Chapter 2

Winter came to Honolulu, which meant the rains arrived and the gulch turned to red mud. The camp at Honuliuli sprawled across the hillside like a temporary city that had forgotten it was supposed to be temporary—rows of barracks, mess halls, administration buildings, and everywhere, the wire.

Akiko had been assigned to the women’s compound, a section that held both civilian detainees and the handful of female personnel caught in the same bureaucratic confusion that had trapped her. The barracks were crowded but clean. The food came regularly—rice, vegetables, sometimes fish or chicken. Portions that would have seemed miraculous in the caves now arrived three times a day without ceremony.

The abundance was disorienting.

She watched American soldiers requisition supplies and receive deliveries within days. Medical supplies arrived in crates: antibiotics, sterile bandages, surgical equipment, even refrigerated storage for blood. Things that would have saved dozens of lives in the cave hospitals now sat in organized rows in the camp infirmary, catalogued and available.

The other women whispered about it at night. “They won the war with factories, not soldiers,” Mrs. Yamada said one evening, her voice quiet but certain. “Look at what they have. Look at how much they throw away.”

It was true. Akiko had seen soldiers discard supplies that would have been treasured in Japan—blankets with small tears, rations barely past their date, soap still half-usable. The waste spoke to a wealth so vast it could afford to be careless.

And yet, the cruelty never came.

She still waited for it some nights, lying on her cot in the dark, wondering when the kindness would crack and reveal the monsters she’d been taught to expect. But morning after morning arrived with roll call and breakfast and the mundane routine of a detention camp that treated its prisoners with something approaching dignity.

Captain Morrison, the camp’s chief medical officer, had reviewed her records within the first week. He’d found her one morning during sick call and asked, through an interpreter, about her training.

“Four years,” she’d told him. “Field hospitals, then caves. Surgery, wound care, disease management.”

Morrison had studied her for a long moment, then nodded. “I’m short-staffed. If you’re willing to work, I can make sure you’re fed properly and housed in the medical barracks. The work is hard, but it’s honest.”

She’d agreed immediately. Not just for the better conditions, but because her hands remembered what to do with bandages and sutures, and idleness felt like dying slowly.

The infirmary became her world. She worked alongside American corpsmen and two other Japanese nurses who’d been similarly conscripted and similarly trapped in bureaucratic limbo. They treated everyone: American soldiers with minor injuries, POWs with chronic conditions, civilian detainees with ailments that ranged from mundane to serious.

What stunned her most was the equality of care. A Japanese soldier with an infected wound received the same antibiotics, the same clean bandages, the same attention as an American private. She watched Morrison spend an hour setting a POW’s broken arm with the same meticulous care he’d shown treating a guard’s sprained ankle the day before.

“Why?” she asked one day, through the interpreter who came by weekly. “Why do you treat them the same?”

Morrison had looked up from the chart he was reviewing, his expression tired but genuine. “Because they’re patients. That’s all that matters in here.”

It was the kindness that tortured her most. Every day that passed without cruelty felt like waiting for a blade that never fell.

Steven found ways to see her. Not often—the regulations were strict, and Sergeant Klein watched him like a hawk—but he managed. Supply deliveries to the infirmary gave him excuses. Equipment requisitions. Twice-weekly inspections of the medical facilities.

Their conversations were brief, conducted in broken English and fragmented Japanese, with gestures filling the gaps language left. But the meaning came through.

“You okay?” he’d ask, standing in the doorway while she changed a dressing.

“Okay,” she’d reply, not looking up from her work but allowing herself the smallest smile.

“Good. That’s good.”

And then he’d leave before anyone could question why he’d lingered.

Corporal Diaz became their inadvertent accomplice. He’d picked up more Japanese during his signal corps training and could translate with more nuance than the official interpreters. He’d stop by the infirmary on errands that probably didn’t need running and relay messages.

“Sims wants to know if you need anything,” Diaz said one afternoon in careful Japanese.