Presentation of Dialogue on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

By the friends of Idaho Public Television, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With additional funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation.

Daniel James Brown, Author: To tell an honest story you have to use honest language.

So I tried to strip away the government's language, the language that was deliberately designed to soften the reality of what was happening.

Marcia Franklin, Host: Coming up, I talk with best-selling author Daniel James Brown about his newest book, "Facing the Mountain."

It pays homage to the bravery of the 442nd, an all Japanese-American regimental combat team that fought in World War II.

That's "Conversations from the Sun Valley Writers' Conference," next.

Stay tuned.

[MUSIC] Franklin: Hello and welcome to Dialogue.

I'm Marcia Franklin.

When author Daniel James Brown was growing up, he would watch his usually soft-spoken father become angry as he told his son about what had happened to many of his Japanese-American friends during World War II.

After Pearl Harbor, they had been rounded up from the west coast and sent to camps further inland that were surrounded by barbed wire and guard towers, including one in Minidoka, Idaho.

But Brown, who would go on to write the bestselling book, "The Boys in the Boat," wouldn't learn much more about that period of history for many years.

Then, when he was casting about for his next book topic, he met Tom Ikeda, the director of Densho.

That's a nonprofit dedicated to preserving the stories of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

Brown became fascinated with the topic, and decided to make it the subject of his next book.

"Facing the Mountain: A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II," delves deeply into the lives of several of the men who fought in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team.

Some even did so while their own families were incarcerated in the United States merely for being of Japanese descent.

The book, which took brown more than five years to write, has become a bestseller.

I had the opportunity to talk with him at the 2021 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

We spoke about how he chose the stories in the book, and how the language we use to talk about that era has changed dramatically.

Before we talk about this fabulous book, "Facing the Mountain," I wanted to ask you, as you were growing up, or you know, even later, what was your knowledge of this period of time?

Brown: You know, I thought I had a pretty good sense of what had happened with Japanese-Americans during the war.

My father was in the flower business in San Francisco and we were a wholesaler.

And I think probably 30, 40% of our customers were Japanese-American nurserymen and florists and growers.

And I remember when I was very small, my father talking about what had happened with his friends and his customers, um, Japanese-Americans, friends and customers during the war, and how, how upset he was about that.

Brown: So it was, you know, something I was aware of as something that had happened very early in my life.

But it wasn't really until I delved into writing this book that I understood -- um, it's one of those things I think a lot of us think we know already, and I learned how much I didn't know about the experience through the research of, of writing the book.

Franklin: There's some synchronicity involved here in the fact that one of the main people who assisted you in the research for this book was somebody that happened to be at the same award ceremony as you were.

And that's how you kind of made this nexus.

Talk about that.

Brown: Yeah, so Tom Ikeda and I were both, um -- in Seattle, there's this thing called the Mayor's Arts Award -- and we were both, um, honored to receive the award, uh, whatever year that was.

Um, and, uh, so we met on the stage and Tom stood up and he talked about his work at Densho.

And he, for 25 years, he's been collecting the oral histories of Japanese-Americans, videotaping them, archiving them, curating them and making them available on his website.

And it was really sitting there listening to him that I got intrigued, because I've always been interested in, in that period of history.

Um, so I went home that night and I started looking at some of these, uh, stories that, uh, Tom has recorded.

Franklin: Fabulous website.

Brown: Yeah.

I mean, I fell into those stories and I was just, I, I'm really interested in story.

That's kind of what motivates me in general.

And there were wonderful stories in there.

And, you know, in some ways they reminded me -- although obviously everybody is Japanese-American -- um, a lot of the stories I was hearing from what were now older men and women talking about when they were younger men and women in the 1930s and 40s, were similar and a lot of their themes to the stories from "The Boys in the Boat."

They were about resilience and perseverance and overcoming great difficulties and pulling together as a group.

So uh, within a few days I was pretty convinced that I wanted to try to do something in terms of the book.

Franklin: It was that quickly.

Brown: Yeah, yeah, yes.

Franklin: It was that quickly.

And, uh, Tom was also instrumental in helping you kind of sit down and, you know, narrow down.

Although he, he says, he, he says he might've caused more trouble 'cause he wants to keep expanding it!

But, but nevertheless, he knew where a lot of these stories were and he could direct you towards them.

