Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II - Hardcover

Henderson, Bruce

 
9780525655817: Bridge to the Sun: The Secret Role of the Japanese Americans Who Fought in the Pacific in World War II
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0525655816 ISBN 13: 9780525655817
Verlag: Knopf, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

One of the last, great untold stories of World War II—kept hidden for decades—even after most of the World War II records were declassified in 1972, many of the files remained untouched in various archives—a gripping true tale of courage and adventure from Bruce Henderson, master storyteller, historian, and New York Times best-selling author of Sons and Soldiers—the saga of the Japanese American U.S. Army soldiers who fought in the Pacific theater, in Burma, Iwo Jima, Okinawa, with their families back home in America, under U.S. Executive Order 9066, held behind barbed wire in government internment camps.

 After Japan's surprise attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. military was desperate to find Americans who spoke Japanese to serve in the Pacific war. They soon turned to the Nisei—first-generation U.S. citizens whose parents were immigrants from Japan. Eager to prove their loyalty to America, several thousand Nisei—many of them volunteering from the internment camps where they were being held behind barbed wire—were selected by the Army for top-secret training, then were rushed to the Pacific theater. Highly valued as expert translators and interrogators, these Japanese American soldiers operated in elite intelligence teams alongside Army infantrymen and Marines on the front lines of the Pacific war, from Iwo Jima to Burma, from the Solomons to Okinawa.
 
Henderson reveals, in riveting detail, the harrowing untold story of the Nisei and their major contributions in the war of the Pacific, through six Japanese American soldiers. After the war, these soldiers became translators and interrogators for war crime trials, and later helped to rebuild Japan as a modern democracy and a pivotal U.S. ally.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

BRUCE HENDERSON is the author of more than twenty nonfiction books, including Sons and Soldiers: The Untold Story of the Jews Who Escaped the Nazi and Returned with the U.S. Army to Fight Hitler, and True North: Peary, Cook and the Race to the Pole. He is the co-author of the #1 New York Times bestseller And the Sea Will Tell (with Vincent Bugliosi). An award-winning journalist who has taught reporting and writing at USC School of Journalism and Stanford University, Henderson lives in northern California.

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Chapter One

The Type of Soldier We Want

Kazuo Komoto was born in the heart of California’s Central Valley. He was the first of six boys. His father, Yoshikazu, had immigrated on his own from Japan at the age of seventeen in 1907. Landing in Seattle, he worked as a railroad and field laborer for ten years before returning to Japan and marrying Hisano Waki from their hometown of Okayama, a city on the western shore of Japan’s main island of Honshu, bounded on the south by the Island Sea and known for its traditional gardens and a samurai-era castle. Together, the newlywed couple migrated to America in early 1918, settling in Sanger, California. Kazuo was born nine months later.

It was a hardscrabble life on cracked, sunbaked land made fertile thanks to the miracle of irrigation. Hisano, who had a comfortable upbringing in Japan, cried herself to sleep the first night in her new home. The wind howled through the slats of the shack in the middle of a treeless field, and stars were visible through holes in the roof. This was not the life she had envisioned. As the years passed and her babies came, she grew concerned about what she saw as America’s discriminatory society weighted against Japanese immigrants and their children, fearing that it would be difficult for her sons to get ahead in life. She had seen many young Nisei men unable to find decent jobs, having to work as farm laborers or in produce stands. In her mind, acquiring an education was paramount. To complement the local public school, she enrolled seven-year-old Kazuo and his school-age brothers in a Japanese school two miles away. She walked them there every Saturday, signaling to her young sons the importance she placed on their education.

By the time Kazuo was ten years old, his father was making a decent living growing grapes and strawberries on twenty acres, much of which he delivered himself to the 7th Street farmers’ market in Los Angeles over the winding road through the Tehachapi Mountains known as the Grapevine. Like other immigrants from Japan, Kazuo’s parents were not allowed to hold U.S. citizenship. And since they were ineligible for citizenship, under California’s restrictive Alien Land Laws of 1913 and 1920, they could not own land or hold long-term leases, which meant Kazuo’s father could farm only rented land. A quiet man who worked long hours, he didn’t have much time or energy for the children, and they were largely reared by their strong-willed mother. It was she who, in 1928, decided to take her oldest son to Japan so he could learn more about his ancestral culture and receive a traditional Japanese education.

