Mrs. Sakagawa had spent the morning at home making pickled cabbage and the afternoon at Mrs. Mark Whipple’s rolling Red Cross bandages. The latter experience had been a trying one, for every woman in the room had at least one son in the Two-Two-Two except Mrs. Whipple, and her husband commanded it. Therefore, the conversation, which most of the Japanese women could not participate in, had to be about the war in Italy and the heavy casualties which the Japanese boys were suffering, but whenever grief began to stalk the room, Mrs. Whipple, one of the Hale girls, invariably brought up some new and cheering fact. Once she said, “President Roosevelt himself has announced that our boys are among the bravest that have fought under the Stars and Stripes.” Later she said, “Time magazine this week reports that when our boys reached Salerno on leave, the other troops at the railway station cheered them as they disembarked.” Mrs. Whipple always referred to the Japanese soldiers as “our boys,” and other haoles in Hawaii were beginning to do the same.
So the afternoon had been an emotional one, regardless of whether the talk was of casualties or of triumphs, and Mrs. Sakagawa, whose feet were sore from the American shoes she felt obligated to wear, reached home eager for rest. Instead, she found her husband at home rather than in the barbershop, and she knew that something dire had happened. Before she could ask, Kamejiro shouted, “A fine daughter you raised! She’s in love with a haole!”
The words were the harshest that Mrs. Sakagawa could have heard. There were some Japanese girls, she had to admit, who went openly with haoles, but they were not from self-respecting families, and there were a few who under the pressure of war had become prostitutes, but she suspected that these were really either Etas or Okinawans. It was unlikely that any Japanese girl, mindful of the proud blood that flowed in her veins …
“And Sakai took his daughter out of the barbershop lest she become contaminated too, and Hasegawa is removing his daughter tomorrow.” He was about to cry, “We are ruined,” but an even deeper concern overcame him, and he fell into a chair, sinking his head on his forearms and sobbing, “Our family has never known shame before.”
Mrs. Sakagawa, who refused to believe that her daughter could have brought disgrace upon the family, kicked off her American shoes, wriggled her toes in comfort, and kneeled beside her distraught husband. “Kamejiro,” she whispered, “we taught Reiko how to be a good Japanese. I am sure she will not disgrace us. Somebody has told you a great lie.”
Violently the little dynamiter thrust his wife aside and strode across the room. “I saw them! She was almost kissing him in public. And I’ve been thinking. Where was she that afternoon she said she didn’t feel well? Out with a haole. And where was she when she said she was going to a cinema? Riding in a dark car with a haole. I heard a car stop that night, but I was too stupid to put two and two together.”
At this moment Reiko-chan, flushed with love and the brisk walk home, entered and saw immediately from her parents’ faces that her secret had been discovered. Her father said simply, with a heartbreaking gasp, “My own daughter! With a haole!” Her mother was still ready to dismiss the whole scandal and asked, “It isn’t true, is it?”
Reiko-chan, her dark eyes warm with the inner conviction that was to sustain her through the impending argument, replied, “I am in love, and I want to get married.”
No one spoke. Kamejiro fell back into a chair and buried his face. Mrs. Sakagawa stared at her daughter in disbelief and then began to treat her with exaggerated solicitude, as if she were already illegally pregnant. Reiko smiled in quiet amusement, but then her stricken father gave an appalling gasp, and she knelt beside him, saying quickly, “Lieutenant Jackson is a wonderful man, Father. He’s understanding, and he’s lived in Japan. He has a good job in Seattle, but he thinks he may settle here after the war.” She hesitated, for her words were not being heard, and then added, “Wherever he goes, I want to go with him.”
Slowly her father pushed himself back from the table, withdrew from his daughter, and looked at her in shocked disbelief. “But you are a Japanese!” he cried in his misery.
“I am going to marry him, Father,” his daughter repeated forcefully.
“But you’re a Japanese,” he reiterated. Taking her hand he said, “You have the blood of Japan, the strength of a great nation, everything …” He tried to explain how unthinkable her suggestion was, but could come back to only one paramount fact. “You’re a Japanese!”