Brown: Yeah, so we went back and forth.

Um, I was trying to, I was hoping to find a single family or a single character that could, that I could hang the story on, that would sort of tell the whole story.

And they're just, it's, it's too big a story for that.

So, um, so we wound up going back and forth, Tom and I, trying to find the best few, relatively small number of people, um, that the story could be built around.

Finally, what I wound up doing was focusing on, uh, four young men, all of whom were of draft age when the attack on Pearl Harbor happened.

Because I felt that draft age young men, Japanese-American young men, uh, faced a particularly difficult challenge in terms of what they were going to do with this situation that they found themselves in immediately after Pearl Harbor.

So they became the focus of the book.

Franklin: Right.

And you also include a man who's a resister as well in that group.

Brown: Yes.

Right.

Franklin: Um, the situation that they found themselves in was not only that, uh, Japan had attacked us and they were of Japanese descent, but, but also that, uh, Franklin Delano Roosevelt had instituted an executive order that for many of them meant that they and their families were being incarcerated.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: Were being taken from the West Coast where they were deemed a potential threat.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: And moved inland to places like Idaho, Minidoka.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: So this was kind of a, uh, a double edged sword if, if you will, of, of insult.

Brown: Yes, it was.

And, um, as I say, particularly for these young men, um, most of them watched their friends from high school, uh, enlist in the military and go off to serve, uh, in the war cause.

And millions of them, or hundreds of thousands of them, wanted to do the same thing.

But when they went down to the induction centers, they were told that they couldn't serve, that they were considered "enemy aliens," even though they were American citizens.

So, at the same time, they and their families in many cases were being incarcerated behind barbed wire.

So it set off a debate among the young men within the camps, especially, about what the right thing to do was.

Some of them felt that, um, the last thing in the world they wanted to do was cooperate with the government that had incarcerated their families.

Um, others thought that by joining the military, if they would be allowed to join the military, would, um, would maybe be a vehicle for them to, um, earn respect and to be accepted as full Americans.

Franklin: Eventually there was a segregated, I guess you might say, unit, or the 442nd that was established.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: And your men, three of them go off to fight.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Um, when you talk about how much you've learned doing this, you know, I as well think, "Oh, well, I know a lot about this story."

I did not know about the, um, Hawaii, the Hawaiian Japanese-Americans and the mainland and the, uh, tension eventually between bringing these groups together in the 442nd.

Brown: Yeah, so, yeah, it's true.

When the 442nd was created in the spring of 1943, um, young Japanese-American men from Hawaii and from the mainland -- many of the mainland guys came out of the camps -- all came together at Camp Shelby in Mississippi for basic training.

And, um, they, it was like mixing oil and water.

The, the guys from Hawaii had grown up, um, mostly in plantation towns or on sugarcane plantations or pineapple plantations in Hawaii.

They universally spoke pidgin English.

They had a very sort of casual attitude towards life and, and following rules, um, and things of that sort.

Sort of a happy-go-lucky bunch of young men.

The young men from the mainland, particularly those from the camps, um, kind of had a chip on their shoulder.

They were angry about what had happened.

And they were very serious in their demeanor about pretty much everything, and very determined -- those who signed up -- very determined to be good soldiers and, um, uh, to, to follow military rules and all that.

So when they came together at Camp Shelby, within a week, there were fist fights breaking out all over camp, all over the, uh, the camp, primarily revolving around language.

As I say, the, the guys from Hawaii, um, spoke pidgin English and the guys from mainland just flat out couldn't understand them, thought they sounded ignorant and coarse, made fun of them.

The Hawaii guys took great offense at that.

And so they went at each other for weeks and then months, and to the point that they, senior officers considered, uh, dissolving the 442nd; they didn't think these two groups of recruits could become an effective fighting force, um.

Franklin: It's really interesting, one of the strategies that was used to bring, to try and bring them together.

Brown: Yeah, it was, I, it was one of the ideas, I believe, of one of the chaplains, um, in the 442nd, uh, chaplain Higuchi, I believe, um, got the idea that, well, the Hawaii guys don't understand what's happening to these mainland families because in fact many of them hardly knew that these camps existed.

Uh, Japanese Americans in Hawaii were not incarcerated in mass.

Franklin: As much.