Kazuo gave his mother no argument when she left him in the care of his paternal grandparents in Okayama and returned to California. His grandfather, a Shinto priest, made an immediate impact on young Kazuo, although the boy was influenced more by his elder’s conduct than his words. The old man lived, to the end, a disciplined life, yet was always kind to others. Kazuo tried his best to follow his grandfather’s example.

It didn’t take Kazuo long to learn firsthand that Japan had its own immigrant discrimination. Anyone of Japanese ancestry coming from America (and elsewhere) was considered lower class by native-born Japanese. Being the only American in school targeted him for teasing and bullying. He looked like them, but the other kids did not accept him as one of their own. In America, he was Japanese; in Japan, he was American. But the personable boy dismissed the insults and began to make friends.

After two years in elementary school, Kazuo entered intermediate school. He read voraciously, anything he could find, which helped him with basic Japanese grammar as well as memorizing some two thousand commonly used ideographs known as kanji—characters adopted from Chinese that are used in the Japanese writing system—which the students were expected to know by the sixth grade. Thanks to his extracurricular reading, his vocabulary expanded greatly. After graduating from sixth grade, he took the admission test for preparatory high school. Of the more than one thousand students in the region taking the exam, 250 passed. Kazuo was one of them. Already thinking about what he would study after high school at university, he seemed on track to get the education his mother wanted for him. By then, both grandparents had passed away, and Kazuo was living with his mother’s sister.

During his decade in Japan (1928–38), Kazuo witnessed the country moving steadily toward militarism. Japan’s national policy to spread influence politically and militarily led to the 1931 invasion of Manchuria, which was colonized and used as a base from which to attack China in 1937. In this rising tide of imperialism, the legions of the soldiers going off to “protect Japan” were revered as saviors. But protect and save Japan from what? Kazuo often wondered. It seemed that Japan was always the aggressor. But this was not an opinion he could freely express. On occasion, in fact, he had to stand compliantly with other students cheering trains filled with soldiers yelling the slogan first used centuries ago to express respect for the emperor but which was now a battle cry.

“Banzai! Banzai! Banzai!”

Playing with friends one day in a park, Kazuo watched a platoon of Japanese army reservists drilling, then breaking for lunch. When three of the soldiers returned a few minutes late, their sergeant beat them, one by one, first with his fists, then kicked them after they fell to the ground. The soldiers took the beatings without a whimper, as the other soldiers and their officer watched. Although only twelve at the time, Kazuo wanted to yell at the sergeant to stop. Why are you beating your own soldiers?

As he grew older, Kazuo worried that if he stayed in Japan he would be drafted and sent off to some faraway war. His high school years passed quickly; he was a good student, popular with his peers, and a star on the track team, setting school records in the hundred yard dash. After his graduation in June 1938, he wrote his mother saying he wanted to come back to the U.S. for college. Although he had enjoyed his time in Japan, he had strong feelings that he did not belong, and did not see himself spending the rest of his life here. He disliked how the people were conditioned to think and act the way the government wanted them to. Here, it was about conforming, and being docile. When a teacher made a statement, that was it, right or wrong, with no discussion. The students didn’t dare ask questions that might embarrass the teacher. As early as first grade, children were taught in shushin (ethics) courses about virtues such as fidelity, diligence, and frugality, and also to obey the emperor and be willing to die for him. Life itself was but a feather, they were told, compared to their obligation to the emperor. But through all the indoctrination, Kazuo never forgot he was an American, and he never accepted all the fuss about what he later derided as “emperor love.”

But there was more to Kazuo’s desire to leave Japan. He had brothers he had not seen in ten years; the youngest ones he hardly knew. He missed his intelligent and supportive mother, and even his father, although he was at times harsh. Kazuo was crestfallen when his mother wrote to him to stay in Japan for college. But his mind was made up. When it was apparent she wasn’t going to send the money for his return, he borrowed enough from his sympathetic aunt for a steamship ticket to California. He didn’t tell anyone at home he was coming, but waited to telephone them when his ship docked in San Francisco. Within a few days of arriving back in Sanger, he told his parents of his plan to enroll in college and become an...

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Verlag
Knopf
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0525655816
ISBN 13 
9780525655817
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
480
Kontakt zum Hersteller
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Verantwortliche Person
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