Hawaii

by James Michener

  The brother and sister looked at each other and it was Shigeo who formulated their doubt: "On the other hand, Pop used to prowl around every night."

  "Shigeo!" Reiko-chan cried. "That's unworthy!”

  "I'm only trying to think like the F.B.I., Shig explained in justification.

  They were further disturbed when Mr. Ishii, in a state of maximum excitement, ran up with this startling news: "The Japanese army is making a landing at the other end of the island. They've already captured Maui and Kauai."

  "That's impossible!" Shigeo cried. "I've been all over Honolulu this morning, and I heard nothing like that."

  "You'll see!" the quick little man assured them. "By tomorrow night Japan will be in complete control." To the amazement of the Sakagawa children, Mr. Ishii seemed positively exhilarated by the prospect, and Shigeo caught him by the arm.

  "You be careful what you're saying, Mr. Ishii! The F.B.I. just arrested Pop."

  "When the Japanese win he'll be a hero," the little man exulted. "Now everyone who laughs at Japanese will behave themselves. You watch what happens when the troops march into Honolulu." He waved a warning finger at them and dashed on down the street.

  "I think he's out of his mind," Shigeo said sadly as he watched the community gossip disappear. As Mr. Ishii turned the corner, a patrol came through Kakaako, announcing with a loud-speaker: "All Japanese are under house arrest. Do not leave your homes. I repeat. Do not leave your homes."

  Shigeo went up to them and said, "I'm the Sunday delivery boy for Cable Wireless!

  There was a moment of hesitation, after which the patrol made the type of decision that was going to be made many times that day throughout Hawaii: the Japanese are all spies and they are all disloyal; they must be clamped into house arrest; but we know this particular Japanese and the work he is doing is essential, therefore he is excused. The patrol looked at Shig's bicycle with its clear marking, and one man asked, "Aren't you the kid who plays for Punahou?" "Yes," Slug replied. "You're all right. You go ahead."

  "You got a pass I could use?" Shig asked. "I don't want to get shot at."

  "Sure. Use this."

  At two o'clock that afternoon Shig reported to his main office for his fourth batch of telegrams and he was handed one addressed to General Lansing Hommer, but since Shig knew that the general lived at the extreme end of his route, he tucked that particular message into the bottom of his pile and as he pedaled through the western part of Honolulu toward Pearl Harbor and saw the devastation he understood better than most what had happened and what was about to happen. From the porch of one house where he delivered a cable, he could see the anchorage at Pearl Harbor itself, and alongside the piers he saw the stricken ships, lying on their sides and belching flames.

  The man to whom he had given the telegram said, "Well, the goddamned Japs hit everything they aimed at. Papers said Japs couldn't fly planes because they were cross-eyed. You ask me, we better get some cross-eyed pilots. And some 'gunners, too. I stood on this porch for three hours and I didn't see our men hit one goddamned Jap plane. What do you think of that?" "You mean they all got away?" "Every one of the bastards."

  "Some monkey was telling me the Japanese have already landed," Shig said.

  "They'll never make it," the man replied. "So far the Japs have hit only the navy, which is a bunch of do-nothings anyway. When they try to land they run up against the dogfaces. That'll be different. I got two sons in the infantry. Plenty tough. You got anyone in uniform?" "Two brothers." "Infantry, I hope?" "Yep. They're plenty tough, too."

  "I don't think the yellow bastards'll make it," the man said as he ripped open his telegram.

  At four thirty-one that hot, terrifying afternoon Shigeo Sakagawa reached the end of his route, and he pedaled his Cable Wireless bicycle up the long drive leading to the residence of General Hommer, where the ashen-faced military leader took the cable and scribbled his name in pencil across the receipt. His command had been virtually destroyed. The islands he was supposed to protect were at the mercy of the enemy. Even his own headquarters had been strafed with impunity. At the end of this debacle he was forced to receive cables from Washington, but this particular one was more than he could stomach. He read it, swore, crumpled it up, and threw it on the floor. As it slowly unfolded itself, Shig could read that it came from the War Department. It warned General Hommer that from secret sources Washington had concluded that Japan might attempt to attack Pearl Harbor. With all the instantaneous systems of communications available to the government, Washington could have rushed the message through in time to prevent the holocaust, but it had transmitted this most urgent of contemporary cables by ordinary commercial wireless. It arrived tea hours late, delivered on bicycle by a Japanese messenger boy.

