Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II

Kats’s family lived in the town of Kahului, Maui, and ran the small Miho Hotel. Kahului was historically “segregated along ethnic lines” (22), with the railroad as one of its central industries. Between 1853 and 1896, the Indigenous Hawaiian population shrank to 25% due to immigration from Asia.

Prior to university, Kats attended the local public English-language school. He had a difficult time learning Japanese, but maintained a connection to the culture through films, ethics, and cuisine. Kats also enjoyed sports such as football. Taking a year off from high school, he worked as a maintenance man at Maui Pineapple cannery.

Kats’s parents were from Hiroshima. His father, Katsuichi, was well liked in Hawaii’s Japanese community. Originally a school principal who had “become a businessman only by necessity” in America (21), Katsuichi adhered to some aspects of Japanese culture, except for the tenet of otonashii, or the necessity of knowing one’s place—instead, he was quite outspoken. He and his wife, Ayano, had eight children, of whom Kats was the youngest.

Seventeen-year-old Fred Shiosaki lived in Spokane, Washington. His parents, Kisaburo and Tori, were first-generation immigrants who owned and operated the Hillyard Laundry, working 16-hour days except for Sunday. Fred was “a competent but not particularly enthusiastic student” (35). Every morning before school, he helped the family business, but was free to play baseball, spend time with friends, and enjoy photography after school. Fred got into fights, defending himself from bullying, including being called racist slurs. He had a brother, Floyd, and a sister, Blanche. When the family learned of Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor on the radio, his parents “suddenly looked drawn, pale, tense” (36).

Kats’s sister Fumiye lived with her sister Tsukie in Tokyo. Fumiye had left the US in 1940, having fully embraced Japanese culture and language, and now worked as an English teacher at a women’s college. When she first learned of Japan’s attack on Hawaii, she did not believe the news, even though she knew the political tensions were rising.

Back in Hawaii, the governor imposed martial law in fear of a full-scale invasion. Suspicion immediately fell on the growing Japanese American population. Rumors circulated, such as that local Japanese people were poisoning the water supply. Kats and other Japanese Americans were transferred into the new Territorial Guard with the goal of protecting local infrastructure.

As Kats guarded Honolulu, his father was arrested one night “at the point of a bayonet” (42). The arrest was one of the hundreds in which federal agents targeted the older Issei, or first-generation immigrants, who “by law were not allowed to naturalize as citizens” (43). By the 1930s, the federal government was using legislation such as the Alien Enemies Act to compile lists of German, Italian, and Japanese nationals in the US, ranking them in terms of perceived danger. After Pearl Harbor, the FBI targeted all Americans of Japanese extraction, ranging from Buddhist priests to members of Japanese literary societies. 

The day after the Pearl Harbor attacks, the Shiosakis’ longtime customer and local Democrat, Will Simpson, informed them that he could no longer do business with them—he was worried about jeopardizing his political position.

Anti-Japanese propaganda and legal measures proliferated in the US, shutting down Buddhist temples and freezing bank accounts. Mass arrests of Japanese men “decapitated the leadership of Japanese communities” (60). Soon, the Hawaiian Territorial Guard dismissed Kats and many others because of their Japanese ancestry.

Fred’s father, Kisaburo Shiosaki, had arrived in North America “with a wicker suitcase, a head full of dreams, and a heart yearning to realize them” (48) in the wake of major financial depression in Japan and natural disasters that wiped out crops. Born into a farming family outside Shizuoka, he grew up “stooped over in sodden fields, living in the squalor and cramped poverty of rural Japan” (50). Recruited by the Oriental Trading Company to work on the Canadian Pacific Railroad, he had come to Vancouver at age 21 in 1904. After living in boxcars, earning low wages, working in the sometimes-harsh winter climate in western Canada, Kisaburo crossed the border, got a job at Spokane’s lavish Davenport Hotel, and temporarily returned to Japan to marry Tori Iwai. The family opened their Spokane laundry business in 1917, becoming financially secure in the following decades.

Kats’s father, Katsuichi Imamura, got his last name, Miho, from marrying into the prosperous merchant family of his wife Ayano—a common custom in Japan for families without a male heir. Residing in the Hiroshima prefecture, the young couple worked as teachers. Katsuichi rose to become the principal of Fujisaki Elementary School. When Katsuichi decided to emigrate, his father-in-law pressured him to leave his two older children, Katsuto and Hisae, in Japan, while Katsuichi and Ayano traveled to America with the infant Tsukie in 1911.

In Honolulu, Katsuichi had different jobs, including being the principal of a Japanese-language school. The couple had five more children. In Kahului, they ”began to make serious advances on the American dream” (55) in 1929, buying what would become the Miho Hotel. In 1941, Katsuichi was “frightened but not really surprised” (55) by his arrest: The FBI had recently interrogated him about his family connections to Japan. He was detained behind barbed wire on Sand Island with other Issei (first-generation immigrants from Japan) men referred to as POWs.