Kiko Tanaka pressed her hand against the cold metal wall of the ship’s hold, trying to steady herself against the waves of pain radiating through her body. Around her, 23 other Japanese women sat in terrified silence, waiting for what they believed would be their execution. They had been taught that capture by Americans meant torture, humiliation, and death.
What they were about to discover would shatter everything they had been told about their enemy. Late November 1944, the USS Transport ship cut through the gray waters of San Francisco Bay, carrying cargo that would have seemed impossible just months earlier. Japanese women prisoners of war, captured during the brutal battle of Saipan.
In the converted cargo hold, Ko Tanaka sat among two dozen women, her body aching from weeks of confinement on hard surfaces, her mind racing with images of the horrors she expected to face. She was 26 years old, though she felt decades older. Before the war consumed everything, she had worked as a civilian nurse in Saipan’s small hospital, tending to the growing number of Japanese settlers who had made the island their home.
She had treated children with fevers, helped deliver babies, set broken bones. Simple work, honest work. Then the Americans came. The battle for Saipan had been apocalyptic. For three weeks in June and July of 1944, the island had become hell on earth. Japanese military commanders had gathered the civilian population and delivered their final instructions.
Death before dishonor, capture by the Americans would mean unspeakable torture. The women would be raped repeatedly. The children would be murdered in front of their parents. Better to die by your own hand than fall into the clutches of the American demons. Ko had watched thousands of her fellow civilians make their choice.
At Marpy Point on the island’s northern cliffs, families had held hands and jumped together into the sea below. Mothers had thrown their children off the cliffs before following them into the void. Men had detonated grenades while clutching their wives and daughters. The water at the base of the cliffs had turned red with blood.
She had tried to reach the cliffs herself. Injured by shrapnel during an American artillery barrage, she had dragged herself across the rocky terrain, determined to die with honor rather than face capture. But her body had failed her. She had collapsed just yards from the cliff edge, consciousness fading, waiting for death to claim her.
Instead, she had awakened to find an American marine kneeling beside her. She had closed her eyes and waited for the knife across her throat, the bullet to her head. But the marine had simply lifted her onto a stretcher and carried her to a field hospital. A medic had cleaned and bandaged her wounds, offered her water, spoken to her in soft tones she couldn’t understand.
She had refused the water, certain it was poisoned. She had turned her face away from the medic’s kindness, knowing it must be a cruel prelude to something worse. That had been 5 months ago. Since then, she had been processed through a series of temporary holding facilities, always waiting for the torture to begin, always bracing herself for the horrors she had been promised. But they never came.
Instead, there had been medical examinations, adequate food, clean water. There had been confusion and disbelief, but no violence. Now, as the ship approached the San Francisco docks, Ko felt a different kind of fear settling over her. They were being taken to the American homeland. Surely here, far from the eyes of international observers, the mask would finally drop.
Here, the Americans would reveal their true nature. The ship’s engines changed pitch as they began docking procedures around Ko. The other women stirred nervously. Some were civilians like herself, captured on Saipan or Tinian. Others were military nurses who had been unable to evacuate before the islands fell.
All of them shared the same haunted expression, the same terrible certainty about what awaited them. The hold’s door opened with a metallic screech. Ko flinched, her body tensing. American soldiers descended the stairs, and she prepared herself for the worst. But the soldiers were carrying boxes, not weapons. They began distributing blankets, thick wool blankets that looked impossibly clean and soft.
One soldier, a woman in uniform, approached Ko and draped a blanket around her shoulders. The woman smiled and said something in English, her tone gentle. Ko stared at the blanket in her hands, unable to process what was happening. This had to be a trick, some kind of psychological torture designed to make the eventual cruelty even more devastating.
She looked at the other women, seeing her own confusion reflected in their faces. They were led off the ship in small groups up onto the deck where cold November wind whipped across the bay. Ko’s legs trembled as she walked, partly from fear and partly from weeks of inactivity and poornutrition. Her body achd in ways she had never experienced before.
The simple act of sitting had become painful. Her malnourished frame unable to cushion itself against hard surfaces. Every step sent jolts of discomfort through her spine and hips. The women were loaded onto buses with barred windows. As they drove through San Francisco’s streets, Ko pressed her face to the glass, staring at a world that seemed impossibly prosperous.
