Hawaii

by James Michener

  It was under Hale's direction that The Fort insinuated its men onto the public boards that controlled things like the university and the parks, and once when an outside writer took pains to cross-reference the 181 most influential board members in Hawaii, he found that only thirty-one men in all were involved, and that of them twenty-eight were Hales, Whipples, Hoxworths, Hewletts and Janderses ... or their sons-in-law. "A very public-spirited group of people," the writer concluded, "but it is often difficult to tell one board from the other or any from the board of H & H."

  The Honolulu Mail was owned by The Fort, but its function in the community was never blatantly abused. It was a good paper, Republican of course, and it frequently supported positions which The Fort could not have approved but which the general public did; but when an issue involved land, sugar or labor, the Mail wrote forceful editorials explaining how the public good was involved and how government ought to respond. Once when a Mail reporter was sent to fifteen different sugar-growing areas to write a series of articles proving how much better off the people of Hawaii were than laborers in Jamaica, Fiji and Queensland, his returning letters were first studied in The Fort, "to be sure he maintains the proper historical perspective." The Mail was scrupulously fair in reporting activities of the underground Democratic Party, but the articles were written as if a benevolent old man was chuckling over the actions of imbecile and delinquent children.

  The endless chain of appointed office holders sent out from Washington--too often incompetent and gregarious politicians--was quickly absorbed into The Fort's genial social life: hunting trips to the big island, boating parties, picnics by the sea. Sometimes a newcomer could sit on the bench for six months without ever meeting a Chinese other than a defendant in a court case or a Japanese who was not dressed in white and serving sandwiches. Such officials could be forgiven if they came to think of Hawaii as The Fort and vice versa and to hand down their decisions accordingly.

  But Hoxworth Hale's greatest contribution lay in a general principle which he propounded early in his regime, and it is to his credit that he perceived this problem long before any of his contemporaries, and his adroit handling of it earned The Fort millions upon millions of dollars. He announced his policy flatly: "No military man stationed in Hawaii above the rank of captain in the army or lieutenant in the navy is to leave these islands without having been entertained by at least three families in this room." Then he added, "And if you can include the lower ranks, so much the better!" As a result of this rule, the constant flow of military people who passed through Hawaii came to think of big Hewlett Janders and gracious Hoxworth Hale as the two commanders of the islands, men who could be trusted, men who were sound; and in the years that were about to explode, making Hawaii a bastion of the Pacific, it was very difficult for Washington to send any senior admiral or general to Honolulu who did not already know The Fort intimately. Therefore, when a contract was to be let, bids weren't really necessary: "Hewlett Janders, the fellow I went hunting with ten years ago, he can build it for us." More important, when the procurement and engineering offices in Washington began to assume major importance hi America's rush program of military expansion, the rising young men who crowded those offices almost had to be the ones that Hoxworth Hale and Hewie Janders had entertained so lavishly in the previous decade.

  Nothing Hoxworth accomplished was more important than this establishment of a personal pipeline direct to the sources of power in Washington. Again, he never abused his prerogatives. He never called generals on the phone, shouting, as did some, "Goddam it, Shelly, they're talking about eminent domain on three thousand acres of my choicest sugar fields." Usually this made Washington determined to go ahead with condemnation proceedings. Hoxworth Hale acted differently: "This you, Shelly? How's Bernice? We're fine out here. Say, Shelly, what I called about was the proposed air strip out Waipahu way. That's a good site, Shelly, but have your men studied what the landing pattern would be with those tall mountains at the end . . . Yes, Shelly, the ones we went hunting on that weekend . . . Yes, I just want to be sure your men have thought about that, because there's another strip of land a little farther makai . . . Yes, that means toward the sea in Hawaiian, and I was wondering . . . Yes, it's our land, too, so there's no advantage to me one way or the other ... Be sure to give Bernice our best."