  The speed with which Goro and Tadao rushed to offer their services to America was not matched by America in accepting those services. The 298th Infantry Regiment, which Goro joined at Schofield Barracks, was composed mostly of Japanese enlisted men commanded by non-Japanese officers, and it was this unit which was dispatched to clean up the bomb damage at Hickam Field, where dozens of American aircraft had been destroyed by Japanese bombers. When the air corps men saw the truckload of local Japanese boys invading the wrecked air strip they yelled, "They're invading!” And some frightened guards started shooting.

  "Knock it off!" the 298th shouted. "We're Americans!" and in the next three days of crisis the outfit put forth a remarkable effort, working eighteen and twenty hours a day to make the airfield operable. "Best crew on the island," one haole superior reported admiringly. "Not much question as to where their loyalty rests."

  But on the night of December 10 somebody in Honolulu headquarters received a message from California pointing out how energetic California was in rounding up its criminal Japanese, and some senior officer pushed the panic button. So in the silent hours before dawn three companies of trustworthy haole soldiers were sent with an extra complement of machine guns to perform one of the war's most curious tasks, and when dawn broke, Goro Sakagawa was the first Japanese boy in the 298th to look out of his tent and cry, "Christ! We're surrounded!"

  His mates tumbled out of their sacks and started to rush onto the parade ground when a stern voice, coming over an impersonal metallic loud-speaker commanded: "You Japanese soldiers! Listen to me. Stay right where you are. Don't make one false move. You're surrounded by guns. Stay where you are!”

  Then a different voice cried: "You Japanese soldiers. I want you to nominate one man from each tent to step outside. Quick!"

  From his tent Goro stepped into the gathering light, wearing shorts and nothing more. Then the voice continued: "You Japanese soldiers inside the tents. Pass out your rifles, your revolvers, your grenades. Quick! You men outside, stack them."

  When this was done the voice commanded: "If there are any non-Japanese soldiers in this encampment, they are to leave now. You have five minutes. Quick."

  Friends, unable to look their Japanese partners in the eye, shuffled away, and when the five minutes were gone, only Japanese boys stood bewildered in the tents. "Does this mean prison camp?" one whispered.

  "Who knows?" his mate shrugged.

  What it meant the Japanese boys were now to discover. "Muster out here!" the tinny voice commanded. "As you are! As you are!" And when the bewildered troops were in line, the colonel who had spoken first advised them: "You have been disarmed as a precautionary measure. We cannot tell when your countrymen will try to attack us again and we cannot endanger our rear by having you carrying weapons among us. You will stay within this barbed-wire enclosure until you get further orders. My men have been given one simple command: If any Jap steps outside this compound, shoot!"

  For three humiliating days, burdened with rumor and fear, the Japanese boys of the 298th looked out into machine-gun muzzles. Then their guard was relaxed and they were told, "You will be free to work on latrine duty, or paring potatoes, or picking up. But you'll never touch guns again. Now snap to." That took care
of Goro, who went into permanent latrine duty.

  When Tadao left home on December 7 he ran all the way to the university, where his unit of the R.O.T.C. had already formed up with men who lived in the dormitories, and he arrived breathless just in time to march with his outfit to repel a Japanese parachute landing that was reported to have taken place north of Diamond Head. Of course, no enemy had landed, but headquarters forgot to inform the R.O.T.C. of this, and the Japanese boys patrolled their areas for four days without relief. Japanese families in the area supplied them with rice balls into which salty pickled plums had been inserted, and the college boys kept to their lonely posts.

  It was on this silent duty that Tadao Sakagawa thought out explicitly what he would do if Japanese Imperial soldiers came over the rise at him. "I'd shoot," he said simply. "They'd be the enemy and I'd shoot." At the water reservoir, Minoru Sakagawa, of the Punahou R.O.T.C., reached the same conclusion: "I'd shoot." Across Hawaii in those angry, aching days some fourteen thousand young Japanese Americans of military age fought out with themselves this same difficult question, and all came up with the same answer: "They're obviously the enemy, so obviously I'd shoot."