Buildings stood intact, undamaged by war. People walked the streets in clean clothes, carrying packages, going about their daily lives as if the world wasn’t burning. She had expected to see hatred in their faces, anger at the Japanese enemy. Instead, most people simply ignored the buses, too absorbed in their own concerns to notice the cargo of prisoners passing by.
They arrived at Angel Island in the middle of the bay, a former immigration station that had been converted to process prisoners of war. As Ko stepped off the bus, she noticed that the facility was divided into separate sections. The women were being kept apart from male prisoners, housed in their own barracks with female guards. The processing began immediately.
Each woman was photographed, fingerprinted, and given a prisoner number. Ko became prisoner 4782. They were led to a medical facility where American doctors and nurses waited. This was it. Ko thought. This was where the torture would begin. Disguised as medical examination, a female doctor approached her, speaking through a Japanese American translator.
The translator was a young woman, probably in her early 20s, who introduced herself as Mary Tanaka. The shared surname startled Ko, creating an unexpected connection across the vast divide of their circumstances. The doctor asked questions about Ko’s medical history, her injuries, her current symptoms.
When Ko mentioned the constant pain, particularly when sitting, the doctor’s expression shifted to one of professional concern. Through Mary, she explained that prolonged malnutrition and sitting on hard surfaces without adequate cushioning could cause significant tissue damage and inflammation. She needed treatment, proper bedding, and nutritious food to recover.
Ko waited for the trap to spring, for the kind words to transform into cruelty. Instead, the doctor simply began her examination, gentle and thorough, treating Ko exactly as she would treat any patient. When the examination revealed signs of infection in Ko’s old shrapnel wounds, the doctor prescribed antibiotics and scheduled follow-up appointments.
She gave Ko a cushion to sit on and instructions to use it consistently until her body could heal. The women were assigned to barracks that seemed impossibly luxurious compared to what they had expected. Each prisoner had her own cot with a real mattress, clean sheets, and blankets. There were showers with hot water, toilets that flushed, windows that let in natural light.
The barracks were heated against the November cold. That first night, Ko lay on her cot, unable to sleep, waiting for the other shoe to drop around her. The other women whispered nervously in the darkness. This had to be temporary, they agreed. This comfort was designed to make them lower their guard.
The real horror would come later, when they least expected it. But the horror never came. Instead, there was routine. Each morning, they were awakened at 6:00. They had 30 minutes to wash and dress before breakfast in the messaul. The food was simple but abundant. Rice, vegetables, fish, bread, fruit. More food than Ko had seen in months.
More food than many Japanese civilians were receiving back home as the war tightened its grip on the home islands. At first, many of the women refused to eat, still convinced the food was poisoned or drugged. But hunger eventually overcame fear, and when no one died or fell ill, the resistance crumbled. Ko found herself eating with an appetite she hadn’t felt since before the war.
Her body, starved for so long, seemed to awaken with gratitude for every meal. After breakfast came work assignments. The Geneva Convention of 1929, which the United States had signed and actually followed, required that prisoners of war be given meaningful work, but not exploited. The women were assigned to various tasks.
Sewing and mending uniforms, doing laundry, working in the facility’s gardens, creating crafts that would be sold with the proceeds going into a prisoner welfare fund. Ko was assigned to the medical facility where her nursing background made her useful. She worked alongside American medical staff, treating minor ailments among the prisoner population.
It was strange, surreal even to be practicing her profession again, to be trusted with medical supplies and patient care. The American nurses treated her as a colleague, teaching her English medical terminology, showing her American medical techniques. She was even paid for her work. Not much, just a few cents per day, but it was actual money thatshe could use to purchase small items from the camp canteen.
Soap, writing paper, pencils. The idea that prisoners would be paid for their labor seemed absurd. Yet another piece of evidence that contradicted everything she had been taught about American barbarism. In the afternoons, there were educational programs. English classes were offered, taught by volunteers from San Francisco.
Ko attended every session, hungry to understand the language of her capttors, to decode the mystery of their unexpected humanity. She proved to be a quick learner, her nursing background having already given her some exposure to medical English. There were also recreational activities. A small library had been established with books in Japanese donated by Japanese American community organizations.
There were musical instruments, art supplies, even a radio that played music in the evenings. On Sundays, a Buddhist priest from San Francisco was allowed to visit and conduct services for those who wished to attend. The cognitive dissonance was overwhelming. Everything Ko had been taught. Everything she had believed about the Americans was being systematically dismantled by the simple reality of decent treatment.