Reiko explained patiently, “Lieutenant Jackson is a respectable man. He has a much better job than any man here that I might possibly marry. He’s a college graduate and has a good deal of money in the bank. His family is well known in Seattle. These things aren’t of major importance, but I tell you so that you will realize what an unusual man he is.”
Kamejiro listened in disgust at the rigmarole, and when it seemed likely that Reiko was going to add more, he slapped her sharply across the cheek. “It would be humiliating,” he cried. “A permanent disgrace. Already even the rumor of your behavior has ruined the barbershop. The Sakai girl has quit. So has the Hasegawa. No self-respecting Japanese family will want to associate with us after what you have done.”
Reiko pressed her hand to her burning cheek and said quietly, “Father, hundreds of decent Japanese girls have fallen in love with Americans.”
“Whores, all of them!” Kamejiro stormed.
Ignoring him Reiko said, “I know, because that’s Lieutenant Jackson’s job. To talk with parents like you. And the girls are not …”
“Aha!” Kamejiro cried. “So that’s what he does! Tomorrow I go see Admiral Nimitz.”
“Father, I warn you that if you …”
“Admiral Nimitz will hear of this!”
The little dynamiter did not actually get to Nimitz. He was stopped first by an ensign, who was so enthralled by the stalwart, bow-armed Japanese that he passed him along to a full lieutenant who sent him on to a commodore who burst into the office of a rear admiral, with the cry: “Jesus, Jack! There’s a little Japanese out here with the goddamnedest story you ever heard. You gotta listen.”
So a circle of captains, commodores and admirals interrupted their work to listen to Kamejiro’s hilarious pidgin as he protested to the navy that one of their officers had wrecked his barbershop and had ruined his daughter.
“Is she pregnant?” one of the rear admirals asked.
“You watch out!” Kamejiro cried. “Mo bettah you know Reiko a good wahine!”
“I’m sorry, Mr. Sakanawa. In our language ruined means, well, ruined.”
When the officers heard who it was that ruined, or whatever, the girl Reiko, they almost exploded. “That goddamned Jackson!” one of them sputtered. “His job is to break up this sort of thing.”
“I’ve told you a dozen times,” another said. “Putting a civilian into uniform doesn’t make him an officer.”
“That’s beside the point,” the senior admiral said. “What I’d like to know, Mr. Sakanawa, is this. If the boy has a good reputation, a good job, a good income, and a good family back in Seattle … Well, what I’m driving at is this. Your daughter is a lady barber. It would seem to me that you would jump at the chance for such a marriage.”
Little Kamejiro, who was shorter by nine inches than any man in the room, stared at them in amazement. “She’s a Japanese!” he said to the interpreter. “It would be disgraceful if she married a haole.”
“How’s that?” the commodore asked.
“It would bring such shame on our family …”
“What the hell do you mean?” the commodore bellowed. “Since when is a Jap marrying a decent American a matter of shame … to the Jap?”
“Her brothers in Italy would be humiliated before all their companions,” Kamejiro doggedly explained.
“What’s that again?” the senior officer asked. “She got brothers in Italy?”
“My four boys are fighting in Italy,” Kamejiro said humbly.
One of the rear admirals rose and came over to the littl
e dynamiter. “You have four sons in the Two-Two-Two?”
“Yes.”
“They all in Italy?”
“Yes.”
There was a long silence, broken by the admiral, who said, “I got one son there. I worry about him all the time.”
“I am worried about my daughter,” the stubborn little man replied.
“And if she marries a white man, her four brothers won’t be able to live down the disgrace?”
“Never.”
“What do you want Admiral Nimitz to do?”
“Send Lieutenant Jackson away.”
“He will go away this afternoon,” the admiral said.
“May God bless Admiral Nimitz,” Kamejiro said.
“That’s an odd phrase,” the admiral said. “You a Christian?”
“I’m Buddhist. But my children are all Christian.”
When Kamejiro had been led outside, happy at the ease with which he had found a solution to his grave problem, the admiral shrugged his shoulders and said, “We’ll beat the little bastards, but we’ll never understand them.”
