The children of recent immigrants, who often lived in company housing with people who spoke their native language, could not easily adapt to some of the sounds found in English. To give their children a chance at a better education, Hyotaro and Kame switched to speaking only English at home, which was a difficult sacrifice. To shed the language that your brain naturally thinks and dreams in requires Herculean effort, especially when surrounded by mostly Japanese speakers.
In seventh grade, Daniel and a friend were wrestling, acting like normal middle school–age boys. Mid-wrestle, Daniel fell on his arm in such a way that it broke in several places—a significant compound fracture. His mother rushed him to the only doctor she knew—an ear, nose, and throat specialist who had been treating her other son for an infection. The ENT said that he was no orthopedic surgeon, but he would do his best to set Daniel’s arm.[8]
When the cast came off, the arm hung crookedly, as if it belonged to someone else, and Daniel could barely move it. Not only was the arm next to useless for Daniel, it was also a source of anguish for his parents—what kind of life would their son have without the use of one arm? They started asking friends and neighbors: “Do you know of a doctor that could fix Daniel’s arm?” Everyone seemed to give them a different name. Eventually, Kame brought him to the children’s hospital, where Dr. Craig gave them encouraging news.
“You better start learning how to throw lefty, because soon it will be stronger than your right,” the doctor winked. “It can be fixed with surgery,” Dr. Craig told Kame, who felt great relief that something more could be done for her son. Immediately following the surgery, Daniel had far greater use of his arm. The hospital staff seemed pleased.
At Daniel’s postoperative visit, Dr. Craig smiled broadly, clearly proud of the results of the procedure. As they got up to leave, Kame said, “We will not be able to pay you all at once, but we will bring you a small amount each month until the whole amount is paid. I hope you will allow this and not worry, for we are grateful to you. And even if it takes a lifetime…”
“You owe me nothing,” Dr. Craig said.
Kame stared, not understanding. “Nothing?”
“You will have the hospital costs, I believe that come to thirty dollars, but the operation is my gift to Dan. The payment will be that you will be a good student.” He grinned at Daniel. “You going to be a left-handed pitcher?”[9]
The moment Daniel saw the incredulity and relief on his mother’s face, everything changed. He felt what it was like for her to be released from a debt it would take forever to pay, the shock and gratitude washing over her from head to foot. Dan vowed to become a surgeon, and to do for someone else what Dr. Craig had done for him and his family.
Over the years, Hyotaro and Kame sent Daniel to bring baskets of garden produce, a freshly plucked chicken, and other small tokens of their appreciation to Dr. Craig. And when Dan entered the doctor’s office, bearing the fruit of his parents’ labor, he saw other baskets lined up. We won’t forget what you did for us, the many tokens said. He realized exactly what kind of person the doctor was, and he wanted to be that kind of person too.
Daniel went to high school, where he learned that he loved history. “The story of America had the ring of an adventure in human progress, troubles and setbacks, and the inexorable march down to the present,” he remembered of his adolescence.[10] He practiced his English, and the saxophone, and gambling with his friends. He kept homing pigeons. He took a Red Cross first-aid class and started teaching first-aid lessons all over the island.
“I was never spanked,” Daniel said, “because it would never occur to me to disobey my parents.”[11] When his parents said be home by 10:00 p.m., he was. No matter if he was providing the entertainment at a school dance or blowing his sax in the ROTC band, he ducked out of the festivities to make it home on time.
And one night, December 6, 1941, he left his place in the band just a bit too late. By the time he neared his house, Dan was full-on running, pumping his legs until his hand connected with the doorknob. He burst into the living room.
“You should leave earlier,” his mother said, barely looking up. “Then you wouldn’t have to run.”[12]
That was Daniel’s last night as a child. By morning, the boyish face that only needed to be shaved every third day would be gone. And in the mirror would be a man.
Daniel was up early, getting ready for church, carefully buttoning the only white shirt he owned. He clicked on the radio, as was his habit, gazing out at the blue skies. The sun had already burned off its usual haze, the great Pacific sparkling in the distance.
Vaguely, Daniel heard the voice of the radio announcer, who sounded upset. He moved in closer to the radio. “This is no test,” he heard the announcer say. “Pearl Harbor is being bombed by the Japanese! I repeat, this is not a test or a maneuver! Japanese warplanes are attacking Oahu!”[13]
Blood throbbed through his temples. “Papa!” Daniel yelled. He was enveloped by a dread that left him with a deep knowing: The world you knew is gone. Daniel stood silent, motionless, as the announcer panicked.