  Then, after several weeks of distinguished duty, all Japanese boys in the R.O.T.C. were quietly told, "We no longer have any place for you in the outfit. Turn in your uniforms." They were given no reason, no alternative, so Tadao and Minoru turned in their hard-earned American uniforms and appeared next day in mufti. A haole soldier from Arkansas saw them walking along the street and jeered: "Why ain't you yellow-bellied bastards in uniform same as me? Why should I fight to protect you slant-eyes?"

  Minoru, being a rather beefy tackle at Punahou, was always ready for a brawl, and he turned toward the Arkansas boy, but Tadao, a quieter type, caught his arm and dragged him along. "If you hit a soldier, they'd lynch you."

  "I'll take so much," Minoru muttered, "and then somebody's going to get it."

  But they were to find out that day just how much they would be required to take, for as they came down from the R.O.T.C. headquarters, where their pleas for reinstatement were rejected, they saw their mother in her customary black kimono and straw geta walking pin-toed along Kakaako, shuffling in her peasant style and bent forward from the hips. She looked, Minoru had to admit, extremely foreign, and he was not surprised therefore when a crowd gathered and began to shout at her, telling her in words which she couldn't understand that no slant-eyed Japanese were wanted in the streets of Honolulu with their filthy kimonos. And before the boys could get to their mother, rowdies were actually beginning to tear off her kimono.

  "Why don't you wear shoes, like decent Americans?" the rowdies cried. They hectored her into a corner, without her understanding at all what was happening, and a big man kept kicking at the offensive zori. "Take 'em off, goddamn it. Take 'em off!"

  Swiftly Minoru and Tadao leaped among the crowd to protect their mother, and some sports fans recognized them and shouted, "It's the Sakagawa boys." The incident ended without further embarrassment, but Tadao, who was a diplomat, whispered to his terrified mother, "Kick off your zori. That's what made them mad." Deftly she kicked away the Japanese shoes, and the crowd cheered. On the way home Tadao warned her, "You've got to stop coming out in public wearing your kimono."

  "And buy some shoes!" Minoru snapped, for like all the boys of his age, he could not understand why his parents kept to their old ways.

  In the following days Minoru and Tadao were to be repeatedly tested. Having been born in America, they were technically citizens and even eligible to become President; but they were also Japanese and were thus subjected to humiliations worse than those suffered by aliens. Several times they were threatened by drunken soldiers, and prudence told them to keep off the streets.

  Nevertheless, animosity against all Japanese increased when Hawaii, staggered by the completeness with which Japan had defeated the local troops, understandably turned to any logical rationalization at hand "You can't tell me the Japs could have bombed our ships unless the local slant-eyes were feeding them spy information," one man shouted in a bar.

  "I know for a fact that plantation workers at Malama Sugar cut arrows across the cane fields, showing Nip fliers the way to Pearl Harbor," a luna reported.

  "The F.B.I, has proved that almost every Jap maid working for the military was a paid agent of the Mikado," an official announced.

  And the Secretary of the Navy himself, after inspecting the disaster, told the press frankly, "Hawaii was the victim of the most effective fifth-column work that has come out of this war, except in Norway."

  It was therefore no wonder that many Japanese were arrested and thrown into hastily improvised jails, whereupon those not yet picked up were ready to believe the rumor that all Japanese in Hawaii were to be evacuated to tents on Molokai. But when the jails were jammed and ships actually appeared in the harbor to haul those already arrested to concentration camps in Nevada, an unusual thing happened, one which more than any other served to bind up the wounds caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hoxworth Hale and Mrs. Hewlett Janders and Mrs. John Whipple Hoxworth and a maiden librarian named Luanda Whipple went singly, and not as a result of concerted action, to the jails where the Japanese were being held. Being the leading citizens of the community, they were admitted, and as they walked through the corridors they said to the jailers, "I know that man well. He can't possibly be a spy. Let him go."

  Mrs. Hewlett Janders even went so far as to bring her husband, big Hewie, to the jail in his naval uniform, and he identified half a dozen excellent citizens whom he had known for years. "It's ridiculous to keep those men in a concentration camp. They're as good Americans as I am."