Reiko-chan never saw Lieutenant Jackson again. In conformance with secret and high-priority orders he flew out of Hawaii that night, exiled to Bougainville, where, less than a week later, a body of Japanese infiltrators slipped through the jungle, attacked the headquarters in which he was serving, and lunged at him with bayonets. Knowing nothing of guns, the young lawyer tried to fight them off with a chair, but one Japanese soldier parried the chair, drove his bayonet through the lieutenant’s chest, and left him strangling to death in the mud.
No one told Reiko that her lawyer was dead—there was no reason why anyone should—and she assumed that he had been fooling with her as men will, and that he had gone to other duties. When her father’s barbershop had to close, because cautious Japanese families would not allow their daughters to work under a man who did not even protect his own daughter from the disgrace of a haole love affair, Reiko went to work in another barbershop, and sometimes when a naval officer came in for a haircut, and she placed the towel about his neck and saw the railroad-track insignia on his shirt, she would for a moment feel dizzy. At other times, when brash enlisted men tried to feel her legs as she cut their hair, she would jab their hands with her scissors, as her father had taught her to do, but even as she did so, she felt confused by the great passion that can exist between men and women.
The forced closing of Kamejiro Sakagawa’s barbershop was actually a considerable blessing to the family, although at the time it was not so recognized, for in the first weeks the stalwart little dynamiter could find no work other than caring for lawns, a job he did not like. Then the Okinawan restaurant keeper Senaga sent a messenger saying that he needed a busboy at a new restaurant he was opening in Waikiki, where a great many soldiers and sailors went, and he would like Sakagawa-san to take the job. Kamejiro’s eyes blazed as he stared at the messenger. “If Senaga had been a friend, he would never have allowed a Japanese girl to talk with a haole in his restaurant. Tell him no.” But to his wife, Kamejiro swore, “I would rather die of starvation than work for an Okinawan.” Then, from a totally unexpected source, the Sakagawas received the financial aid which established them as one of the stronger and more prosperous Japanese families in Hawaii. It all happened because early in 1943 Hong Kong Kee had made a speech.
The inflamed oratory which provoked the loan took place before the Japanese boys of the Two-Two-Two had become the popular heroes they were later to be. When Hong Kong spoke, Japanese were still suspect, and a haole committee, seeking to whip up patriotism for war bonds, prevailed upon him to give a short speech explaining why the Chinese could be trusted and the Japanese could not. Since the committee of patriots contained many of the leaders of Honolulu, Hong Kong was naturally flattered by the invitation and spent some time in working out a rather fiery comparison of Chinese virtues as opposed to Japanese duplicity. Then, when he got on the speakers’ platform, he became intoxicated by the crowd and deviated from his script, making his remarks rather more inclusive than he had planned. “The Japanese war lords have oppressed China for many years,” he cried, “and it is with joy in our hearts that we watch the great American forces driving the evil Japanese from places where they have no right to be.” He was astonished at the constant applause which the mass meeting threw back at him, and thus emboldened, he extended his remarks to include the Japanese in Hawaii. It was a very popular speech, sold a lot of war bonds, and got Hong Kong’s picture in the papers under the caption “Patriotic Chinese Leader Flays Japs.”
The affair was a big success except in one house. In her small, ugly clapboard shack up the Nuuanu, Hong Kong’s grandmother, then ninety-six years old, listened appalled as one of her great-granddaughters read aloud the account of Hong Kong’s oratory. “Bring him here at once!” she stormed, and when the powerful banker stood in her room she sent the others away, and when the door was closed she rose, stalked over to her grandson and slapped him four times in the face. “You fool!” she cried. “You fool! You damned, damned fool!”
Hong Kong fell back from the assault and covered his face to prevent further slappings. When he did this his fiery little grandmother began pushing him in the chest, calling him all the while “You fool” until he stumbled backward against a chair and fell into it. Then she stopped, waited for him to drop his hands, and stared at him sorrowfully. “Hong Kong,” she said, “yesterday you were a great fool.”
“Why?” he asked weakly.