  Hawaii in these years of benevolent domination by The Fort was one of the finest areas of the world. The sun shone, the trade winds blew, and when tourists arrived on the luxury H & H liners the police band played hulas and girls in grass skirts danced. Labor relations were reasonably good, and any luna who dared strike a worker would have been instantly whisked out of the islands. The legislature was honest, the judges sent out from the mainland handed down strict but impartial decisions, except in certain unimportant cases involving land, and the economy flourished. It is true that mainland firms like Gregory's and California Fruit protested: "My God, the place is a feudal barony! We tried to buy land for a store and they said, 'You can't buy any land in Hawaii. We don't want your kind of store in the islands.'"

  It was also true that Chinese or Japanese who wanted to leave the islands to travel on the mainland had to get written permission to do so, and if The Fort felt that a given Oriental was not the kind of man who should represent the islands in America, because he tended toward communist ideas, speaking of labor unions and such, the authorities would not let him leave, and there was nothing he could do about it. Hewlett Janders in particular objected to the large number of young Chinese and Japanese who wanted to go to the mainland to become doctors and lawyers, and he personally saw to it that a good many of them did not get away, for, as he pointed out: "We've got fine doctors right here that we can trust, and if we keep on allowing Orientals to become lawyers, we merely create problems for ourselves. Educating such people above their station has got to stop."

  Once in 1934, after Hoxworth and his team had performed miracles in protecting Hawaii from the fury of the depression--it fell less heavily on the islands than anywhere else on earth--he was embittered when a group of Japanese workers connived to have a labor man from Washington visit the islands, and Hale refused to see the visitor. "You'd think they'd have respect for what I've done keeping Hawaii safe from the depression. Every Japanese who got his regular pay cheek, got it thanks to me, and now they want me to talk with labor-union men!”

  He refused three times to permit an interview, but one day the man from Washington caught him on the sidewalk and said hurriedly, "Mr. Hale, I respect your position, but I've got to tell you that under the new laws you are required to let labor-union organizers talk to your men on the plantations."

  "What's that?" Hoxworth asked in astonishment. "Did you say . . ."

  "I said," the visitor, an unpleasant foreign type, repeated slowly, "that under the law you are required to permit labor-union organizers access to your men on the plantations."

  "I thought that's what you said," Hale replied. "Good heavens, man!" Then, taking refuge in a phrase he had often heard Wild Whip declaim, he said, "If I saw a rattlesnake crawling onto one of my plantations and I shot him, I'd be a hero. Yet you want me voluntarily to open my lands to labor organizers. Truly, you must be out of your mind." He turned abruptly and left.

  "Mr. Hale!" the labor man called, catching up with him and grabbing his coat.

  "Don't you ever touch me!" Hale stormed.

  "I apologize," the man said contritely. "I just wanted to warn you that Hawaii's no different from the rest of America."

  "Apparently you don't know Hawaii," Hale said, and left.

  In his cold, efficient governance of The Fort he manifested only two peculiarities which could be construed as weaknesses. Whenever he had a major decision to make he spent some time alone in his office, pushing back and forth across his polished desk a reddish rock about the size of a large fist, and in the contemplation of its mysterious form he found intellectual reassurance. "The rock came from his great-great-grandmother on Maui," his secr
etary explained. "It's sort of a good-luck omen," she said, but what the good luck derived from she did not know and Hale never told her. Also, whenever The Fort started a new building Hale insisted that local kahunas be brought in to orient it. Once a mainland architect asked, "What's a man with a Yale degree doing with kahunas?" and Hale replied, "You'd be surprised. In our courts it's illegal to force a Hawaiian to testify if a known kahuna is watching in the courtroom." The architect asked, "You certainly don't believe such nonsense, do you?" and Hale replied evasively, "Well, if I were the judge, I would certainly insist that any known kahunas be barred from my courtroom. Their power is peculiar."

  One unspoken rule regarding The Fort was observed by all: The Fort did not exist; it was a phrase never mentioned in public; Hale himself never spoke it; and it was banned from both newspaper and radio. The building in which the men met remained as it was during Wild Whip's tenancy: a rugged red-stone commercial headquarters built like a fort and bearing a simple brass plate that read: Hoxworth & Hale, Shipmasters and Factors.

