The Big War: Eyes of the Emperor by Graham Salisbury

In Eyes of the Emperor, Graham Salisbury revisits Honolulu just before the attack on Pearl Harbor to tell the story of another Japanese-American boy (see my review of Under the Blood-Red Sun posted April 8) caught up in conflicting emotions as the United States goes to war with his father's homeland.

When nisei Eddy Okubo graduates from high school at the age of sixteen, he tries to sidestep his father's wish that he finish his education in Japan and, changing his birth certificate, enlists instead in the U.S. Army to be with his friends Chik and Cobra. When Japan attacks the Schofield Barracks where he is beginning his training, Eddy soon learns that he has three wars to fight, the first with his father over his loyalty to the Emperor of Japan. But as his father reflects on the Japanese bombs falling on the Pearl Harbor, Eddy senses a sea change in his dad.

"Boy," Pop said.

I waited.

"Me?" he said after a long pause. "I'm old country, yeah?"

"Yeah."

"But not you, I know."

I nodded.

"Ne' mind how I feel about Japan or what I want for you," he said. "What you doing now...it's right."

With that issue settled, Eddy returns to base to find his fellow Japanese-Americans segregated and surrounded by machine gun emplacements manned by troops from the mainland. Although the Army eventually removes the guards from the nisei soldiers, they are still given menial work and kept apart from the others. Meanwhile many of their issei relatives are being rounded up and jailed. To win respect for the loyalty of Japanese-American soldiers, Eddy hopes that his group will be sent to the European front where they can prove themselves against the real enemy. Instead he finds himself shipped out to the mainland, first to Minnesota and then, traveling by train past a internment camp of Japanese-Americans, transported to Ship Island just off the coast of Mississippi.

There Eddy finds himself part of a secret mission on nearby Cat Island to train war dogs to locate Japanese soldiers by their supposed unique scent. Although even some of the mainland trainers disbelieve this theory, Eddy bravely throws himself into the role of "scent bait" for the German Shepherd assigned to his handler, hiding in the alligator-infested swamps as the German Shepherd tracks him down. As the first step in training the dog to attack Japanese soldiers, Eddy is required to allow the dog to eat a chunk of raw horsemeat off his neck. His training then forces Eddy to beat the dog and threaten him while dressed in protective padding. When the final trial nearly ends in Eddy's death, the aggressive dog turns on his Anglo handler as well, and only the quick action of both resolves the threat. Both soldiers come to respect each other as Americans following orders and doing their duty.

The novel ends with the failure of the K-9 trials to prove that the dogs can detect a distinctive "Japanese" scent but also with tremendous respect earned by the courage of the Japanese-Americans. With his battle for respect won, Eddy then prepares to move on to the real war in Europe with his nisei comrades.

Salisbury's novel is based on interviews with eight of the original 26 Japanese-American soldiers chosen to train the first U.S. Army K-9 Corps. As he points out in his afterword, "every man who served on Cat Island received at least one Purple Heart and a Bronze Star" in battle. As a native Hawaiian, Salisbury deals realistically and sensitively with the xenophobia which Anglo-Americans felt toward those soldiers who shared "the eyes of the emperor" with their Japanese enemies.