Daniel James Brown, FACING THE MOUNTAIN

[2:01]Zibby Owens: Hi. This is Zippy Owens, and you're listening to the award winning podcast, moms don't have time to read books. I'm also the host of Moms Don't Have Time to Lose Weight, and I'm the editor of the anthology, which you should run out and buy, called Moms Don't Have Time to A Quarantine Anthology. All proceeds of that book go to COVID nineteen Vaccine Research. And I'm the editor in chief of Moms Don't Have Time to Write a New Publication on Medium, and we're accepting submissions, so please send your personal essays there. And if all that isn't enough, you can follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens, and my website is zibbyowens.com. Okay, now back to this amazing podcast. Happy Memorial Day, everybody. I hope you guys have a great weekend and that you're relaxing and enjoying life and getting time to regroup and listen to podcasts and read and everything that you enjoy doing. All of the podcasts I'm releasing today, which marks the start of my June early summer book blasts. So welcome to that. All of them have a military based theme in honor of all of the wonderful people who we are thinking of today for this Memorial Day. So all of them have a common theme. Listen to all three and enjoy. Daniel James Brown is the number one New York Times bestselling author of The Boys in the Boat. He's also written The Indifferent Stars Above and Under a Flaming Sky. His latest book is called Facing the Mountain, A True Story of Japanese American Heroes in World War two and that book has already hit the bestseller list as well. He has taught writing at San Jose State University and Stanford University. He lives outside Seattle. Welcome, Daniel. Thank you so much for coming on Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books to discuss Facing the Mountain, a true story of Japanese American heroes in World War two. Thanks for having me. I was such a big fan. I'm sure you hear this all the time of the boys in the boat and was thrilled that you had a new book out. And, oh my gosh, it, like, pulls you in from the very first second. I just love the way you write and how you paint a picture of how everything's going on, and you're, like, immediately invested in the characters. And it's really it's really amazing how you bring history to life. Oh, cool. I mean, that's

[4:11]Daniel James Brown: what I'm all about is, you know, I'm not trying to write like comprehensive histories of my topics. I'm trying to just connect people on a personal level with the individuals I write about. I think that's the way we really learn history is when we get engaged with real people who lived through interesting slices of history. So that's really what, in many ways, The Boys in the Boat was about, and that's what this book is about too.

[4:38]Zibby Owens: It's so true. You can read it in a textbook or you can look at source documents or whatever. It's not the same as, you know, the boy who wakes up in bed and is headed down to check out the two cute girls at the church service. I mean, it's, like, completely different. Absolutely. Just the emotional engagement. Because of course, history is not really I mean, history is just like I mean, it could be happening today. It's just we just missed it. So I don't know. To make it feel as vibrant is such an art. Yeah, I mean, it's real people living real experiences.

[5:10]Daniel James Brown: For the most part, those experiences, many of them are going to be things we can relate to if we're given a chance to. So going to church partly and because you want to meet these cute new girls from another of the Hawaiian Islands, that's, know, if you're, I guess, if you're a young man, that's something you can relate to. So that's what it's all about.

[5:33]Zibby Owens: So what initially led you to this topic, especially after your last book? Obviously, it's sort of ripe for investigation and I'm embarrassed to say I did not even know that this type of stuff was going on in America. I had no idea. Anyway, now I feel terrible. And I feel like I'm pretty well educated, but I I somehow missed this real atrocity that happened right here in America. So tell me about it. Yeah. So you're not alone. So well, let me just explain. This book arose out of I met about five years ago, a guy named Tom Ikeda in Seattle. And Tom has for

[6:08]Daniel James Brown: twenty five years been collecting and videotaping the oral histories of Japanese Americans, mostly who lived through the World War II years. So first generation, second generation Japanese Americans. And I met Tom and he talked about what he did. So I went home and I started listening to these recorded stories that these people were telling about their own lives. And I just was entranced by some of the stories. Were all about Japanese Americans, but they were also the kinds of stories that I tend to be drawn to about ordinary Americans confronting really difficult situations pulling together in order to overcome them. And in this case, the thing that had to be overcome was particularly draft age young men, Japanese American young men, right after Pearl Harbor faced this real dilemma. Their families were being incarcerated in these camps around the American West. They had to walk away from their businesses, from the homes they owned, from their beloved pets, from the schools they were enrolled in. Their lives were completely taken away from them, they were forced into these camps. At the same time, some of these young men, like other young American men at the beginning of the war really wanted to serve their country. They wanted to enlist and many of them tried to, but because their ancestry was Japanese, they were not allowed to enlist. Until about a year later when the Roosevelt administration reversed course and they created an all Japanese American segregated army unit called the four hundred forty second Regimental Combat Team. So the course some of these young men took was to join the four hundred forty second. Other young men thought the right thing to do was to resist with every fiber of their being, the incarceration of their families and the government that was incarcerating them. So there was this complex set of interactions and the book traces the paths that these four young men and their families took during the war. Wow. It's hard to imagine that

