Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  The letter was delivered to Africa in his law offices, and he sat for a long time pondering it. At first he was consumed with rage at the humiliation his family had willingly undergone, and then he spent about an hour shoving the formal letter about his desk into this position and that. Finally he summoned his son and waited until the boy came in breathless from play along the river. In even, unimpassioned tones he said, “Hong Kong, you will not go back to school any more.”

  “I thought you said I was to go to Michigan.”

  “No. What you require to learn, son, you can learn right here. Tonight you will start reading this book on Hawaiian land systems. When you’re through give you your examination … sitting in that chair. Are those your schoolbooks?”

  “Yes.”

  “You’ll never need them again.” Slowly Africa Kee, who loved education, took the books and tore them apart. Throwing them into the wastebasket he said, “When you study your new book you are to memorize the end of every chapter. Hong Kong, you’re going to get an education that no man in Hawaii has ever had before.”

  Ultimately, of course, the Kees did squeeze a boy into Punahou. It happened in a most peculiar way. In 1910 the Republican Party had difficulty finding the right man to run for the legislature from Chinatown and somebody made the radical proposal, “Why don’t we run a Chinaman?”

  “Oh, no!” one of the Hewlett boys protested. “I don’t want that radical Africa Kee in government.”

  “I wasn’t thinking of him. I was thinking of his brother Australia.”

  A hush fell over the caucus and smiles began to play upon the faces of the white men who ran the islands, for Australia was a man whom men could like. He wasn’t too bright, played a good ukulele, was honest, didn’t have too much education but did have a host of friends among both the Chinese and the Hawaiians, with whom he had been reared. Furthermore, he had an appealing nickname, Kangaroo Kee, and without even taking a vote the caucus decided that he was their man.

  Kangaroo Kee was elected by a huge majority and kept on getting elected, and in time he became the leading Chinese in the Republican Party, a man everyone loved and trusted. Fortunately, he had a son who like himself was gloriously average, and in 1912 Punahou felt that at last it had found a Kee who could be safely admitted to the school.

  On the day this boy enrolled, Nyuk Tsin walked secretly to the entrance of the school and hid behind one of the palms to watch one of her grandsons at last enter the great school. As she saw the bright faces of the haole children gathering for the beginning of the new term, chatting of vacation experiences, she recognized here a Hale and there a Whipple, and thought: “The white people are crazy to allow Chinese in this school. This is the secret of how they rule the islands and they have a right to protect their interests.”

  Then, coming up the street, she saw her grandson walking with his father, the politician Kangaroo Kee, and she withdrew into the shadows, mumbling to herself, “This boy knows nothing. He is not worthy of this great school. But he is our beginning.”

  FOR THIRTEEN YEARS Kamejiro Sakagawa rose every morning at three-thirty to cut wild plum, storing it for his hot bath. He then ran to work, labored till sunset, ran home and lighted his fire. He now charged two cents for the first ten men to enjoy the clean hot water, a penny each for all who cared to follow. Over the course of a year he obviously earned quite a few dollars, and like all the Japanese laboring on Hanakai he watched with excitement as his hidden funds reached toward the mystic number: $400.

  From the arrival of the first Japanese back in the 1880’s, it had been agreed that a man who could return to Hiroshima with $400 in cash could thenceforth live like a samurai. “With four hundred dollars,” the workmen assured one another, “a man could buy three good rice fields, build a large house, get all the kimonos you would ever need, and live in splendor.” Every plantation laborer was determined that he would be the man to accumulate the $400, and almost none did.

  It was appalling how the money slipped through the fingers of a well-intentioned man. In Kamejiro’s case his weaknesses were neither gambling nor women nor alcohol; no, his were far more expensive—friendship and patriotism—and they kept depleting his funds. If a workman faced what appeared to be an insoluble crisis, he went at last to Kamejiro and said bluntly, “I have got to have eighty-one cents.”

  “Why don’t you borrow from the Japanese money lender in Kapaa?” Kamejiro asked.