She showed him the paper, with his picture grinning out from a semicircle of haole faces, and although she could not read, she could remember what her great-granddaughter had reported, and now she repeated the phrases with icy sarcasm: “We cannot trust the Japanese!” She spat onto her own floor. “They are deceitful and criminal men.” Again she spat. Then she threw the paper onto the floor and kicked it, for her fury was great, and when this was done she shouted at her grandson, “What glory did you get from standing for a few minutes among the haoles?”
“I was asked to represent the Chinese community,” Hong Kong fumbled.
“Who appointed you our representative, you stupid man?”
“I thought that since we are fighting Japan, somebody ought to …”
“You didn’t think!” Nyuk Tsin stormed. “You have no brains to think. For a minute’s glory, standing among the haoles, you have destroyed every good chance the Chinese have built up for themselves in Honolulu.”
“Wait a minute, Auntie!” Hong Kong protested. “That’s exactly what I was thinking about when I agreed to make the speech. It was a chance to make the Chinese look better among the haoles who run the islands.”
Nyuk Tsin looked at her grandson in amazement. “Hong Kong?” she gasped. “Do you think that when the war is over, the haoles will continue to run Hawaii?”
“They have the banks, the newspapers …”
“Hong Kong! Who is doing the fighting? What men are in uniform? Who is going to come back to the islands ready to take over the political control? Tell me, Hong Kong.”
“You mean the Japanese?” he asked weakly.
“Yes!” she shouted, her Hakka anger at its peak. “That’s exactly who I mean. They are the ones who will win this war, and believe me, Hong Kong, when they take control they will remember the evil things you said yesterday, and every Kee in Honolulu will find life a little more difficult because of your stupidity.”
“I didn’t mean that …”
“Be still, you stupid man. After the war when Sam wants to build a store, who will sign the papers giving him the permit? Some Japanese. If Ruth’s husband wants to run a bus line, who will give the permit? Some Japanese. And they will hate you for what you said yesterday. Already your words have been filed in their minds.”
The shadow of a government building where all the permit signers were Japanese fell heavily upon Hong Kong, and he asked, “What ought we to do?” It was symptomatic of the Kees that when one of them took a bold st
ep, he said of himself, “I did this,” but when corrective measures had to be taken, he always consulted Wu Chow’s Auntie and asked, “What must we do?”
The old woman said, “You must go through Honolulu and apologize to every Japanese you have ever known. Humble yourself, as you should. Then find at least twenty men who need money, and lend it to them. Help them start new businesses.” She stopped, then added prudently, “It would be better if you lent the money to those who have a lot of sons in the war, for they will be the ones who are going to run Hawaii.”
In the course of his apologies to the Japanese community, Hong Kong came in time to Sakai, the storekeeper, and Sakai said in English, “No, I don’t need any money, but my good friend Sakagawa the dynamiter has lost his barbershop, and he needs money to start a store of some kind.”
“Where can I find him?” Hong Kong asked.
“He lives in Kakaako.”
“By the way, any of his boys in the Two-Two-Two?”
“Four,” Sakai replied.
“I will look him up,” Hong Kong replied, and that afternoon he told Kamejiro, “I have come to apologize for what I said at the meeting.”
“Mo bettah you be ashamed,” Kamejiro said bluntly.
“Yes, with you having four sons in the battles.”
“And all other Japanese, too.”
“Kamejiro, I’m sorry.”
“I sorry for you,” the stocky little Japanese said, for he did not like Chinese.
“And I have come to lend you the money to start a store here in Kakaako.”
Kamejiro drew back, for he had learned that anything either a Chinese or an Okinawan did was sure to be tricky. Surveying Hong Kong, he asked, “What for you lend me money?”
Humbly Hong Kong replied, “Because I’ve got to prove I am really sorry.”
It was in this way that Kamejiro Sakagawa opened his grocery store, and because he was a frugal man and worked incredibly hard, and because his wife had a knack of waiting on Japanese customers and his barber daughter a skill in keeping accounts, the store flourished. Then, as if good fortune had piled up a warehouse full of beneficences, on New Year’s Day, 1944, Sakai-san came running with breathless news.
Hawaii Page 117