[8:24]Zibby Owens: families like that were just whisked off. And you have a very interesting note at the start about even your choice of language of how you described it and how in history, if you kind of couch the terms nicely and say, you know, like, I can't remember what the words were, but something like, you know, a detention not detention center, that would sound bad. Like, you know, they kept people in a certain place, but really they were concentration camps. Not to be confused with the, you know, Auschwitz or Dachau or whatever, but the way history has recorded it has made it sound much better, has sort of couched it in these gentler terms. Tell me about the laying it bare

[9:04]Daniel James Brown: and saying it like it is. So I thought that was important. I mean, it wasn't just the camps. And first of I just want to be really clear. When I use the term concentration camps, I'm in no way equating them with the death camps and the slave labor camps of the Nazis. Those were an entirely different thing. But when the government began to round up and incarcerate Japanese Americans, American citizens and their parents in these camps, they used a lot of really soft language to describe what was happening, euphemistic language. So, the first place most of these people were taken were to fairgrounds and horse stables around the western part of the country where they, in some cases, were made literally to live in horse stalls. They called those places assembly centers, And then they were sent to these bleak camps out in the various deserts of the American West, really miserable places and surrounded by barbed wire. And they called those relocation centers. And there was this whole set of even the word internment, which is still the term most people use for what happened is sort of like what exactly does that mean? It's kind of a vague, term. They were actually incarcerating people. So I think it's important and I have a little note at the beginning of the book that I think it's important if you're going to tell an honest story to use honest language. And so I tried to resist using the language that the government was using at the time to describe what was happening. As I say, use this more honest language, even though I realized that, and I hope people don't, start assuming that I'm equating these camps

[10:45]Zibby Owens: with death camps. So what was the rationale then for the government putting all Japanese Americans in their own regiment?

[10:54]Daniel James Brown: Well, it's, you know, I'm not sure exactly why they decided to go with the segregated regiment. My suspicion is that they felt that incorporating Japanese Americans into other regiments, other divisions, other army units would cause too much friction. There was so much anger directed at Japan as a nation, the Japanese Imperial Army in particular, that I think they just were concerned there'd be just too much friction and that they would be disruptive to the fighting capabilities of other units. And also, I think perhaps they felt that the Japanese Americans fighting together not only would have less friction, but might have certain sense of comradeship. So, I'm not sure exactly what the rationale was, but I think basically it was that. The 440, I should say, although it was all Japanese American, many of the officers, particularly at the higher levels were in fact were white. They were not Japanese Americans. So the command structure remained Caucasian.

[12:01]Zibby Owens: So you obviously have this talent for observation. Right? Even in the scene when you talk about the now 90 who are eating lunch together and you talked about one running around and making sure the other doesn't fall and making sure he had his cane. You said that in that one gesture, it summed up their whole relationship. You notice all these little things and you notice them in your last book and just the way people relate to each other. Like how did you become how did that become part of who you were? Were you shot? Like, tell me about that.

[12:36]Daniel James Brown: I have no idea, actually. But I mean, I do, I think, well, I guess, I mean, it's deliberate and it's conscious. When I know I'm gonna be writing about something, I sort of turn on video recorder mode in my head. And I try to notice the little things because it's the little things that actually tell us who a person is. So the senior describing as long after the war, when I met these guys, they were old men, and they've been so closely knit for the seventy five years since they fought in Europe. They just love each other and they take care of each other so lovingly that is just really humbling to watch these old men, how affectionate they were with one another and how they treated one another. So, you know, I mean, I think that's the kind of little detail that somebody helping a one old man helping another old man out of a chair tells you a lot about their relationship and what they've been through together. So, I try to when I know I'm writing about something, I just try to see all those small things. So if someone were writing about you, let's say this last day or two even,

[13:51]Zibby Owens: like what little thing did you do that would reveal a lot about who you were?

[13:56]Daniel James Brown: I spent a lot of time sitting in front of my computer doing podcasts and radio interviews and not getting very much sleep mostly. Other than that, I don't know. I don't really pay attention to myself when I'm in this mode, just sort of drinking a lot of coffee. Coffee is probably the iconic thing.