She had been told they were demons, monsters who delighted in cruelty. Instead, she found herself surrounded by people who seemed genuinely committed to following rules, maintaining standards, treating prisoners with basic human dignity. The female guards were particularly confusing. Most were members of the Women’s Army Corps, professional soldiers who took their duties seriously.
They were firm but fair, enforcing rules without cruelty, maintaining order without violence. Some of them even seemed kind, offering words of encouragement, helping prisoners navigate the complex bureaucracy of camp life. One guard, Sergeant Patricia Morrison, took a particular interest in helping the Japanese women adjust. She was a tall woman from Iowa, probably in her mid-30s, with a non-nonsense demeanor that somehow managed to be reassuring rather than threatening.
She learned basic Japanese phrases to communicate better with her charges. She organized cultural exchange activities, encouraging the Japanese women to teach traditional crafts, while American staff shared their own skills and interests. It was through one of these exchanges that Ko first began to truly connect with her capttors as human beings.
Sergeant Morrison had asked if any of the Japanese women knew origami, the traditional art of paper folding. Ko volunteered and soon found herself teaching a group of American soldiers how to fold paper cranes, flowers, and boxes. As she worked, demonstrating the precise folds and creases, she found herself talking haltingly in broken English about her life before the war.
The Americans listened with genuine interest, asking questions, sharing their own stories. One young soldier from California talked about her Japanese American neighbors who had been sent to internment camps. The irony wasn’t lost on anyone. Japanese Americans imprisoned in their own country while Japanese nationals were held as prisoners of war.
Both groups caught in the machinery of wartime fear and suspicion. This revelation about Japanese American internment camps created another layer of complexity in Ko’s understanding. The Americans weren’t perfect. They were capable of injustice, of allowing fear to override principle. Yet, even in their imperfection, they maintained certain standards.
The internment camps, however unjust, weren’t death camps. Families were kept together. People weren’t systematically starved or worked to death. It was a violation of civil liberties, a stain on American democracy, but it wasn’t the genocidal horror that Japanese propaganda had promised. As winter turned to spring in 1945, Ko’s physical health improved dramatically.
The pain that had plagued her for months gradually subsided as proper nutrition and medical care allowed her body to heal. The cushion the doctor had given her became unnecessary as her body rebuilt the tissue and muscle it had lost. She gained weight. Her skin regained its color. Her hair stopped falling out. She looked in the mirror one day and barely recognized the healthy woman staring back at her.
But as her body healed, her mind struggled with increasingly difficult questions. Letters from Japan, heavily censored but still informative, painted a picture of a homeland in its death throws. American bombers were systematically destroying Japanese cities. Millions of civilians were homeless, starving, dying. The war that Japanese leaders had promised would bring glory and prosperity, had instead brought only devastation.
And here she was, safe and wellfed in an enemy prison camp, receiving better care than most Japanese civilians were getting in their own country. The guilt was crushing. She had survived when so many had died. She was comfortable while her countrymen suffered.
She was beginning to see hercapttors as human beings even as they continued to reign destruction on her homeland. In March 1945, Ko learned that Tokyo had been firebombed. The attack had killed an estimated 100,000 people in a single night, more than either of the atomic bombs would later claim. Her family lived in Yokohama, close enough to Tokyo that she feared for their safety.
For weeks, she had no word, no way of knowing if they had survived. When a letter finally arrived in May, she wept with relief. Her parents and younger brother had survived, though their home had been destroyed. They were living in a shelter, struggling to find enough food to survive. Her mother’s letter was carefully worded to pass the sensors, but the desperation bled through every line.
“They were proud of her,” the letter said. They hoped she was being treated well. They prayed for her safe return when the war ended,” Ko wrote back, trying to describe her situation without sounding as if she had betrayed her country by accepting enemy kindness. How could she explain that she was eating three meals a day while they starved, that she had access to medical care while Japanese hospitals ran out of supplies, that her American capttors treated her with more dignity than Japanese military officers had shown to their own civilians? The translator,
Mary Tanaka, became a confidant during this difficult time. Mary’s own story was complicated. Born in California to Japanese immigrant parents, she had grown up American but looked Japanese. When the war started, her family had been sent to an internment camp in the California desert. Mary had volunteered for military service, partly to prove her loyalty, partly to escape the camp.