Brown: As much, yeah.

Some were, limited numbers were.

But there was no mass incarceration in Hawaii, because 35% or something like that of the population in Hawaii was of Japanese descent and the place simply would have stopped functioning if they had all been incarcerated.

So chaplain Yamada, uh, realized that the guys from Hawaii just didn't understand why the mainland, uh, guys were, were so somber and serious.

And so he said, "Well, let's put them on buses and take them" -- there happened to be a camp nearby in Arkansas.

And so the Hawaii guys got loaded onto buses and carted up to, uh, to one of these camps in Arkansas.

And, and they found themselves for the first time -- they, they arrived at the camp in buses -- and they saw people that looked like them looking back out through barbed wire.

Uh, and, and then they, although they were in full uniform, they were frisked before they were allowed to enter the camps.

Some of them had friends and relatives in the camps, but most, most didn't.

So by the time -- and they spent a weekend there -- by the time they were through with those visits, they came back to, um, to Camp Shelby with a very different attitude, much more understanding of what the, um, of what the mainland young men were going through.

Franklin: And as you mentioned, you concentrate, um, the book on four stories, largely.

One was a very famous, um, resister, resistant to going into the camps and also to serving -- Gordon Hirabayashi, whose case went all the way up to the United States Supreme Court.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Rudy Tokiwa.

Am I pronouncing the name correctly?

Brown: Yes, yes.

Franklin: He was a young man from Coyote, California.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Fred Shiosaki was a person that you were able to actually speak to.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Who, uh, grew up in Spokane.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: ...and, uh, Kats Miho.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Uh, who represents the Hawaiian part of this.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: Um, we don't have time to go to delve deeply into their stories.

That's why I encourage people to read the book.

Um, but they also kind of intersect and overlap.

And I know that that was an important part of your storytelling process.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: Was to find these nexus, nexi?

(Laughter) Nexuses?

Between these characters.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Um, which you do so well.

Uh, but it's not easy.

Brown: No, that was, that was part of the challenge, um, to find a small set of characters so the readers weren't overwhelmed by the number of characters.

But I needed certain people to be in certain places at certain times, uh, during the war, in order to create the complete arc of the story.

Franklin: Um, eventually these groups did come together to form a cohesive unit and that is in large part what, what the book features, and went through some of the most brutal, uh, engagements.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Um, and you, you, you describe them in detail, because they were able to go back and do that.

Tell people who are watching what this unit experienced.

And it is one of the most decorated.

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: It's, in all of American military history.

Brown: Yeah, that's right.

Not just in World War II, but all of American military history.

Um, they had an extraordinarily, um, extraordinary, uh, record in terms of their battle accomplishments.

They, um, they were shipped first to, um, Italy, and they joined the war there, um, at Anzio.

And they fought their way north, uh, on the, um, Western side of the Italian boot, a series of pitched battles as they had to take one, um, if you've ever been in Tuscany, um, it's very.

Franklin: Hills.

Brown: Hilly terrain, exactly.

And so the Germans always had the high ground.

They were always having to fight their way up the side of some hill or some mountain to take another Tuscan, um, town.

And so they suffered a lot of casualties, but as I say, they also performed extraordinarily well.

And then, um, in the fall of 1944, they were sent, um, from Italy to, um, the French-German border, to the Vosges Forest.

And they were given the task there of liberating a town called Bruyères, which, um, after several days of very heavy fighting in miserable conditions -- rain and sleet and snow and mud -- they, um, they managed to liberate this village and then move deeper into the Vosges forest, which is a very dark forested, impenetrable sort of, um, sort of countryside.

And that's actually where they fought their, um, their most famous and most important battle.

Franklin: Saving the "Lost Battalion" -- a group of Texans who were there.

It is absolutely harrowing to read about what happened.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: Um, and as I recall, I mean, the numbers at the end were so low.

Brown: Right.

Franklin: What was it?

It went down to?

Brown: Well, the, in the, the... Franklin: It was K group.

Brown: K Company, at the beginning of that sequence of battles I think they had 188 men.

When they came down off the mountain after that battle only 17 of them were still walking.

Um, I mean, not, not all the others had been killed, although many of them had, but they were wounded and, and sick and had trench foot.

And just, there were very few of them left able to fight by the time they came back down off the mountain.