  “In Kapaa if you borrow eighty-one cents, next payday you have to pay back the loan and eighty-one cents more,” the workman explained, and he was correct. No white man in Hawaii ever abused Oriental labor as viciously as the Orientals themselves did. Men close to the Japanese consulate had organized a racket whereby incoming workmen were required to pay a deposit to safeguard their papers for eventual return to Japan, and the substantial sums of money were kept year after year with no interest, and when the time came to leave, the deposit often could not be found, and some Japanese became very rich. At every point, vicious practices gnawed away the financial security of the workmen, and interest rates of one hundred per cent a month were common. So usually, rugged little Kamejiro had to cough up the money for his friends.

  Some of the Japanese men had begun to bring brides in from Japan, and this was always costly, throwing unusual burdens upon the whole community. There were photographs to be taken in Kapaa, fares to be paid, travel to Honolulu to complete the paper work, and store-bought black suits in which to be married. The amount of connubial bliss underwritten by stalwart Kamejiro was considerable; and this was a self-defeating game, because he found that as soon as a man and woman got together, there were apt to be babies which caused further financial crises. There was thus a constant drain upon his resources and at times it seemed as if he were paying for the family happiness of everyone but himself.

  His biggest expenditures, however, arose from patriotism. If a priest came through Kauai telling of a new war memorial, Kamejiro was the man who contributed most heavily. When consular officials from Honolulu appeared to explain the great events transpiring in the homeland, Kamejiro paid their hotel bills. He contributed to the Japanese school, to the Japanese church, and above all to the Japanese reciters who passed through the islands periodically.

  These men were the joy of Kamejiro’s life, and whenever one was announced he worked with greater speed, impatient for the Sunday afternoon when the entire Japanese community would gather in some park of casuarina trees, sitting on beds of dried needles to wait for the appearance of the reciter. At one-thirty, after the Japanese had enjoyed their lunch of sushi and sashimi, a movable platform of boards, covered by a traditional cloth, was put into position, with a low lectern bearing a closed fan. A hush fell over the crowd, and the visitor from Japan, usually an elderly man with bald head and wide-shouldered starched uniform whose points swept out like butterfly wings, stepped onto the platform in white tabi, bowed many times, and sat on his haunches before the lectern. For some moments he seemed to pray that his voice would be strong, and then, as his audience waited breathless in the sunlight, he picked up the folded fan and began chanting.

  “I … shall … speak … of … the … Battle … of … Ichi-no-tani,” he cried in mournful voice, singing each pregnant word and holding onto it. In those first moments he seemed like an imprisoned volcano, about to burst into wild fury, and as the events of that battle, which had taken place more than seven hundred years before, began to unfold, the man’s voice began to acquire new force. He projected himself into each of the characters in turn; he was the brave warrior Kumagai; he was the handsome youth Atsumori; he was the horse, the cliff, the flute; he was the brilliant hero Yoshitsune; and all the women. As his excitement grew, the veins of his head stood out as if they might burst and his neck muscles could be seen like pencils under the skin. At the various crises of the ancient battle, he roared and whispered, sobbed and screamed with joy; but when it came time for Atsumori to die—this bewitching young warrior playing a flute—the m
an reported grief as if it were a tangible thing, and the entire audience wept.

  How terribly real was the heroism of Japan, there under the casuarina trees. How fair and loyal the women were, how brave the men. And as the battle drew to its tragic conclusion, with the plantation hands sobbing for the lost dead, the reciter added lines that were not originally part of the epic, but which he had been told were especially appropriate for distant colonies like this one on Kauai: “And … as … the … ghost … of … Atsumori … left … the … plain … of … Ichi-no-tani,” the reciter cried mournfully, “he looked back upon the gallant warriors who had slain him and thought: ‘These are the brave soldiers of Japan, and while they live there is no danger to the homeland. They can march for miles through hardship. They can live on nothing to support their emperor. They fear no enemy and withdraw from no storm. They are the bravest men on earth, fighting for just causes and the glory of Japan. How strong they are, how noble, how fine it is to see them on the battlefield. Oh, how I long to be with them again, the brave warriors of Japan.’ ”