Now she served as a bridge between two worlds, belonging fully to neither. Mary helped Ko understand American culture, explaining the contradictions and complexities that made the United States so difficult to categorize. America was a nation that could in turn its own citizens based on ethnicity while simultaneously treating enemy prisoners according to international law.
It was a country that could be both idealistic and pragmatic, principled and hypocritical, generous and cruel, often all at the same time. Through Mary Ko learned about the American concept of individual rights, the idea that every person possessed inherent dignity regardless of their nationality or circumstances.
This was why the Geneva Convention mattered to Americans. Mary explained, “It wasn’t just about following rules. It was about maintaining a moral standard even in the midst of war’s brutality. Americans wanted to believe they were the good guys and treating prisoners decently was part of that self-image. It was a stark contrast to the Japanese military philosophy Ko had been raised with.
In that world view, surrender was the ultimate dishonor. Prisoners had forfeited their right to dignified treatment by choosing capture over death. The Japanese military’s treatment of Allied prisoners reflected this belief. Captured soldiers were viewed with contempt, subjected to brutal conditions, worked to death, or simply executed.
The death rate among allied prisoners in Japanese custody would eventually reach 27% compared to less than 2% for Axis prisoners in American custody. Ko hadn’t known these statistics in 1945, but she was beginning to understand the philosophical divide that produced such different outcomes. She thought about the American marine who had saved her life on Saipan, the medic who had treated her wounds, the doctors and nurses who had restored her health.
None of them had treated her with contempt. None of them had seemed to view her as less than human because she had been captured. Zoomer arrived, bringing warmer weather and growing rumors that the war was approaching its end. Germany had surrendered in May, allowing the Allies to focus all their resources on defeating Japan.
The bombing campaigns intensified. American submarines had effectively cut off Japan from its empire, strangling the flow of resources that had sustained the war effort. Everyone knew the end was coming. The only question was how much more destruction would occur before Japan accepted the inevitable. On August 6th, 1945, everything changed.
News filtered into the camp that a single American bomb had destroyed the entire city of Hiroshima. The report seemed impossible. The casualty figures too large to comprehend. Ko and the other prisoners struggled to understand what had happened. Some kind of new weapon, the rumors said. A bomb that harnessed the power of the sun itself.
3 days later, Nagasaki was destroyed by a second atomic bomb. On August 15th, Emperor Hirohito addressed the Japanese nation by radio for the first time in history, announcing Japan’s surrender. The war was over. The camp erupted in confusion. The American guards celebrated, relieved that the war had ended without the need for an invasion of Japan that would have cost countless lives on both sides.
TheJapanese prisoners reacted with a complex mixture of emotions. relief that the killing had stopped, grief for their defeated nation, fear about what would happen next, and an overwhelming uncertainty about their own futures. Ko sat on her cot holding her mother’s last letter, trying to process the magnitude of what had occurred.
Japan had been defeated. The empire was gone. Everything that had been sacrificed, all the death and suffering had been for nothing. and she had survived it all by being captured by the enemy, by accepting their care, by slowly learning to see them as human beings rather than demons. The guilt threatened to overwhelm her.
She had lived while hundreds of thousands had died. She had been comfortable while her nation burned. She had begun to respect her capttors even as they destroyed her homeland. What kind of Japanese woman did that make her? What would her family think? What would her community say when she returned? The camp authorities began making arrangements for repatriation.
The process would take months, they explained. Ships had to be organized, destinations confirmed, paperwork completed. In the meantime, life in the camp continued much as it had before, though the atmosphere had changed. The war was over, but its consequences were just beginning to unfold. Ko continued working in the medical facility, continued attending English classes, continued trying to make sense of her transformed understanding of the world.
She had conversations with Sergeant Morrison about what Japan would be like under American occupation. The sergeant was optimistic, talking about reconstruction aid, democratic reforms, helping Japan rebuild into a peaceful nation. Ko wanted to believe her, but she couldn’t shake her fear of returning to a country she no longer recognized.
In September, the first detailed reports about conditions in Japan began reaching the camp. The devastation was total. Major cities had been reduced to rubble. Millions were homeless. Food shortages were severe. The economy had collapsed. The occupation forces were struggling to provide basic humanitarian aid to a population on the brink of starvation.
