IN MANY WAYS, BEN’S CHILDHOOD was even more challenging than that of his siblings. Naka was so weak after giving birth to him that an extraordinary neighbor from a nearby farm became Ben’s primary caregiver for weeks.3
A sweet, even-tempered baby who rarely cried, in that neighbor’s recollection, Ben became a painfully shy child. His adjustment to school after the family’s move to Hershey was traumatic. Ben was in the second grade when he first walked into the two-story building in Hershey that housed the classrooms for grades one through twelve. Ben was overwhelmed by the experience. When called on to answer a question in class, he would rise to his feet and stand mutely until classmates tittered and the teacher allowed him to sit.
The work that Ben and his siblings shouldered on the farm, like shoveling manure from the barn or digging potatoes, was drudgery. But as Ben grew in size and maturity and was entrusted with more demanding tasks, he developed confidence and self-assurance. By the time he was twelve, Ben was largely exempt from the menial farm chores that fell to the younger children; his developing physical strength allowed him to join the older boys and their father in the exhausting task of sacking, storing, or loading potatoes. By the time he was fourteen, Ben could handle a one-hundred-pound sack of potatoes with ease.4
Ben entered high school as the country sank into the despair of the Great Depression. It was during those years that his paralyzing childhood shyness became a distant memory and his personality fully emerged. He was humble, earnest, and soft-spoken in manner, but he also smiled easily and was warm and friendly. He had developed close friendships, a sense of humor, and a penchant for pranks—some of them bordering on obnoxious. He was a member of the basketball, baseball, and track teams, but he was an unexceptional athlete. By his junior year, he found that he enjoyed writing and he worked on the school’s first yearbook. He also wrote the junior class “School Notes” column for the local newspaper.
Over several years, Ben had developed a close friendship with the most popular boy in his small Hershey High School class. From the time they were old enough to hold a shotgun, Ben and Gordon Jorgenson, or Gordy as he preferred, hunted ducks and pheasants together along the North Platte River. On one of their winter hunts, Ben crawled out on an ice sheet to retrieve some ducks they had brought down, only for the ice to give way. As Ben struggled for his life in the freezing water, Gordy extended the butt of his shotgun close enough for Ben to grab. He pulled Ben to safety and then built a fire to thaw him out.
By his senior year, Ben’s status had risen such that he was elected the vice president of his fourteen-member graduating class; Gordy, to no one’s surprise, was president. When he graduated from high school in 1936, Ben didn’t have the money or inclination to attend college. He didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life, except that he didn’t want to spend it growing potatoes, sugar beets, and cabbages. Without any immediate alternatives, Ben worked on the farm and trapped fur-bearing animals along the North Platte River to earn some money. He had learned to drive the family’s old Chevrolet truck, and that nurtured an idea that he pitched to his father: He would buy a tractor-trailer rig with his trapping money and transport the family crops and those of other area farmers to markets in Omaha and beyond. Sam gave his blessing.
The life of a long-haul trucker turned out to be tougher than Ben had imagined. On his first trip in November 1938, Ben rolled out of Hershey with a load of his father’s cabbages, bound for Omaha, 275 miles to the east. Ben and his partner made it into the city without incident, but then disaster struck. Ben’s friend was at the wheel when a car ran a red light on a busy city street, forcing him to swerve to avoid hitting the vehicle broadside. The trailer tipped over, spilling nine tons of cabbages around a major Omaha intersection. The accident, written up in the Omaha newspaper and spread around the state in an Associated Press dispatch, foreshadowed further mishaps to come. Running on cheap tires, Ben had frequent blowouts. On another trip, Ben’s partner fell asleep at the wheel, ran off the road, and tipped the trailer yet again; Ben smashed into the windshield and was lucky to walk away with only cuts and bruises.
With their truck out of commission, Ben and his partner borrowed money to buy another. They began venturing farther and farther from Hershey, making runs into Oklahoma and then Texas. In February 1940, Ben drove to south Texas to bring a load of fruit and vegetables back to wintry Nebraska to sell. With another year of driving under his belt, he repeated the Texas trip again in February 1941, dropping off a load of his father’s potatoes in Oklahoma City before continuing to the Rio Grande Valley to fill his trailer with fresh citrus and vegetables.