“This is not a test! This is the real thing! Pearl Harbor has been hit! We can see the Japanese planes…”
“Come outside!” his father ordered. His voice was hard. Hyotaro and Daniel walked out the door of their small home and into the bright sunshine, into a Hawaii that would be irreparably scarred.
On the horizon, they saw black puffs of smoke in the harbor. This was no test. Practice drills used white smoke. Soon, huge plumes of gray leapt heavenward, followed by columns of fire. They could hear the muffled whistle of bombs, as they stood, helpless.
They saw movement in the sky erupt through the clouds of smoke: three planes, silver with red dots on the underside of the wings, flew immediately over their heads, and they knew: this was it.
“You fools!” his father screamed at the planes. “FOOLS!”[14] The singular pain of the country of his ancestry attacking the country of his heart twisted his face. In a world where many Americans already hated the Japanese, it was like watching a slow-motion nightmare play out before his eyes.
Except no one was asleep.
The phone inside the house rang. It was the director of the Red Cross, calling on Daniel’s first-aid training. Daniel stripped off his church shirt. “Where are you going?” his mother panicked. “They’ll kill you!”
Hyotaro put his hand on Kame’s arm. “Let him go. He must go.”
Daniel rode his bike through the now crowded street. An old Japanese man grabbed his handlebars in disbelief: “Who did it! Was it the Germans! It must have been the Germans!” He too could not face what would come next. More planes. Many ships hit. Thousands dead. He had only been seventeen for a few months, but Daniel felt the collective anguish of Hawaii’s 158,000 residents of Japanese ancestry.[15]
He saw a few boys he knew and they yelled, “Where are you going?”
“Where the trouble is,” Daniel replied. “Follow me.”[16] It was Daniel who picked up the first civilian dead in the Pearl Harbor attack. He found an old woman, a neighbor, who had been hit by U.S. anti-aircraft shrapnel, a mistake from choosing the wrong settings before the shell was released. Another was a young woman holding a baby, both of them nearly headless, the mother missing both her legs. Her husband, who had been at work on the other side of the island, arrived, begging to see his loved ones. Daniel told him, “Sir, no. You don’t want to see them,” but he was overruled by a doctor.
“Sir, if you show this man the remains, he is going to go nuts,” Daniel whispered privately to him. But the husband insisted, and the doctor allowed it.
Daniel showed him to a cardboard box where his wife stared, unblinking, sightless, her hand severed and placed in the corner of the box. The man ended up in an asylum.[17]
Somehow, Daniel did not faint or throw up. They opened a medical clinic and a morgue at the elementary school, and for the next five days, he stayed there, stealing thirty minutes of sleep once or twice a day.
He found one woman unable to walk, clutching stumps where her legs should have been. Buildings started on fire, and it was Daniel’s job to sift through the rubble, recovering corpses and looking for survivors. He did his best to get all of a person’s body parts into one box, but as he picked through the hollowed-out structures, sometimes limbs just fell off when he tried to lift them. “I did my job. But every horrid detail is etched in my memory,” he said later.[18]
Red Cross volunteers were hired as part of the civil defense command, which was activated because the nation was now at war. Daniel was still in school, so they gave him the overnight shift working at the aid station, and he worked each night from 6:00 p.m. to 6:00 a.m. He grabbed breakfast at home, went to school, where he was expected to learn advanced math, and stumbled home, where he slept for two hours until his mother shook him awake in time to make it to work.
He was paid $125 per month, more money than he had ever dreamed he could earn at age seventeen. But the money meant nothing to him.[19]
—
The United States had a long history of discriminating against people of Asian descent, beginning with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that severely restricted immigration, forbidding them from becoming citizens no matter how long they lived in the country, ensuring that many professions were off-limits, and in many states, keeping them from owning property. It didn’t matter how prosperous someone became, it didn’t matter how hard they worked or how deeply they believed in the promise of America, if they had the wrong face, they were an “other.”
Labor leaders and government officials formed an exclusion league. A club, of sorts, this one wielding not hoods and crosses but the power of government contacts and well-placed individuals. This Japanese Exclusion League, later called the Asiatic Exclusion League, pressured state and federal government leaders to create policies like the Alien Land Law, which was advertised as a way to “Save California from the Japs” and prevent them from buying land.[20]
Why? Fear is the simple and all-encompassing answer.
Fear of people who didn’t look European.