  BACK IN THE 1880's, when the Chinese vegetable peddler Nyuk Tsin decided to educate her five sons and to send one of them all the way to Michigan for a law degree, Honolulu had been amazed at her tenacity and instructed by the manner in which she forced four of her sons to support the fifth on the mainland. But what Hawaii was now about to witness in the case of Japanese families and their dedication to learning made anything that the Chinese had accomplished look both dilatory and lacking in conviction. Specifically, the penniless night-soil collector Kamejiro Sakagawa was determined that each of his five children must have nothing less than a full education: twelve years of public school, four years at the local university, followed by three at graduate school on the mainland. In any other nation in the world, such an ambition would have been insane; it was to the glory of America, and especially that part known as Hawaii, that such a dream on the part of a privy-cleaner was entirely practical, if only the family had the courage to pursue it.

  From the Kakaako home each morning the five Sakagawa children set forth to school. They were clean. Their black hair was bobbed straight across their eyes and their teeth had no cavities. They walked with an eager bounce, their bright scrubbed faces shining in sunlight, for to them school was the world's great adventure. Their education did not come easily, for it was conducted in a foreign language: English. At home their mother spoke almost none and their father knew only pidgin.

  But in spite of language difficulties, the five Sakagawas performed brilliantly and even teachers who might have begun with an animus against Japanese grew to love these particular children. Reiko-chan set the pattern for her brothers. In her first six grades she usually led her class, and when teachers had to leave the room to see the principal, they felt no compunction about turning their classes over to this adorable little girl with the delicately slanted eyes and the flawless skin. Reiko-chan was destined to be a teacher's pet, and early in life she decided that when she graduated from the university, she would be a teacher too.

  The boys were a more rowdy lot, and no teacher in her right mind would have turned her class over to them. They specialized in the rougher games, for in accordance with the ancient rule that all who came to Hawaii were modified, the four Sakagawa boys were obviously going to be taller than their father, with better teeth, wider shoulders and straighter legs. It was noticeable that they threw like Americans and could knock bottles off fences with surprising accuracy, but their mastery of English fell markedly below their sister's, a fact of which they were proud, for in the Honolulu public schools anyone who spoke too well was censured and even tormented by his classmates. To be accepted, one had to speak pidgin like a moron, and above everything else, the Sakagawa boys wanted to be accepted.

  The success of this family in the American school was the more noteworthy because when classes were over, and when haole children ran home to play, the five Sakagawas lined up and marched over to the Shinto temple, where the man who was a priest on Sundays appeared in a schoolteacher's black kimono to conduct a Japanese school. He was a severe man, much given to beating children, and since he was proud of the fact that he spoke no corrupting English and had only recently come from Tokyo, he tyrannized the children growing up in an alien land. "How can you ever become decent, self-respecting Japanese," he stormed, "if you do not learn to sit properly upon your ankles. Sakagawa Goro!” and the heavy rod fell harshly across the boy's back. "Do not fidget! Will you feel no shame when you return home and visit friends and fidget?" Bang, went the rod. Bang and bang again.

  The priest was contemptuous of everything American and impressed upon his charges that they were in this alien land for only a few years until they took up their proper life, and when he described Japan, his eyes grew misty and a poetry came into his voice. "A land created by the immortal gods themselves!" he assured them. "In Japan there is no rowdyism like here. In Japan children are respectful to their parents. In Japan every man knows his place and all do reverence to the emperor. No man can predict what impossible things Japan will some day accomplish." He taught from the same books that were used in Tokyo, using the same inflections and the same stern discipline. For three hours each day, when other children were rollicking in the sun, the Sakagawas sat painfully on their ankles before the priest and received what he called their true education.