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[17:30]Zibby Owens: How did you get started in your whole career? Like, how did you end up in a place where you could write these big epic historical narratives that changed the way we see events in history?

[17:45]Daniel James Brown: Yeah. I didn't really become a writer till quite late in life. I think I was in my mid fifties when I started writing. I was an English teacher, college English teacher in California for many years. And when I got married, I I started working for software companies as a technical writer, technical editor. And it was really only sort of when I started, I'd been working at that for many decades, and I started looking towards retirement that I started fiddling around with writing really basically as a hobby. I wrote my first book without having an agent or a publisher or anything. And to my great surprise, it got published on a very small level. But that sort of opened the doors for me. By the time I had written my second book, I was able to make a career of it. So I stopped doing what I was doing and just became a full time writer. Just basically building one book, each book sort of trying to build it at a higher level than the previous book in terms of how ambitious it was and on what level I was trying to get it published.

[18:48]Zibby Owens: So, you know, ended up a lot of hard work and I'm sure some lucky breaks along the way. And so what's your process like? Obviously a lot of it is in person meeting with primary sources and everything, but when you decide to tackle a topic, like what are the things you weigh in your mind and then how do you then go get the information you need? Yeah, I mean, it takes a lot of work to write a book like this. This book has actually probably been five years that I've been working on this book.

[19:15]Daniel James Brown: It's just an enormous amount of wading through primary materials. In this case, the biggest single thing was all these video recorded oral histories that Tom Nikita has collected at Densho, just listening to hundreds of hours of these folks talking about their experiences, both the four people that I wound up focusing on, but also other people that were at the same place at the same time. So I could pull their details in as well. So just tons of listening, meeting the family members of those folks that I could find family members for a lot of just boring traditional library research, reading books about Pearl Harbor and about the April and Asian American history and a lot of just library work. So it takes a long time to sort of accumulate all that background material. And then as you suggested, the hard part is sort of selecting what you're actually going to use. And as I think I said earlier, in this case, I just decided to focus on this one thing is young draft age men, Japanese American men at the beginning of the war. There are situations happening. What do you do?

[20:38]Zibby Owens: And make that the focus of the book. Did you think about calling it the boys in the war?

[20:44]Daniel James Brown: No, no, I didn't. Actually, my wife, I'm terrible with titles. My wife came up with this title. I mean, one way of looking at it is title is sort of a metaphor for this mountain of troubles that these young men and their families, you know, I mean, one day they're just going along with their lives as immigrant families trying to make their way in America. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, there's this mountain of difficulties suddenly looming in their path. They have to figure out a way around it or over it. And so it seemed like an apt metaphor. It's also just a fact that fits in neatly that when these guys were fighting in Europe, they were always fighting their way up the side of some mountain or another. The the Germans always had the high ground, and they were always having to fight uphill to take the hill or the mountain away from the Germans. So So I think I didn't mean to disparage the title in any way. It's a good, strong title. Like it. No. I'm not trying to offend it. I'm just explaining it here. I say, it's my wife's one of my wife's many contributions to this book.

[21:50]Zibby Owens: Does she get really involved in your research? I mean, would imagine as you get so singularly focused on a topic for years that it's hard not to have everyone in your orbit kind of get involved. Yeah. And this one kind of became overwhelming. There was so much material that Sharon,

[22:05]Daniel James Brown: set a couple of years into my work to start working side by side with me, helping me sort through materials. I went a number of times to different archives, actually, particularly at the University of Hawaii. And there's worse places to have to go to do research than Hawaii. But our trips to Hawaii were mostly spent inside a windowless building on the University of Hawaii campus pouring over old letters and things. Yeah, so she did a lot, helped me with a lot of research and edited drafts and much more than any of my previous books, she's been a huge help with this one. Doctor. You should have put her on the podcast. Doctor. We should. She's pretty shy, she probably will. Oh yeah.

[22:48]Zibby Owens: See, that's how you can get past the the coffee consumption. You just, like, have to outsource your your podcasts from now on.

[22:56]Daniel James Brown: Yeah. Well, I'd love to see her do that. That'd be fun.

[22:59]Zibby Owens: Well, what lessons should we really take away? I mean, you mentioned in your book about how many Japanese then saw it when the events of nineeleven were happening, that the same sort of, you know, discrimination and widespread, you know, unfair targeting of people. And now, of course, there's more Asian targeting again with coronavirus and all these other things. I mean, this is something that America is not particularly good at getting out of its system. What can we do about this?