Again, they were, they were fighting their way uphill against, uh, German forces that were very entrenched and, um, suffered very, very high casualties, but also extraordinary, demonstrated extraordinary valor.

And I, in writing the book, um, I, I looked forward very much to, to writing that chapter, because listening to the stories of these veterans talk about what had happened in those few days was just so rich with tragedy, but also with heroism, that I, I couldn't wait to, to write that chapter.

Franklin: And hence the title, too, emanates from this, right?

"Facing the mountain" has kind of a double entendre.

Because they both were facing the mountain literally when they were having to do these battles... Brown: Yes.

Franklin: But also facing another mountain, yes?

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: Both before they left, in terms of prejudice, and when they came home.

Brown: Yes.

You know, I mean, on December 6th, 1941, just before Pearl Harbor, they were students at, you know, University of Washington or, um, UCLA, or they were running, helping to run the family farm, or they were in high school and they were going about their business, like all the other American young men.

But by the afternoon of December 7th, this whole mountain of troubles had arisen in their path.

And they and their parents knew that to move forward with their life in America they had to get through, around, over this mountain somehow or another.

And that's really what the book is about, is how they, how they navigated all, all those difficulties that suddenly arose in their path.

Franklin: One part of the book I found particularly poignant was that you also include a story of a Holocaust survivor at the end, because some of the Japanese-American soldiers came across people who had been in, is it Dachau and some of the forced marches?

Brown: Yes.

Franklin: And I just, that was a really, really resonant part of the book.

Brown: Yes.

The 442 guys, um, found themselves coming across these enclosures with these starved, emaciated, um, mostly Jewish, um, prisoners and not really knowing what they were looking at, but liberating them, trying to feed them, trying to take care of them.

And all this is happening the same time that many of them have their parents and their sisters and their brothers back in, uh, basically a concentration camp, uh, in the United States.

So, you know, there's a great deal of irony there obviously.

Franklin: I think it's important for me to ask you about the language in the book, because it certainly has changed, not only since I was a child, but even as I've been a reporter and trying to learn more.

Brown: Yeah.

Franklin: When we grew up, it was, um, "relocation," "internment camps," "evacuation."

Now the terminology is much harsher to describe it - "concentration camps," "incarceration."

Um, talk to me about that language, because of course you do have an, a Holocaust survivor in here, and that term is used almost uniquely for that experience.

Brown: Yes, and actually, I'm glad you asked because I want to be very clear, first of all, about the fact that, um, I'm not equating in any way these camps we had in the United States with places like Auschwitz and Dachau.

Those were death camps, they were slave labor camps.

And the WRA camps, uh, in the United States were nothing like that.

Although they looked a lot like them because they were barracks and surrounded by barbed wire.

So that's why we, I do use the term "concentration camp."

Also because it's the honest term, though.

Um, those camps were designed to concentrate a particular group of people because of their ethnic background behind barbed wire and remove them from the rest of the population.

So it simply was, these were concentration camps.

But it's also, the language that the government used in the wake of Pearl Harbor in terms of how Japanese-Americans were treated was deliberately very softened, very euphemistic.

So the places they were taken initially were called "assembly centers."

When actually they were, people were sleeping in horse stalls in fairgrounds.

The permanent camps were called, as you say, "relocation centers."

Um, there's this, this series, uh, the, their removal, the forced removal from their home was called an "evacuation."

So I think it's really important if you're telling, talking about history, um, to tell an honest story you have to use honest language.

So I tried to strip away the government's language, the language that was deliberately designed to soften, um, the reality of what was happening and, um, and use more honest language.

Franklin: What I also thought was very, uh, poignant as well, was that you, you introduced us to some people who didn't make it.

Brown: Yes.

I mean, I think it was really important to tell, and there were actually surprising number of brothers in the 442, and in a number of instances two, or in one case actually three brothers, all died in the war.

So this happened over and over again in Minidoka and the other camps that, um, you on a particular day, military officers would arrive at the gate to the camp, um, and come in and have to inform some mother and father that their soldier, their son, you know, had been killed in Italy or France or Germany Franklin: Including Tom Ikeda's grandparents had to receive that news.

And in another interview, which we will, um, also have online, um, he talks about that with us.

