On September 15, 1945, Sergeant James Morrison of the 25th Infantry Division was on patrol near the ruins of Hiroshima when he heard a baby crying. He followed the sound to the rubble of a collapsed building and found a six-month-old baby girl wrapped in cloth torn from a kimono. A cloth label bore her name: Yuki. Her parents were nowhere to be found.
Morrison was a 28-year-old farmer from Enid, Oklahoma, who had never held a baby before. He held the baby in his arms, and the baby stopped crying.
He carried Yuki back to his unit. His fellow soldiers told him to leave the baby, that she would be cared for by the Japanese Red Cross. Morrison wrapped the baby in his military coat and carried her for three months, until he returned to the United States. When immigration officers at the port of Oakland asked why he was carrying a Japanese baby, he said simply, She is my daughter.
Morrison brought Yuki to Oklahoma, where his family was shocked but eventually accepting. She grew up as the daughter of a farming family. She learned to speak with a Oklahoma twang that no one could quite place. She was never told she was Japanese until she was twelve.
Morrison died in 1994. Yuki now lives in Oklahoma City and is a schoolteacher. She tells her class the same thing every year, He was a soldier in a war. He had every reason to leave me. He had every reason to be a coward. But he was not. He was my father.