Meet Author Pamela Rotner Sakamoto at the Darien Library August 11th

Join us in the Louise Parker Berry Community Room Thursday, August 11^th at 7 p.m. Pamela Rotner Sakamoto, author of Final Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds, will be our featured speaker. Books will be available for purchase. Refreshments will be served.

Midnight in Broad Daylight is a true and moving narrative of a Japanese-American family divided across continents during World War II. Meticulously researched and beautifully written, it is an epic story of love, reconciliation, loss, and redemption within the crucible of war.

The Fukuharas were a Japanese immigrant family, raising five American-born children near Seattle, Washington, with little certainty about their future in the United States. When the patriarch of the family died, his widow moved back to Hiroshima with the children. Two of them returned to the Seattle area in the late 1930s but were interned in the wake of the attack on Pearl Harbor. One, Harry, volunteered to serve in the Army as an interpreter and island-hopped through the Pacific, slowly making his way toward his two younger brothers, both Japanese soldiers.

As the story alternates between the American and Japanese perspectives, Midnight in Broad Daylight offers a penetrating look at children separated from their families out of perceived necessity, life in two suspicious cultures, the distress of ethnic internment, divided loyalties in two countries, and fraught military campaigns throughout the Southwest Pacific. It is also the story of the deteriorating home front of Hiroshima -- as never seen before in English -- and a fresh look at the dropping of the atomic bomb.

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto is a respected scholar of Japanese-American relations, is fluent in both English & Japanese, and conducted extensive research in archives, museums, and libraries in both the U.S. and Japan, along with dozens of interviews. In addition, she visited the Fukuhara family’s former home in Hiroshima, and pored over Harry’s teenaged diaries and letters from friends in the United States. The author first met Harry, the book’s central character, by chance in 1994. The two stayed in touch, and Sakamoto slowly uncovered the layers of his family’s incredible story. She was in frequent contact with the family’s four siblings, who gave her their blessing to tell their story. She lived in Kyoto and Tokyo for seventeen years. She works offsite as an expert consultant on Japan-related projects for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, D.C. and has taught in the University of Hawaii System. She teaches history at Punahou School in Honolulu.