Geko read these reports with growing dread. She was being repatriated to a country that could barely feed its own people. A country where she would be marked as a former prisoner of war, someone who had chosen survival over honorable death. In the rigid social hierarchy of Japanese culture, that stigma might never fade.
The repatriation ships began departing in October. Ko’s group was scheduled to leave in early November, almost exactly 1 year after she had arrived in San Francisco. As the date approached, she found herself experiencing an unexpected emotion, reluctance. She wanted to go home, wanted to see her family, wanted to help rebuild her country, but she was also leaving behind a place where she had been treated with dignity, where she had learned that enemies could be human, where she had discovered that the world was far more complex than propaganda had
suggested. The night before departure, Sergeant Morrison organized a farewell gathering. American staff and Japanese prisoners shared a meal together, exchanged small gifts, said their goodbyes. Ko gave the sergeant an origami crane she had folded from red paper, a symbol of peace and hope. The sergeant gave Ko a small English Japanese dictionary and a letter of reference testifying to her work in the medical facility.
As they said goodbye, Sergeant Morrison spoke through Mary’s translation. You’re a good nurse and a good person. I hope you’ll use your skills to help your country recover. And I hope you’ll remember that not all Americans are demons, just like not all Japanese are fanatics. We’re all just people trying to survive in a world gone mad.
Ko boarded the repatriation ship with those words echoing in her mind. The voyage across the Pacific took two weeks. Two weeks of increasing anxiety about what awaited her. The ship was crowded with former prisoners, both military and civilian. All of them facing the same uncertain future. They shared stories, compared experiences, tried to prepare themselves for the shock of returning to a defeated nation.
The ship docked at Yokohama in late November 1945. As Ko walked down the gang plank, she confronted the reality of Japan’s defeat. The port was a landscape of destruction. Buildings stood as hollow shells, their walls pockmarked by shrapnel, their roofs collapsed. The smell of smoke and decay hung in the air.
People moved through the ruins like ghosts, thin and ragged, their eyes hollow with hunger and loss. Ko’s family met her at the port. Her mother had aged a decade in the year since Ko had last seen her. Her father walked with a limp from an injury sustained during an air raid. Her younger brother, who had been 15 when she was captured, now looked like an old man at 16.
They embraced, weeping, grateful to be reunited, but overwhelmedby the magnitude of what they had all endured. The reception from the broader community was mixed. Some people were simply grateful that Ko had survived, that she had returned to help with the massive task of reconstruction. Others viewed her with suspicion or contempt, she had been captured, she had survived in enemy custody.
She had accepted American charity. In the eyes of some, these facts marked her as someone who had failed to uphold Japanese honor. Ko tried to describe her experiences to explain that the Americans had treated her well, that they had followed international law, that they had shown basic human decency. Many people didn’t want to hear it.
The propaganda machine had been so effective, the demonization of the enemy so complete that evidence contradicting the narrative was simply rejected. Some accused her of lying, of having been brainwashed by American psychological warfare. Others suggested she had collaborated with the enemy, trading her honor for comfort.
But there were also those who listened, who wanted to understand, who recognized that the old certainties had been shattered by defeat. These people asked questions, sought details, tried to reconcile the propaganda they had been fed with the reality Ko described. Slowly, painfully, a more nuanced understanding began to emerge.
The American occupation forces arrived in force and Ko found herself in an unexpected position. Her English language skills developed during her time as a prisoner made her valuable as a translator and liaison. She was hired to work with American medical teams providing humanitarian aid to Japanese civilians.
It was strange, surreal even to be working alongside Americans again. but this time in her own country helping her own people. The American occupation was nothing like what Japanese propaganda had predicted. There was no mass slaughter, no systematic rape, no enslavement of the population. Instead, there was food aid, medical care, reconstruction assistance.
General Douglas MacArthur, the Supreme Commander of the Occupation forces, implemented democratic reforms while showing respect for Japanese culture and institutions. The emperor was allowed to remain, though stripped of political power. War criminals were prosecuted, but ordinary Japanese were treated as victims of militarism rather than as enemies to be punished.
Ko watched this unfold with a sense of vindication. Everything she had experienced as a prisoner. Everything she had tried to tell people about American adherence to standards and rules was being demonstrated on a national scale. The Americans weren’t perfect. There were incidents of misconduct, cases of abuse, failures of policy, but the overall approach was remarkably similar to what she had experienced in the P camp.