  There was much agitation against the Japanese-language schools, as they were called, and there was no doubt that the priests taught an un-American, Shintoistic, nationalistic body of material, but in those years not a single child who attended the schools got into trouble with the police. Among the Japanese there was no delinquency. Parents were obeyed and teachers were respected. In the Japanese schools a severe rectitude was taught and enforced, and much of the civic responsibility that marked the adult Japanese community derived from these austere late-afternoon sessions; and it was a strange thing, but not a single child in later years ever remembered much of the jingoistic nonsense taught by the priests; few ever wanted to go back to Japan; but all learned respect for an established order of life. It was as if the great freedoms enjoyed in the American school in the first part of the day insulated the child against the nationalistic farrago of the afternoon, so that most Japanese children, like the Sakagawas, assimilated the best from both schools and were not marred by the worst of either.

  Actually, their true education in these years took place at home. In their tiny Kakaako shack, which would have been cramped even for a family of three, their mother enforced the rigid rules of cleanliness that she had learned as a child. Nothing was left on the floor. No dish went unwashed. Chopsticks were handled so that no food dropped. Clothes were put away neatly, and the child who did not bathe completely at least once each day was a hopeless barbarian, no better than a Chinese. Their father's influence was more subtly felt. He saw the world as divided sharply into the good and the bad and he never hesitated long in defining where any given action fell. It was good to honor one's country, it was good to die heroically, it was good to attend to what one's superiors said, it was good to have education. He lived a life of the most fierce propriety in which stealing was bad, and gambling, and speaking back, and tearing one's clothes. He was a harsh disciplinarian, but he rarely struck his children, relying instead upon the force of his character. He loved his children as if they were mysterious angels that had been allowed to live with him for a little while, and if the mean little shack was sometimes barren of food, it was never lacking in love.

  The children engaged in nonsensical jokes which their parents could not understand. Reiko-chan had a series of remarks which her brothers greeted with shouts no matter how often she recited them: "What did the hat say to the hatrack? You stay here and I'll go on a head." Six times a week the boys could scream with delight over that one. "What did the carpet say to the floor? Don't make a move, I got you covered!" And "What did the big toe say to the little toe? Don't look back, but we're being followed by a heel."

  The boys
had rougher games, including one in which Goro would grab a brother's ear and ask sweetly, "Do you want your ear any longer?" If the brother said no, Goro would pretend to twist it off. If the answer was yes, Goro would jerk vigorously on the ear and shout, "Then I'll make it longer!" This usually led to a fight, which was what Goro had intended.

  But on two basic principles the Sakagawa children would permit no joking. No one was allowed to call them Japs. This was a word so offensive to the Japanese that it simply could not be tolerated, for throughout America it was being used in headlines and cartoons to depict sneaking, evil little men with buckteeth. No haole could appreciate the fervor with which Japanese combated the use of this word.

  Nor were they to be called slant-eyes. They argued: "Our eyes are not slanted! It's only because we have no fold in our eyelids that they look slanted." But of course in this they were wrong. Reiko-chan's little eyes were delightfully slanted, low near the nose and tilting upward in saucy angles. It was she who came home with one of their best games. Putting her two fingers at the corners of her lovely eyes, she pulled them way up and chanted, "My mother's a Japanese." Then she pulled them far down and sang, "And my father's a Chinese." Then, moving her forefingers to the middle of her eyebrows and her thumbs below, she spread her eyes wide apart and shouted, "But I'm a hundred per cent American."

  When Kamejiro first saw this trick, he rebuked his daughter and reminded her: "The proudest thing in your life is that you're a Japanese. Don't ever laugh about it." But at the same time he became vaguely aware that with the arrival of children his family had become entangled in values that were contradictory and mutually exclusive: he sent his offspring to American schools so that they would succeed in American life; but at the same time he kept them in Japanese school so that they would be prepared for their eventual return to Japan. The children felt this schizophrenia and one day at the close of the American school Goro went not to the Japanese teacher but directly home, where Kamejiro met him with the question, "Why are you home?"