  A program consisted of four recitations, and since each lasted more than an hour, with famous ones like Ichi-no-tani requiring nearly two, the afternoon usually crept on toward darkness before the recital ended. How one man, taking so many varied parts and throwing his voice up and down the scale as if by magic, could last five hours was always a mystery, but in time a convention grew up at the Hanakai readings which made the last item on the program the best of all. It was initiated when a reciter announced: “Today I have a special reward! The story of Colonel Ito, who threw himself upon the Russian guns at Port Arthur.” And someone remembered that their own Sakagawa Kamejiro had once played the role of Colonel Ito in the victory procession in Honolulu, and he was sent to fetch his uniform; so while the reciter told the impassioned story of Colonel Ito and the Russian guns, Kamejiro, five-feet-one-inch tall and with arms like hoops, stood rigidly at attention beside the platform, wearing the Imperial uniform which had been sewed up by the women of Honolulu. At such moments a strange thing occurred; he became Colonel Ito. He could see the Russian guns and smell their powder. When the emperor spoke as the troops were leaving Tokyo, Kamejiro could hear the august words, and when the colonel died, defending Japan against the barbarians, Kamejiro died, too, and entered the pantheon of heroes. Spiritually he was part of Japan, a warrior who had never yet borne arms, but who stood ready to die for his emperor. It was after such moments of exaltation that he contributed most heavily to war funds and military hospitals and all such good works.

  The constant pull of Japan and its emotional history was so great that Kamejiro did not know one Japanese who intended remaining in Hawaii. All labored twelve hours a day for seventy-three cents, the pay having been raised, in hopes of returning to Hiroshima with $400 and a bright future, and although from the presence of an increasing number of white-haired men and women it was obvious that the majority never saved enough money to get home, not even the most despairing ever admitted that they had given up hope.

  One night at the conclusion of a Japanese movie the Buddhist priest called for attention, and a spotlight was thrown upon him by the projectionist. “I want Sakagawa Kamejiro to step forth,” the priest said, and the stocky little workman moved into the lights, blinking and keeping his left fist to his mouth. “His Imperial Majesty’s consulate in Honolulu has directed me,” the priest said, “to award this scroll to Sakagawa Kamejiro in recognition of his contributions on behalf of the brave sailors who lost their lives at the Fukushima catastrophe. All Japan is proud of this man.”

  To Kamejiro the last words were not an empty phrase. He believed that every village in Japan knew of his loyal behavior and he could visualize word of his deportment creeping to his parents’ home, and he could see how happy they were that their son was a decent Japanese. All Japan was proud of him, and for Kamejiro that was sufficient.

  For thirteen years he lived in this manner, excited by his recurring contacts with Japan and hopeful that one day soon he would accumulate the $400 plus the boat fare home; but one spring day in 1915, when the casuarina trees were throwing bright nodules at the tips of their needles, ready for the year’s growth, and when blossoms were coming onto the pineapples nestling in the red earth, Kamejiro heard a bird cry. It was not a sea bird, for he knew their voices as they swept aloft on the spume thrown up by the cliffs. Perhaps it was from Tahiti, where it had been wintering; possibly it was merely crossing Kauai on its way to Alaska for the rich, insect-laden summer months; and Kamejiro never actually saw the bird, but he heard it winging past him and he stopped dead in the middle of the pineapple field and thought: “I am thirty-three years old and the years are flying past me.”

  He entered into a period of terrible depression, and a vision came to him which he could not expel: he saw Yoko waiting in Hiroshima, beside the rice fields, and birds were flying past her, too, and she held out her hands, and mists came from the Inland Sea and obliterated her pleading. For the first time he did not rise at three-thirty, and he failed to tend his hot baths, throwing the job onto a friend. He wandered about, gnawed at by an insatiable hunger, and he contemplated going to Kapaa and the brothels, but he rejected the idea, and at last he worked himself toward the decision that hundreds had made before him: “For a little while I shall forget about returning to Japan, but I will use my money to send for Yoko.”