A genuine attempt to follow principles, to maintain standards, to treat even defeated enemies with basic dignity. She worked with the occupation forces for 3 years, serving as a bridge between two cultures that were learning to coexist. She helped American doctors understand Japanese medical practices and cultural sensitivities.
She helped Japanese civilians overcome their fear of the occupiers, explaining that these were the same people who had treated her well as a prisoner, that they could be trusted to keep their word. In 1948, she met an American civil affairs officer named Robert Chen, a Chinese American from San Francisco who had volunteered for occupation duty.
They bonded over their shared experience of being cultural intermediaries, belonging fully to neither world but serving as bridges between them. They married in 1949, a union that would have been unthinkable just a few years earlier. In 1952, when the occupation officially ended and Japan regained its sovereignty, Ko immigrated to the United States with her husband.
They settled in San Francisco, not far from Angel Island, where she had first arrived as a prisoner 8 years earlier. She worked as a nurse at a local hospital, using the skills she had maintained throughout the war and its aftermath. She never forgot her experiences as a prisoner of war, but she also never allowed them to define her entirely.
She became active in Japanese American community organizations, working to build bridges between Japanese immigrants and the broader American society. She spoke occasionally about her wartime experiences, always emphasizing the importance of maintaining human dignity even in the midst of conflict. In the 1980s, a historian researching the treatment of Japanese prisoners of war, interviewed Ko for an oral history project.
By then, she was in her 60s, a grandmother, a respected member of her community. The historian asked her to reflect on her experiences to explain how being a prisoner of war had shaped her understanding of the world. Ko thought carefully before answering. When I was captured, she said, “I expected to die.
I had been taught that Americans were monsters, that capture meanttorture and death. Instead, I found people who treated me according to rules, who provided medical care, who respected my basic humanity even though we were enemies. It confused me at first. I thought it must be a trick that the cruelty would come later, but it never did.
She paused, gathering her thoughts. I’m not saying the Americans were perfect. They weren’t. They made mistakes. They did terrible things during the war. The atomic bombs killed hundreds of thousands of people. The firebombing campaigns destroyed entire cities. But even in the midst of that destruction, they maintained certain standards for how prisoners should be treated.
They followed rules even when it would have been easier not to. The historian asked what she thought that said about American culture, about the American approach to war. Ko smiled, a sad but genuine expression. I think it says that Americans want to believe they’re the good guys. They want to think of themselves as principled, as following rules, as respecting human rights.
Sometimes that’s just self-d delusion, a way of justifying their actions. But sometimes it actually means something. Sometimes it makes a real difference in how they behave. She looked out the window of her San Francisco home toward the bay where she had first arrived as a terrified prisoner four decades earlier. They treated us with dignity when they had every reason not to. We were the enemy.
Our country had attacked them, had killed their soldiers, had committed atrocities against their prisoners. They could have responded with equal cruelty and no one would have blamed them. But they didn’t. They chose to follow rules, to maintain standards, to treat us as human beings rather than as objects of revenge.
That taught me something important, she continued. It taught me that even in war, even in the midst of hatred and violence, it’s possible to maintain your humanity. It’s possible to see your enemy as a person, to treat them with basic dignity, to follow principles even when it’s difficult. That’s not weakness. That’s strength. real strength.
The historian asked one final question. Did she think her experience as a prisoner of war had contributed to the surprisingly smooth reconciliation between the United States and Japan after the war? Ko considered this carefully. I think it helped, she said finally. Not just my experience, but the experiences of all the Japanese prisoners who were treated decently by the Americans.
We went home and told people what we had seen, what we had experienced. Many didn’t believe us at first, but eventually the truth became undeniable. The Americans weren’t the demons we had been told they were. They were just people capable of both good and bad, but generally trying to do the right thing.
When the occupation began, she continued, “There were people like me who could tell our fellow Japanese that the Americans could be trusted, that they would keep their word, that they would help us rebuild. We became bridges between the two cultures, helping to overcome the hatred and fear that the war had created. I don’t think the reconciliation would have happened as quickly or as smoothly without those bridges.
She smiled again, this time with more warmth. In the end, America’s greatest victory in the Pacific wasn’t one with bombs or bullets. It was one with something far more powerful. The simple, radical act of treating enemies as human beings. That’s what changed hearts and minds. That’s what made reconciliation possible. That’s what turned enemies into allies and eventually into friends.
