Harry Katsuharu Fukuhara: A Life of Service in War and Peace

Harry peered at the document aboard the transport ship bound for the Pacific. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt had written to the American troops, “Upon the outcome depends the freedom of your lives: the freedom of the lives of those you love—your fellow-citizens—your people.”[1] Those words resonated for Harry, especially since he was one of the few headed for the Southwest Pacific who had volunteered for the United States Army from a concentration camp.

In November 1942, Harry Katsuharu Fukuhara, a nisei second-generation Japanese American, enlisted in the nascent Military Intelligence Service from the Gila River Relocation Center, the latter two words a euphemism for prison. Harry was one of approximately 120,000 ethnic Japanese who had been rounded up on the West Coast and Hawai‘i in early 1942 in the wake of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Two-thirds of those interned were Americans by birth. Subject to an “evacuation”—yet another euphemism hiding the dark truth of mass removal—Harry, his sister, and niece ended up in a hastily built, barren camp deep in an American Indian reservation in Gila River, Arizona. Wherever he looked, Harry saw low-slung barracks fading into the horizon. As sandstorms raged, Harry’s good humor faded.

Why had Harry agreed to join the Army when the military represented the government that had incarcerated him without due process? This was my original question. President Roosevelt had signed Executive Order 9066 on February 19, 1942, setting in motion one of the most notorious episodes in American history, racial hysteria operating under the guise of national security. Yet not a single person of Japanese ethnicity in the US would ever be convicted of an act of espionage or sabotage during World War II.

Harry was not only a victim of discrimination, but also subject to a particularly heart-rending situation. Born in America to immigrant parents, he had lost his father to illness, and his mother had taken all her children back to Japan. Harry had returned to the United States as an eighteen-year-old in 1938 after five years in his parents’ native Hiroshima. His mother and three brothers still lived there. Harry knew his brothers in Japan were of an age to be conscripted in the Japanese Imperial Army. How, I wondered, could Harry consent to represent the United States, put his life on the line, and, maybe, come face-to-face in battle with the brothers he loved?

In time, I realized that this compelling question had never been his. Harry, twenty-two years old in 1942, consciously avoided contemplating a scenario in which he confronted his brothers at war. More importantly, Harry was motivated by a notion of service based on his pride as an American. If you think that he must have been an unwavering patriot who could place the dismal surroundings of Gila River behind him, please know that life wasn’t that simple. By autumn 1942, Harry resented his incarceration; sensed that he was turning inward, sullen, and bitter; and could not envision a future. The once extroverted, popular young man was losing his soul.

When Harry saw a sign that the incipient Military Intelligence Service was seeking bilingual interpreters and translators, he registered for the exam and passed easily. He did not hesitate. Joining the Army offered a way out of the camp. He trusted that he would stay in the US and translate captured documents from the safety of a government building. An abiding belief in the responsibility of citizenship also guided him. Harry was ready to serve.

He had been raised in Auburn, Washington, with its main street of brick and shingled storefronts, side streets with grand homes and tidy bungalows, and gracious Mount Rainier reigning above. At the Washington Elementary School, the Stars and Stripes billowed in the breeze. Harry knew the drill; he stood daily for the Pledge of Allegiance, placing his right hand over his heart. At Japanese language school at the Auburn Buddhist Church, where Harry idled away his afternoons, the students studied American history. Although the FBI would round up principals and teachers at Japanese language schools across the West Coast and Hawaiʻi under suspicion as community leaders, most Japanese language school curricula reinforced American narratives of leadership, courage, and commitment. According to the Japanese Education Association of America, “The goal to be attained in our education is to bring up children who will live and die in America, and as such, the whole education system must be founded upon the spirit of the public instruction of America.”[2] Later, Harry had White employers whom he adored. Every day, he helped Mr. Mount raise a flag on a giant flagpole in the backyard. As the transport ship steamed toward the Pacific, the Mounts hung a small white flag bordered in red with a blue star in the middle, denoting a family member in the military. That was for their Harry.

