Sparrows of Angel Island: The Experience of a Young Japanese Prisoner of War

Abstract

The barracks were filled with the bright morning sun. I'd been awake for a while but stayed in bed simply because the white linen sheets felt so clean and pleasant. The room was large and had a high ceiling, and its big windows looked out on the cobaltblue waters of the bay. Small waves glittered in the sun, and a huge bridge spanned the expanse of water. The Golden Gate Bridge looked mighty and powerful, like America itself. When the ding, ding, din,g of a metal triangle sounded outside, we quickly washed and dressed and briskly walked the fifty yards across the compound to a building in the corner. PFC Suzuki, an American soldier in his early twenties, stood watching us outside the entrance to the mess hall. When we were all assembled, he said curtly, Every day from now on, when the triangle sounds at 8 A.M., I2 noon, and 4 P.M., you are to line up here. All of you will take turns on KP duty for a week at a time. Apart from the KP duty, it was very much like what we had already experienced at the prisoner-of-war camp in Honouliuli, on the Hawaiian island of O'ahu. The mess hall was simple but very clean. Inside, we picked up a tray and stepped up to a counter where a big Caucasian slapped food onto our tray as we passed by. We served ourselves toast and milk or coffee and sat wherever we wanted. Here on Angel Island the food was a little simpler than at Honouliuli, but it was still good: toast, jam, butter, fried eggs, bacon, cereal, milk, and coffee. That was our first breakfast. Except for the wire fence around the compound and watchtowers on the corners, American Pow camps were not at all like the prison I had been expecting and fearing. We were all survivors of the Iron and Blood Loyalist Troop, an impressive name for an unimpressive group of middle-school boys who had volunteered to serve in a support capacity in the Japanese military during the Battle of Okinawa in I9415. I had been a fourth-year student at Naha Commercial Middle School and was to graduate a year early, in March of 1945, because the required five years had been reduced to four. Like most of the capital city of Naha, our school had been reduced to ashes by the American air raid on October io, I944, and there was no way to continue schooling. Under these conditions, going to school meant serving in a so-called volunteer labor corps, which built runways and fortifications and dug miles and miles of trenches under the searing Okinawan sun. In early 1945, with American squadrons just off the coast of Okinawa, air raids