  He was hoeing pineapple when he made this decision, and it was only two o’clock in the afternoon, but he dropped his hoe and walked in a kind of glorious daze out to the main highway and on into Kapaa, where the ostracized Hashimoto had a photograph shop and an agency for ships traveling to Japan. Smothering his pride and approaching the renegade, Kamejiro said, “I want to get my picture taken to send to Japan.”

  “Go home and shave,” Hashimoto said bluntly. “And wear the dark suit.”

  “I have no suit.”

  “Ishii Camp has one. All the men use it.”

  “I don’t want to wear a borrowed suit.”

  “What girl will want to marry you if you send a photograph without a dark suit?”

  “Who said anything about girls?”

  “Obviously, you want to get married. I’m glad for you and will take a fine picture. But shave first and wear the dark suit.”

  “How much will it all cost?” Kamejiro asked.

  “Photograph three dollars. Boat fare for the girl seventy. Her train expenses and dresses and the feast back home, maybe seventy. Total one hundred forty-three dollars.”

  Such an amount would delay the accumulation of $400 by another three or four years at least, and Kamejiro hesitated. “I don’t know about that,” he said. “Please don’t tell anybody.”

  “I take pictures. I talk to nobody.”

  “I may be back,” Kamejiro said.

  “You will be,” Hashimoto predicted. Then, as he did with all the Japanese who had ostracized him, he added brutally, “You will marry the girl and you will never return to Japan. Make up your mind about that.”

  Kamejiro swallowed hard and avoided looking at the photographer. “I am going back to Japan,” he said. “You have done me a favor, Hashimoto-san. For a moment I was hungry for a wife and thought: ‘I will spend my money that way.’ But you have shown me what that means. Good night. I won’t be back.”

  But as he left the photographer’s store, a brood of children, half-Japanese, half-Hawaiian, swept past him shouting in a language that no man living could understand—the wild, sweet pidgin of childhood, composed of all languages—and they bumped into him, and a little girl, her hair cut square in the Japanese fashion, cried, “Gomennasai!” and on the impulse of the moment Kamejiro stooped and caught the child, bringing her face to his, and for an instant she remained limp in his arms. Then she kicked free and cried in Hawaiian and Portuguese, “I must go with the others!” And from the doorway, Hashimoto, still hating the men who had driven him out, laughed and said, “It was my daughter you were holding. I have six children, fo
ur of them boys.”

  In great agitation Kamejiro walked home, and the smell of the little girl’s hair burned his nostrils so that when he reached the camp and saw the long, bleak, womanless barracks in which he had been living for thirteen years, he rushed directly to Ishii-san and said, “You must write a letter home.”

  “Are you thinking of getting married?” the scribe asked, for he recognized the symptoms.

  “Yes.”

  Unexpectedly, the thin little letter-writer grasped Kamejiro’s hand and confided: “I have been thinking the same thing. What would it cost?”

  “Not much!” Kamejiro cried excitedly. “Photograph three dollars. Fare seventy. Maybe a hundred and forty-three altogether.”

  “I am going to do it!” Ishii-san announced. “I’ve been thinking about it all this year.”

  “So have I,” Kamejiro confessed, and he sat upon the floor as Ishii-san got out his brushes: “Dear Mother, I have decided to take a wife and later I will send you my photograph so that you can show it to Yoko-chan and she can see how I look now. When you tell me that she is willing to come to Hawaii, I will send the money. This does not mean that I am not going to come back home. It only means that I shall stay here a little longer. Your faithful son, Kamejiro.”

  It took nine weeks to receive an answer to this letter, and when it arrived Kamejiro was stunned by its contents, for his mother wrote: “You must be a stupid boy to think that Yoko-chan would still be waiting. She got married twelve years ago and already has five children, three of them sons. What made you suppose that a self-respecting girl would wait? But that is no loss, for as you can see I am sending you the photograph of a very fine young lady named Sumiko who has said that she would marry you. She is from this village and will make a lovely wife. Please send the money.”