Like most of us, Ian Fujisaki was once a normal teenager — he went to school, built model planes, delivered groceries. But his teenage years weren’t exactly normal.
The second-youngest of 11 children, his family lived on Hawaii’s Big Island before the country adopted the tropical territory as a state. And he was a 13-year-old Japanese boy in 1941 when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor and kicked off the United States’ entry into World War II.
“I remember everything,” said Fujisaki, now 90, sitting in his home in east Vancouver.
“That day, I remember coming home from church on a sunny day. I heard my neighbor — my sister and my neighbor — talking over there about what was going on, listening to the radio.”
It was an odd age to experience a world-defining crisis. He said he was just old enough to realize that something enormous was happening, but not quite mature enough to understand what, exactly, that would mean.
“I remember the radio just blaring about the devastation going on. I didn’t get to delve into the details of it.”
Life changed overnight, he said.
“The tanks came rolling into the towns,” Fujisaki said. “It ruined our streets, but what could you do, you know? In a time of war?”
Over the next three years, U.S. troops would occupy Hawaii as a stepping stone to the Pacific Theater.
Immediately, the islands were put under a curfew. Bars and many restaurants were closed, and liquor was banned. Classes were pushed out of schools to make room for troops. Residents had to black out their windows.
Living on the front lines of WWII meant living with a constant baseline of fear, and Fujisaki’s Japanese heritage meant that his family was treated with extra suspicion by occupying U.S. soldiers.
But even in the most extreme of circumstances, people are only ever just people. And most of the troops weren’t much older than he was, Fujisaki said — they were drafted at 18 or 19, barely more than kids themselves. So along with the fear, he also remembers the more mundane parts of everyday life. Anything can feel normal, after a while.
Schools were repurposed into military spaces, so classes had to find room in empty stores and warehouses. He remembers at one point making model planes in his wood shop class. His teacher — Mr. Blakau, recalls Fujisaki, who has a near-encyclopedic mind for the names and details from that period of his life — was trying to teach his students the differences between U.S. and Japanese planes so they could identify the aircraft from the ground.
“In case there’s an enemy plane that comes over,” Fujisaki explained. “You look up there and see the shape of wings to identify those planes, if they were ours or theirs.”
He formed fleeting relationships with some of the military men before they shipped out. A few had a crush on his older sister and would come by the house to visit her.
One such service member was named Smitty. Fujisaki remembers Smitty specifically for his bushy eyebrows and Southern accent.
“You know these military men always came to see women, so many of them were coming to see my sister, Kay, and Smitty was one of them. So I got to be friends with him and he gave me a tank ride,” Fujisaki said.
“It was a very thrilling ride.” He smiled at the memory. “Being at that age, you know.”
Another, a Marine named Cecil, was a musician in the military band. Cecil happened by the house one day while Fujisaki was fiddling around on a trumpet — Fujisaki himself couldn’t play well, he laughed, but he could sure play loud.
“He was surprised to see that I was interested in swing, so he picked up the horn and he started to play. I was so amazed to hear somebody play like that,” Fujisaki said. “He was a good trumpet player, and he had a wide gap in his teeth, I remember. Maybe that’s what made him a good trumpet player.”
Not all the memories were so fond. The nightly blackouts, for instance, were designed to keep the homes from turning into enemy targets from the air.
“The houses were all covered with roof tar paper,” Fujisaki said. “When there was light in the house, you had to make sure that no light leaked, because even a tiny light leaked can be spotted from planes up above.”
A few of his older brothers became a sort of neighborhood watch, keeping an eye on nearby houses for any light pollution that might draw attention. The family kept a small light that could be used for reading at night, but it would leave the rest of the room dark.
Fujisaki remembers his most frightening moment of the occupation clearly: “One night we were huddled in the basement, like we all did at that period of time — after dinner as it gets dark, we would stay indoors and we would just talk about ourselves and wonder what would happen.”
“And all of a sudden, the door just slammed open and we were so flabbergasted, and in the doorway was an army officer. … With a pistol in his hand, suspecting us.”
Hawaii’s population was more than one-third Japanese at that point. In Ola’a, the town where the Fujisakis lived, that percentage was closer to half. (Ola’a, which sits on the island’s east side south of Hilo, has since been renamed Kea’au.)
“We were suspects all the time. The army was always suspicious of us possibly conspiring, even if we were still American citizens. We were still not a state then.”
Hawaii would remain under military occupation until the war ended in 1944, when Fujisaki was 16 years old. The harsh treatment of Hawaiians during the war was among the factors that helped prompt a bid for statehood, which ended in ratifying the island chain as the nation’s 50th state in 1959.
Fujisaki would go on to be drafted into the U.S. Army in 1951, transferred to the reserve the following year and discharged in 1956. He served in the Korean War, earning a Purple Heart when a piece of shrapnel cut open his hand.
He later married, fathered three children, and spent some time in Chicago and Sacramento, Calif., before moving to Vancouver, where he now lives alone save for his cat named Baby.
