The Making of a Model Minority

ery early on the morning of December 7, 1941, Akira Otani was helping prepare the banners, flowers, and food for the gala reopening of his family’s fish market in downtown Honolulu. But the festivities would have to wait—for years, it turned out—because the Japanese Imperial Navy had just bombed the United States into World War II. “I was scared. You know, I didn’t know what to do. Of course, the radio announcer was very excited and we looked toward Pearl Harbor, where there was nothing but black smoke; . . . you finally realize that it was war and we were being attacked. I started driving home, but I couldn’t drive because I shook so much. I was nervous and scared and—but I made it back home. . . . I wasn’t thinking about anything, just trying to get home.”1 Soon after eight o’clock in the morning, radio announcers issued an urgent call for all members of the University of Hawai ì Reserved Officers’ Training Corps (ROTC) to report for duty. Akira Otani was one of several hundred undergraduates, many of them second-generation Japanese Americans, who donned uniforms and made their way to the armory on the campus in Manoa valley overlooking Honolulu. Amid frantic rumors that Japanese paratroopers had landed on St. Louis Heights, adjacent to the campus, Sergeant Bob Hogan issued each youngster an old Springfield