The interview ended, but Ko’s story continued. She lived to see the full flowering of the US Japan alliance, the transformation of former enemies into close partners. She watched as Japan rebuilt itself into an economic powerhouse. As Japanese and American cultures influenced each other, as the bitter hatreds of war faded into history, she kept certain momentos from her time as a prisoner, the English Japanese dictionary Sergeant Morrison had given her, now worn and faded from decades of use.
A photograph taken at Angel Island in 1945, showing her in donated Red Cross clothing, smiling hesitantly at the camera, still uncertain about her fate, but beginning to hope that she might survive. the cushion the doctor had given her when she complained that it hurt to sit, a tangible reminder of the moment when she first began to understand that her captors saw her as a person deserving of care.
These objects told a story that seemed almost impossible in retrospect. A story of enemies who treated each other with dignity, of rules that were followed even in the midst of total war, of human connections that transcended national boundaries and wartime hatreds. It was a story that challenged simple narratives about good and evil that revealed the complexity and contradiction inherent in human nature.
Ko Tanaka passed away in 1994 at the age of 76. Her obituary in the San Francisco Chronicle mentionedher work as a nurse, her contributions to the Japanese American community, her role in promoting cross-cultural understanding. It noted almost as an afterthought that she had been a Japanese prisoner of war during World War II held at Angel Island and treated according to the Geneva Convention.
That simple phrase, treated according to the Geneva Convention, contained within it an entire universe of meaning. It represented a choice that the United States had made, a decision to follow rules, even when fighting an enemy that often didn’t. It represented thousands of individual acts of decency by guards, doctors, nurses, and administrators who saw their prisoners as human beings rather than as objects of hatred.
It represented a strategic decision that treating prisoners well would serve American interests better than cruelty would. Most importantly, it represented the possibility of maintaining humanity even in the midst of war’s brutality. The story of Japanese women prisoners of war in American custody wasn’t a story of American perfection or moral superiority.
The United States committed its own atrocities during World War II, made its own terrible choices, caused its own immense suffering. But in this one area, in the treatment of prisoners of war, America largely lived up to the principles it claimed to represent. That mattered. It mattered to Ko Tanaka, who survived the war because an American marine chose to save her rather than kill her.
It mattered to the thousands of other Japanese prisoners who received medical care, adequate food, and basic dignity when they had expected only death. It mattered to the postwar reconciliation that transformed bitter enemies into close allies. And it matters still as a reminder that even in humanity’s darkest moments, we retain the capacity to choose decency over cruelty, principle over expedience, humanity over hatred.
The pain Ko felt when she sat in that ship’s hold in November 1944 was real. A physical manifestation of the suffering war inflicts on human bodies. But it was also the beginning of a healing process, both physical and psychological, that would transform her understanding of the world. The Americans who treated her pain, who gave her a cushion and proper nutrition and medical care, weren’t trying to win her loyalty or extract information.
They were simply following rules, maintaining standards, treating a prisoner as a human being deserving of basic care. That simple act of decency multiplied across thousands of prisoners and millions of interactions helped build the foundation for a lasting peace. It demonstrated that enemies could become allies, that hatred could be overcome, that the wounds of war could eventually heal.
It proved that maintaining humanity in the midst of conflict wasn’t just morally right, it was strategically wise, creating possibilities for reconciliation that cruelty would have forever foreclosed. Ko’s story and the stories of thousands like her remind us that how we treat our enemies in war shapes the peace that follows.
The choice to follow rules, to maintain standards, to see the humanity and those we fight. These aren’t signs of weakness. They’re expressions of strength, demonstrations of the principles we claim to defend, their investments in a future where former enemies might become friends, where the hatreds of war might give way to the possibilities of peace.
In the end, that may be the most important lesson of all. That even in war, especially in war, our humanity is tested not by how we treat our friends, but by how we treat our enemies. The Americans who cared for Japanese prisoners of war passed that test. Not perfectly, but well enough to make a difference.
Well enough to change hearts and minds. Well enough to help build a peace that has lasted for generations. And it all began with a simple question from a doctor to a prisoner. Where does it hurt? The answer, it hurts when I sit. Led to treatment, to healing, to a gradual understanding that enemies could be human, that rules could matter, that dignity could be maintained even in the midst of total war.
That understanding, born in pain and nurtured through unexpected kindness, helped transform the world. How do you feel? >> [music]
