Skip to main content

Forbidden Smiles

March 2023
1min read

Those who enjoyed “Forbidden Diary,” Natalie Crouter’s remarkable account of life in a Japanese prison camp during World War II (April/May, 1979) will remember Captain Rokuro Tomibe, the gentle camp commandant who did his best to make life for the Americans under his control as bearable as possible. Nevertheless, after the war Tomibe became a defendant during the Allied War Crime Trials held in Manila. Fortunately, Jim Halsema, a former prisoner of Tomibe’s, was in Manila covering the trials as a reporter; he insisted on testifying in Tomibe’s behalf, and on the strength of his evidence Tomibe was exonerated.

In 1977 there was a reunion of the Camp Holmes internees in San Francisco. Two hundred and twenty Americans attended, including Natalie Crouter, and as their special guest, they invited Captain Tomibe. In a memoir written after the event, Tomibe recalled “many beautiful stories about how Japanese soldiers and American Workers worked together, in spite of their language barrier, to accomplish their same purpose safely and certainly. I believe that human feeling which sprouted spontaneously became a smile … and enhanced into love among fellow soldiers as sharing a cigarette to smoke.”

We hope you enjoy our work.

Please support this 72-year tradition of trusted historical writing and the volunteers that sustain it with a donation to American Heritage.

Donate

Stories published from "June/July 1979"

The ex-Presidency now carries perquisites and powers that would have amazed all but the last few who have held that office

Authored by: The Editors

The Utah Photographs of George Edward Anderson

Authored by: Mark Van Doren

A young poet’s memories of the old rural America in whose fields he worked for two sunny months while awaiting the call to service in the First World War

Authored by: Thomas Fleming

For more than a century, Irish-Americans were whipsawed between love for their tormented native land and loyalty to the United States. But no more .

Authored by: Richard Reinhardt

Westward with the course of empire Colonel Jonathan Drake Stevenson took his way in 1846. With him went the denizens of New York’s Tammany wards, oyster cellars, and gin mills—the future leaders of California.

Authored by: Geoffrey Bocca

The Queen Mary in Peace and War

Featured Articles

Often thought to have been a weak president, Carter was strong-willed in doing what he thought was right, regardless of expediency or the political fallout.

Rarely has the full story been told how a famed botanist, a pioneering female journalist, and First Lady Helen Taft battled reluctant bureaucrats to bring Japanese cherry trees to Washington. 

Why have thousands of U.S. banks failed over the years? The answers are in our history and politics.

In his Second Inaugural Address, Abraham Lincoln embodied leading in a time of polarization, political disagreement, and differing understandings of reality.

Native American peoples and the lands they possessed loomed large for Washington, from his first trips westward as a surveyor to his years as President.

A hundred years ago, America was rocked by riots, repression, and racial violence.

During Pres. Washington’s first term, an epidemic killed one tenth of all the inhabitants of Philadelphia, then the capital of the young United States.

Now a popular state park, the unassuming geological feature along the Illinois River has served as the site of centuries of human habitation and discovery.  

The recent discovery of the hull of the battleship Nevada recalls her dramatic action at Pearl Harbor and ultimate revenge on D-Day as the first ship to fire on the Nazis.

Our research reveals that 19 artworks in the U.S. Capitol honor men who were Confederate officers or officials. What many of them said, and did, is truly despicable.

Here is probably the most wide-ranging look at Presidential misbehavior ever published in a magazine.

When Germany unleashed its blitzkreig in 1939, the U.S. Army was only the 17th largest in the world. FDR and Marshall had to build a fighting force able to take on the Nazis, against the wishes of many in Congress.