had its desired effect, terrorizing the town’s inhabitants and reinforcing the belief that a Japanese invasion of Hawaiʻi was imminent.

As the bad news continued to roll in, the nation’s angriest voices became the loudest, unleashing a torrent of racist invective that all but drowned out those still able to take a step back and distinguish between friend and foe.

Politicians who knew how to use racial hatred to their advantage seized the opportunity, and their rhetoric quickly became brazenly toxic. Representative John Rankin of Mississippi declared, “This is a race war . . . I say it is of vital importance that we get rid of every Japanese . . . Let’s get rid of them now!”[12]

Since the earliest days of Asian immigration in the nineteenth century, certain US newspapers warned about what they called the “Yellow Peril,” claiming that the arrival of too many people from Asia would engulf white American civilization and culture.

In the 1920s, Hollywood reinforced this notion, giving the world the character of Fu Manchu, an evil criminal mastermind hell-bent on destroying the Western world. Other unsavory Asian characters—almost always played by white actors—were common in American movies. By the 1940s, the racist caricatures and the hatred they roused were ingrained in the minds of millions of Americans.

Now, in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor, Japanese American children were taunted on their way to school, barred from public amusement parks, turned away from theaters. Restaurants and hair salons, pharmacies, and dental offices refused to serve Japanese American customers. People boycotted Japanese businesses. The president of the University of Arizona forbade the library to lend books to Japanese American students, declaring that “these people are our enemies.”[13]

For nearly six weeks, Kats Miho and his fellow guardsmen of the Hawaiʻi Territorial Guard patrolled Oʻahu. From the first moment they heard the news of Pearl Harbor—or witnessed the attack with their own eyes—they knew they would bear a particular burden in this war. More than three-quarters of their number were Japanese American, and their faces and last names suggested a connection with the enemy. They were determined to prove that they were just as American—and just as eager to fight—as anyone else.

Then, early on January 19, came a blow they never expected. Kats and his squad were picked up from their post and brought to an athletics field, where they found the entire Territorial Guard milling around in the predawn dark, wondering why they were there. Finally, one of their commanding officers explained—tears welling in his eyes as he spoke.

Captain Nolle Smith was a large man, a halfback on the University of Hawaiʻi football team. As a Black man, he knew something about discrimination. He said that he had tried to stop what was about to happen, that all the local officers had tried, but that they were overruled by someone in Washington, DC.

Then, another officer took over and got bluntly to the heart of the matter. Some of the brass visiting from the mainland had been upset to see men who appeared to be Japanese carrying guns. Orders had come down. “The reason you are here is because you—all you Americans of Japanese ancestry—because of your ethnic background, you are being discharged from the Hawaiian Territorial Guard.”[14]

Kats stood stunned, his mouth open. They were all stunned. And angry. And humiliated. All they had wanted since the morning of December 7 was to serve their country. Now that opportunity had been taken away, replaced with the realization that they—Japanese Americans—were not trusted. Worse even than that, they were not seen as truly American.

For a few moments, there was only silence. Then Kats heard men weeping softly in the darkness all around him.