Ben was helping his family with his trucking venture and had broadened his horizons beyond Nebraska, but there was a sense that life was leaving him behind. His five older siblings were set in their paths. His oldest brother, George, had been forced to drop out of the University of Nebraska and take over the farm when Sam suffered a heart attack; Ben’s second brother, Henry, had earned his business degree at the University of Nebraska; four of Ben’s sisters—Fuji, Cecile, Wilma, who were older than Ben, and his younger sister Beatrice—had found various jobs in Chicago. Ben’s friend Gordy Jorgenson had married one of their Hershey High School classmates in January 1941 and now owned a Hershey service station; he and his wife were expecting their first child.
As Ben scratched out a living and contemplated his future, events far beyond America’s shores suddenly loomed as a wild card. On September 16, 1940, in response to Hitler’s conquest of much of Europe and Japan’s expansionist activities in the Pacific, President Franklin Roosevelt implemented the first peacetime draft in US history. The Selective Training and Service Act of 1940 required men between the ages of twenty-one and forty-five to register for the draft and to serve at least one year in the armed forces if summoned.
In mid-November 1941, Ben received a letter from the army, ordering him to report for his physical examination—the final step prior to his induction for active military service. On November 19, 1941, eight days before Thanksgiving, Ben underwent his physical exam at an army facility in Grand Island, Nebraska. He was rated fit for service. Five years out of high school, unmarried, scraping out a meager living, Ben checked the mail each day for his army summons.
BEN REACHED THE PAVED LINCOLN HIGHWAY—US 30—and turned east. The road passed through flat farmland as the Platte River’s north and south forks gradually converged. Approaching the western outskirts of the town, Ben came abreast of the five-mile-long Union Pacific rail switching yards that had put North Platte on the map. At the eastern edge of the switching yards, the highway suddenly curved at a forty-five-degree angle to the right. Off to the left a traveler might just catch a glimpse of the Second Empire–style mansion and ranch that had belonged to the Union Pacific’s legendary hunter, William “Buffalo Bill” Cody. Ben slowed, made a right turn, crossed the railroad tracks, and entered downtown North Platte.
With a population of about twelve thousand, North Platte had been the “big city” for the Kuroki children growing up. Its two-story buildings seemed enormous and its maze of streets overwhelming to Ben and his younger siblings, Fred, Beatrice, Billie, and Rosie. On his initial trip into North Platte, Ben had seen a movie for the first time. His father had brought Ben and his two younger brothers with him when he had some business to handle in town, and he had bought movie tickets for Ben, Fred, and Billie so he would know where to find the boys when he was done. The movie was All Quiet on the Western Front, the screen adaptation of German writer Erich Maria Remarque’s celebrated antiwar novel set in the shell-scarred trenches of Europe’s Western Front during World War I.
Ben and his brothers found the war scenes scary, and during a climactic artillery barrage on the screen a thunderstorm hit North Platte. Inside the theater, the thunder of the shells blasting from the speakers was punctuated by hail stones pelting the roof above the terrified boys. Overcome by fear, Ben and his brothers bolted from the theater into the rain. Now, a decade after that searing experience, Ben faced the growing prospect of fighting in a real war.
Turning onto West 4th Street, Ben parked outside the Episcopal Church of Our Savior and made his way to the basement auditorium. Several dozen Japanese immigrants—Issei, they were called—and first-generation Japanese Americans—Nisei—began to fill the room. The meeting got underway around eleven o’clock.
At that moment, some thirty-six hundred miles to the west, it was six-thirty in the morning in Honolulu and day was breaking over the Hawaiian Islands.5 A few minutes earlier, six aircraft carriers of the Japanese Imperial Navy, steaming two hundred miles from Oahu, had turned into the wind and launched a wave of fighter-bombers. As Ben and his friends settled into their seats in the church basement to hear a speaker talk about how the tensions between the United States and Japan might affect their lives, 183 Japanese military aircraft were about one hundred miles from the US Navy’s base at Pearl Harbor and closing fast.