[23:27]Daniel James Brown: Yeah, well, you know, I mean, it's a big problem, obviously, and I don't expect my book is gonna cure it. But you know, I mean, my hope is that I think if readers read a book like this, I think if they really get to know not just these young men, but their parents, their mothers, their mothers actually, who are actually very important in this story, their sisters, their aunties. I think if they read these stories and get to know these folks on a very individual personal level and understand what they went through to become Americans, what they sacrificed for this country in various ways, particularly during the World War II era, but also later. You know, I just think that will help build appreciation and awareness. This is just for young men and their families, but I think it'll build more awareness for the role that Asian Americans in general have played in American history in making this country what it is. And I'm optimistic enough person that I think it'll open some hearts. I'm sure it's, as I say, it's not going to cause all the problems we have, but I do think that a book like this can open some hearts and also just teach, it taught me a lot about the history, in this case, particularly of Japanese Americans, but also of Asian Americans in general. I thought I knew much more than it turns out I actually did know when I started the research about the history, not just of these guys, but the sort of the broader history of Asian American participation in the building of this country. So I learned a lot, and I hope my readers will learn a lot, but also just sort of take it to heart on a personal level. Do you have your mindset on your next topic yet? Or are you is this it or what? Oh, I don't know. It may be it. These these things take a long time. As I say, it took, you know, five years to write and will probably occupy me for the next year doing publicity for talking about it with the readers. You know, if something really grabs me during that time or after that, I might dive into another one of these, but it's a really big commitment. I'm gonna be 70 next year. And so five years, it's a long timeframe for me. You have to just do it based on where Sharon wants to go on vacation, I think. Well, yeah, I mean, maybe another Hawaii story. We did squeeze a few trips to the beach during those research trips. That, of course, was fun. So yeah, actually, you know, Sharon also, I went on a, I was honored to go on a tour of some of these guys all fought in Europe. And so I went on a tour of some of the battlefields where they fought with the sons and daughters of these veterans, these four hundred forty second veterans. And Sharon went with me on that. And so we traipsed over Italy, climbing up to the tops of mountains to see these places where these guys had done some pretty extraordinary things. So that was I mean, it was really fun having her along and I know she really, really enjoyed that. When it came time to editing the book, having had her there was really useful that she had seen some of the same places I had seen. That's great. So are these going to be, is this going be a movie? Well, we're actually talking to a young director about actually turning it into a series, of HBO style limited series. I don't know how many episodes, multiple episodes, multiple hours. That way we can trace the families really beginning with their roots in Japan and the experience of the immigrants coming to Hawaii and to the West Coast of The Mainland, which is really an essential part of the story to understand where they came from. So we're hoping, yeah, to develop a series of episodes that sort of unveil the story and get you to know these guys on a personal basis and unfold it in that way.

[27:32]Zibby Owens: Excellent. Oh, I can't wait to watch that. Wow.

[27:35]Daniel James Brown: So what advice would you have for aspiring authors? Doctor. You know, I mean, part of me wants to say start before your mid 50s because I kinda wish, you know, I had forty more years to be a writer. I really enjoy it. It's great work. It's just, it's fun. It's rewarding. But you know, I don't think I actually would say that. I think one should start writing when everyone feels like starting to write, when everyone feels ready for it. The main thing is, I would just say do it. The hardest thing is to overcome the initial blank page syndrome and to just get something down on paper or on your computer screen. Once you do that, that first step is the hardest step in a lot of ways. There's plenty of hard steps along the way. But get started, do it, and then keep at it, and expect a fair amount of rejection. I have upstairs in my office a shoebox full of rejection letters, probably dozens of them from my first book and it took a lot of just hanging in there and continuing to try before that first book got published. But once it did, it led to another book and then that led to The Boys in the Boat and so on. So perseverance.

[28:53]Zibby Owens: And pick up some shoe boxes.

[28:55]Daniel James Brown: And shoe boxes around for your rejection It's a badge of honor. It shows you've been doing your work if you've got some rejection letters to show. Excellent.

[29:06]Zibby Owens: I could pull mine out and start flinging them. There's a lot. Anyway, well, Daniel, thank you so much. Thanks for chatting. I know this book will be, you know, an immense success and pleasure talking to you early in its journey. So thank you. Thanks so much for having me. Okay. Good luck. Bye bye. Alright. Bye bye. Thanks for listening to this episode of Moms Don't Have Time to Read Books. Don't forget to follow me on Instagram at Zibby Owens and at moms don't have time to read books. Also sign up for my newsletter at zibbyowens.com and sign up for my virtual book club and meet lots of authors on Zoom every other week. Thanks so much to Steve and Ryan at Texture Sound for the sound editing, and thank you to Morning Moon Productions for providing this fantastic intro and outro music.