Did you ever have a sense that it should be a Japanese-American person writing this?

Brown: Yeah.

I mean, I did.

Uh, you know, I was very hesitant to write this book because I'm not Japanese-American and spent a long time not writing it for that reason.

It was really only after talking to Tom a lot and talking to the family members of the, of the young men that I wanted to write about that, um, that I could comfortable the idea of doing it, um, as an outsider to the community.

And I have to say I've been so humbled by the response; so far that the response within the Japanese-American community has just been overwhelmingly positive.

So, so, I'm, I'm very grateful for that.

Franklin: When I talked to Tom about this book, he said, and I'm sure he's talked to you about it as well, that he just sees it so cinematically, you know, and, and, and certainly as I mentioned, you know, the battles, you're just right there.

Uh, what's the future for it in that respect?

Brown: It's looking good.

We're working with a young Japanese-American director actually, who, um, is very excited about the project.

And we're looking at, uh, doing a, um, probably not a feature film, because we want to tell this larger story.

So we need more than two hours of time.

So we're looking at probably doing a, like an HBO-style series.

And I don't know if it'd be three episodes or four episodes, or actually he's, he's hoping we can do a couple of seasons.

So, really going back to their immigrant parents' experience in Japan, and then all the way through the story.

Franklin: Have a Japanese-American director.

And I'm sure it will introduce us to many, um, Japanese-American actors that we haven't known about.

It it'll be a real opportunity.

Brown: Yes.

The director's name is Dustin Daniel Cretton, and I've talked to him on a great deal about this.

And one of the things he's very excited about the project is he sees that as an opportunity to develop a lot of, um, Asian American talent, not just as on the acting side, but behind the cameras as well.

So he's very excited about the project, partly for that reason.

Franklin: When you are a bestselling author, as you are, do you feel an extra weight or burden, maybe not a burden, an extra responsibility to pick stories that have some gravitas to them, and that might change minds and hearts?

Brown: Yes, I do.

I mean, actually, you know, uh, "Boys in the Boat" was, uh, was, uh, a large success.

And, um, because of that success I wanted, when I wrote my next book, as I say, I, in many ways, some of the themes are similar, but I did want to write a book that, um, had a little bit more social import, uh, that might, you know, actually contribute something to some of the dialogue that's going on in the country right now.

And, um, and so that is part of the reason I chose this topic.

Franklin: What is your hope for this book?

Brown: My hope is, you know, mostly to personalize the experience.

As I say, I learned so much about what happened with Japanese-Americans during this period.

And you could read all that in a textbook and it probably wouldn't affect you that much.

But in all my, my writing, I try to take a slice of history and then find some personal stories that will really bring it to life, so you, you see this bit of history unfolding through the eyes of people that you can identify with and care about.

And so I just hope, you know, as people read this book that, um, I think they're going to find they get attached to Gordon and Kats and Fred, um, and it, all, to all of them, actually, not just to the four main ones, but to all the characters in the book, I think you're going to find them very attractive and interesting people and, and, and care about what happened to them.

Franklin: Well, thank you for writing this book and adding to the knowledge base that we have of this time in our country, which is so important for people to know about, to contemplate and to make sure it doesn't happen again.

So, thank you very much for taking the time to talk with me.

Brown: Thanks for having me.

I enjoyed it.

Franklin: I hope you've enjoyed this interview with Daniel James Brown, the author of " Facing the Mountain: a True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War II.

Our conversation was taped at the 2021 Sun Valley Writers' Conference.

My thanks to the organizers of that exceptional conference, to our guests, and to the Dialogue team.

If you'd like to watch this interview again, or any of the nearly 70 conversations I've taped over the years at the Sun Valley Writers' Conference, check out our website.

Just go to idahoptv.org and click on "Dialogue."

That's also where you'll find a separate interview I taped with Tom Ikeda, whom Mr. Brown mentioned as so critical to the research for his book.

For Dialogue, I'm Marcia Franklin.

Thanks for tuning in.

[MUSIC] Presentation of Dialogue on Idaho Public Television is made possible through the generous support of the Laura Moore Cunningham Foundation, committed to fulfilling the Moore and Bettis family legacy of building the great state of Idaho.

By the friends of Idaho Public Television, and by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

With additional funding from the James and Barbara Cimino Foundation.