Harry’s moral compass armed him with patience when he was dispatched to contested fronts, often one of few Japanese Americans attached to White units, island hopping ever closer to Japan. It took time to convince GIs to trust a man who looked like the enemy. He was vulnerable to the risk of friendly fire. But Harry made a difference in the torrid jungles and ravaged beachfronts of New Britain and New Guinea. His ebullient nature returned. He gathered timely intelligence from interrogating Japanese POWs, who trusted his native Japanese, cultural understanding, and natural warmth. He treated them with respect, and they confided details about their units. Harry’s work advanced Allied military objectives. He took pride, even as he remained a private while White soldiers were promoted. Finally, while serving in the Philippines, Harry—emaciated from repeated bouts of malaria—stood with his back ramrod straight as he was commissioned a lieutenant by Major General Percy W. Clarkson of the 33rd Infantry Division in summer 1945. It was a singular moment of elation.

Yet, secretly, Harry worried. Operation Olympic was slated to commence on November 1, 1945, when Allied troops would invade Kyushu, the southern island of Japan. He could not know his two younger brothers were there, digging in, lying in wait for the Americans. But he sensed that his luck was coming to an end.

In a horrific twist, the atomic bombs saved Harry, Pierce, and Frank Fukuhara from a frightful confrontation, for the bombs ended the Pacific War. But the boys’ mother Kinu and brother Victor were in Hiroshima that brilliant August morning when an enormous mushroom cloud erupted above. Initially, Harry believed what he had heard—that nothing would grow in Hiroshima for seventy-five years. “The more I thought about it, the more depressed I became,” he recalled.[3] He dreaded the prospect of going there, but he had to try. On his third attempt, he made it to the burned remains of a once-bustling city. I won’t reveal what happened, except to share that his notion of service was tested again. Harry blamed himself for what had happened to his family, but he never blamed his country.

Harry stayed in the Army and rose through the ranks. Harry and six thousand other nisei devoted themselves during and after the Occupation as bridges across the Pacific, skillfully nurturing the US-Japan relationship. The awards accrued. Harry was inducted into the US Military Intelligence Hall of Fame in 1988. By then, the class clown-turned-skinny soldier had become a dignified veteran with professional and personal relationships that extended to the Japanese prime minister’s office. By then, his sable hair had turned silver. He served for forty-eight years in active military and civil service. In 1990, Harry became the rare American awarded the Order of the Rising Sun 3rd Class, Gold Ray with Neck Ribbon, from the emperor of Japan. He also received the President’s Award for Distinguished Federal Civilian Service. In 2015, months after Harry passed away at age 95, the 500th Military Intelligence Brigade, based in Hawaiʻi, dedicated Fukuhara Hall as its headquarters for the Pacific.

Citizenship, service, duty, pride. Harry Katsuharu Fukuhara embodied these words. His identity was forged in a crucible of racism, discrimination, and war. He devoted his life to his imperfect birthplace and home, loving it unconditionally. The United States became his calling, and his legacy was peace. Harry and his wife Terry Fukuhara rest at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California.

Pamela Rotner Sakamoto is a historian and author. Her books include Japanese Diplomats and Jewish Refugees: A World War II Dilemma (Bloomsbury, 1998) and Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds (HarperCollins, 2016). She is the coordinator of the Davis Democracy Initiative at Punahou School in Honolulu, Hawai‘i.

* All the quotations are from sources in my book, Midnight in Broad Daylight: A Japanese American Family Caught Between Two Worlds (New York: HarperCollins, 2016).

[1] President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, White House, to Members of the United States Army Expeditionary Forces, [1942].

[2] Japanese Immigration Hearings before the House Committee on Immigration and Naturalization, July 12–August 3, 1920, H.R. 66th Congress, 2nd Session, Points 1–4, quoted in Yamato Ichihashi, Japanese in the United States (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 1932), 329. 

[3] Harry Fukuhara, “My Story, 50 Years Later,” Nikkei Heritage, 13.