  "Will you vouch for them if we let them go?" the F.B.I, man asked.

  "Me vouch for Ichiro Ogawa? I'd be proud to vouch for him. You come out of there, Ichiro. Go back to work."

  Some three hundred leading Japanese citizens were removed from jail by these voluntary efforts of the missionary descendants. It wasn't that they liked Japanese, or that they feared Imperial Japan less than their neighbors. It was just that as Christians they could not sit idly by and watch innocent people maltreated. In California, where the imaginary danger of trouble from potential fifth columnists was not a fraction of the real danger that could have existed in Hawaii, cruel and senseless measures were taken that would be forever an embarrassment to America: families of the greatest rectitude and patriotism were uprooted; their personal goods were stolen; their privacy was abused; and their pride as full-fledged American citizens outraged. Such things did not happen in Hawaii. Men like Hoxworth Hale and Hewlett Janders wouldn't allow them to happen; women like Miss Whipple and Mrs. Hoxworth personally went through the jails to protect the innocent.

  But when Hoxworth Hale came to the cell in which Kamejiro Sakagawa sat, a more intricate moral problem presented itself, for at first Hale was not ready to swear to the F.B.I, men, "This fellow I know to be innocent." What Hale did know was this: Kamejiro was a known dynamiter who had been in trouble during the strike at Malama Sugar; he had obstinately refused to terminate the Japanese nationality of his children; he had been prowling about all of Honolulu at night some years before Pearl Harbor; and now he was running a barbershop with his own daughter as a lure to bring in sailors and soldiers. That was the debit side. But Hale also knew one other fact: of all the young Japanese boys in Honolulu, none were finer Americans than Kamejiro's sons. Therefore, instead of passing by the cell, Hale stopped and asked to be allowed to talk with this man Sakagawa. When the cell door was opened and he sat inside with Kamejiro he told the interpreter to ask: "Mr. Sakagawa, why did you refuse to allow me to end your sons' dual citizenship?"

  The old stubborn light come into Kamejiro's eyes, but when he realized that if he did not speak the truth he might never again see his sons, he softened and said, "Will you promise never to tell my boys?"

  "Yes," Hale said, for he had family problems of his own. He directed the interpreter to promise like
wise.

  "My wife and I are not married," Kamejiro began.

  "But I saw the marriage certificate!" Hale interrupted.

  "American yes, but it doesn't count," Kamejiro explained. "When I sent for a picture bride to Hiroshima-ken, a girl was picked out and she was married to me there, in proper Japanese style, and her name was put in the village book as my wife."

  "Then what's the problem?" Hale asked.

  Kamejiro blushed at his ancient indiscretion and explained, "So when she got here I didn't like her, and there was another man who didn't like his wife, either."

  "So you swapped?" Hale asked. A smile came across his lips. It seemed rather simple.

  "Yes. In each country I am married to a different woman."

  "But of course this is your real country and this is what counts," Hale said.

  "No," Kamejiro patiently corrected. "Japan is my real home, and I would be ashamed for my village to know the wrong thing I have done."

  Hale was impressed by the man's forthright defense of Japan, even in such trying circumstances, and he said condescendingly, "I don't think it would really matter, at this distance of time."

  "Ah, but it would!” Kamejiro warned. And what he said struck a vibrant chord in Hale's own memories. "Because the wife I got in the exchange turned out to be the best wife a man ever found. But the wife I gave my friend turned out to be a very bad woman indeed, and his life has been ruined and I have had to sit and watch it happen.

  My happiness came at his expense, and I will do nothing now to hurt him any further. At least in our village they think he is an honorable man, and I will leave it that way."

  Hale clenched his hands and thought of his own reactions to just such problems and of his insistence, against the pressure of friends, that his wife Malama stay with him, even though her mind had wandered past the limits usually required for commitment to an asylum, and in that moment of loving a woman, and knowing apprehension about the fate of one's son in a time of war, Hale felt a close kinship to the little bow-legged Japanese sitting before him. To the F.B.I, man he said, "This one can surely go free." And Kamejiro returned to his family.