Chapter 2
“THIS IS URGENT”
A dapper dresser and a debonair ladies’ man who loved to hear himself talk, Mike Masaoka had learned to command a room as a championship debater in high school and college back in Utah. The confidence he gained from years of success in pressure-filled competitions was evident as he addressed the fifty or so Japanese American farmers, agricultural laborers, and merchants on hand to hear him speak in the North Platte church basement on Sunday morning, December 7, 1941.
The gathering in the basement meeting hall of the Episcopal Church of Our Savior was the final stop of Masaoka’s whirlwind tour of the Great Plains hinterlands in his role as national executive secretary of the Japanese American Citizens League (JACL). If everything went according to plan, he would wrap up his business in North Platte that afternoon, then catch a train for San Francisco, his home base these days.
The twenty-six-year-old Masaoka had departed California in late November with two goals: to assure local government officials in Colorado, Wyoming, and Nebraska that the people of Japanese descent in their areas were loyal and patriotic Americans, and to establish new JACL chapters to defend the interests of the region’s Japanese American communities if the worst-case scenario became a reality. That scenario was war between the United States and Japan, which the Sunday morning newspapers suggested might be imminent after months of contentious negotiations.
Masaoka remained skeptical that the country of his birth would end up in a war with the country of his parents’ birth, and he conveyed that sentiment to his audience. But even if the odds of war were remote, he said, it would be to the advantage of audience members to form local JACL chapters to defend their economic interests and civil rights. He explained how the JACL was cultivating relationships with government officials around the country to reassure authorities that people of Japanese ancestry would be loyal to America should there be a war with Japan.
He spoke with authority, and with his dark business suit, white shirt, necktie, and thick shock of wavy black hair, he looked the part of someone who knew what he was talking about. He prominently displayed a Stars and Stripes flag pin on the left lapel of his jacket to leave no doubt of his loyalties. For a Japanese American in the public eye, such a statement had become increasingly important as America’s relations with Japan deteriorated.
In his comments in the North Platte basement, Masaoka was upbeat about the crisis, but there were things that he couldn’t share with his audience. Like the fact that representatives of various federal government agencies and entities had summoned him to furtive meetings in recent weeks.
MASAOKA HAD BEEN SPEAKING about ninety minutes, pointing occasionally to a wall map to highlight locations where he hoped audience members would help form new JACL chapters, when two white men entered the room and approached the podium.
Masaoka was puzzled. He asked the men what they wanted.
“Are you Mike Masaoka?” one of the men asked.
“Yes,” he impatiently replied.
“Would you mind coming outside with us for a minute?”1
Masaoka assumed the men were local newspaper reporters who wanted an interview, and their lack of manners irritated him. He asked them to wait outside until he was finished.
“This is urgent,” one of the men replied. “I’m afraid it can’t wait.”
Without another word, the two men took Masaoka by each arm and escorted him from the meeting hall.
Puzzled, Ben and others filed upstairs and wandered out into the street to see if there was an explanation for Masaoka’s abduction. That’s when they heard the news. As Ben later recalled, “We went outside of the church building and heard the radio reports and said, ‘My God, Pearl Harbor [has] been bombed by the Japanese.’”2
Chapter 3
“THIS IS YOUR COUNTRY”
Ben awakened to the most important decision of his life.
The shock of the radio reports announcing the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor had raised questions that haunted him throughout that terrible day. How could he prove his patriotism to friends and neighbors? What could he do to dispel any suggestion that he felt a kinship with the Japanese airmen who carried out the Pearl Harbor attack? Should he enlist? He had passed his army physical eighteen days earlier and his induction notice might arrive any day, so he could wait for the army to act. Or he could take matters into his own hands. After all, the Marine Corps and the navy both had recruiting stations in North Platte.
He thought about this incessantly in the hours after racing home from the aborted meeting in North Platte’s Church of Our Savior. The more he thought about it, the worse he felt. His parents had always taught him to never do anything that might bring shame on his family. Now, for the first time in his life, Ben felt shame because of his Japanese heritage. He was appalled by what he viewed as a dishonorable attack. On some level, he felt complicit because of his shared ancestry with the men who had bombed Pearl Harbor.
