Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “And you think this cycle operates in all nations?” Shig pressed.

  “I myself have witnessed five such revolutions at close hand. In Mexico the offenses against common sense were unbelievable, and so were the bloody reprisals. In England a smart bunch of legislators effected the change-over with marvelous simplicity. In Rumania the blood was ugly to see. Also Spain. In the western United States the cattlemen started to protect their immoral holdings with gunfire, but in time the common sense of the townspeople, applied through taxation, defeated them. No nation can avoid land reform. All it can do is determine the course it will take: bloody revolution or taxation.”

  “It seems to me that here in Japan we have a third choice. Land reform by fiat.”

  “Of course,” Abernethy quickly agreed. “What you and I finally decide to order done, General MacArthur will do, and it’ll turn out to be his greatest accomplishment in Japan. For it will distribute land equitably and at the same time prevent a bloody revolution.”

  “Then there really is a third alternative?” Shig pressed.

  “Yes,” Abernethy replied, “but few nations are lucky enough to lose a war to the United States.”

  They drove in silence for more than two miles, looking for a country lane that led to the headquarters of one of the most illogical of the large land holdings that had imperiled Japan, and when they spotted the turning, Shig studied the relatively small area involved—small, that is, as compared with Hawaii—and he began to laugh. “What’s the joke?” his lanky, dour companion asked.

  “I was thinking how ironic it is!”

  “What?” Abernethy asked, for he loved the ironies of history.

  “Here we are, you and I, doing all this work in redistributing farm lands in defeated Japan, while, actually, the situation in my own home, Hawaii, is far worse.”

  Dr. Abernethy sat with his knees hunched up toward his chin and waited silently till Shig looked at him. Then he smiled slyly and asked, “What do you suppose I’ve been talking to you about?”

  Shig was so startled that he slowed down the jeep, brought it to a complete halt, and turned formally to look at his commander. “You mean you’ve been talking to me about Hawaii?”

  “Of course. I want you to appreciate what the alternatives are.”

  “How do you know anything about Hawaii?”

  “Anyone interested in land reform knows Hawaii. Now that Hungary and Japan have faced their revolutions, Hawaii and China remain the most notorious remnants of medievalism in the world.”

  “Will both have to undergo revolutions?” Shig asked.

  “Of course,” Abernethy replied simply. “The hardest lesson in all history to learn is that no nation is exempt from history. China’s revolution will probably end in bloody confiscation. Hawaii’s will probably be accomplished by peaceful taxation.” He paused and asked, “That is, if smart young fellows like you have any sense.”

  “I still think it’s sardonic that I should be over here helping to save Japan,” Shig reflected. “I should be doing this same job at home.” He shifted gears and headed for the small house where the nervous Japanese landlords waited.

  “As I said,” Dr. Abernethy repeated dourly, “few nations are lucky enough to lose wars at the right time. Lucky Japan.”

  This fact was hammered home when Shig finally overtook his older brother Goro, who served as translator in General MacArthur’s labor division. He had been in Nagoya when Shig landed, working on a long-range program for the unionization of Japanese industry, but instead of serving a quiet intellectual theorist like Dr. Abernethy of Harvard he was with a team of red-hot American labor organizers from the A.F. of L. “This job is driving me crazy!” stocky Goro cried, rubbing his crew-cut stubble.

  “Are the people you work for stupid?” Shig asked.

  “Stupid! They’re the smartest characters I ever met. What drives me nuts is that I work fifteen hours a day forcing Japanese into labor unions. I read them General MacArthur’s statement that one of the strongest foundations of democracy is an organized laboring class, secure in its rights. And you know, I think MacArthur is right. It’s the only way Japan will ever be able to combat the zaibatsu. Strong, determined unions. But by God it’s maddening to be forcing onto the Japanese in Japan what the Japanese in Hawaii are forbidden to have.”

  “You mean unions?” Shig asked, as they drank Japanese beer in the Dai Ichi Hotel, where they were bunked.

  “You’re damned right I mean unions!” Goro fumed. “Let’s be honest, Shig. We practically fought a war to eliminate the zaibatsu in Japan. But you know the big firms here never controlled half as much as they do in Hawaii. You know, Shig, it’s a crazy world when you fight a war to give the conquered what you refuse to give your own people back home.”

  Shig took refuge in a trick he often used when trying to think straight. He stopped talking and held his beer stein to his lips for a long time, but Goro used this interval to comment: “If unions are good in Japan, they’re good in Hawaii. If the zaibatsu are bad in Japan, they’re bad in Hawaii. Yet I’m forced to make the Japanese join unions here, and if I tried to do the identical thing in Hawaii I’d be arrested, beaten up, and thrown into jail. How bloody crazy can you get?”

  “What you say is fascinating,” Shig volunteered slowly. “The man I’m working for, this Dr. Abernethy, says exactly the same thing about the land problems. Only he always adds, ‘A nation is lucky when it loses a war at the right time.’ The more I look at what we’re doing for Japan, the more I believe him.”

  Goro put down his beer and said solemnly, “When I get back to Honolulu, I’m going to introduce a new motto.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “ ‘What’s good enough for the vanquished, is good enough for the victor.’ I’m going to see to it that a man in Hawaii has a right to join a union, too. Just like a man in Tokyo. And when I start, Hoxworth Hale better stand back. He won last time because labor was stupid. Next time I’ll win because of what I’m learning in Japan.”

  “Don’t commit yourself to trouble,” Shig warned.

  “If you don’t do the same,” Goro countered, “I’ll be ashamed of you. You’ll have wasted your war.”

  This was the first time Shig had heard the phrase that was to determine his behavior in the next few years. “Don’t waste your war!” On this first enunciation of the basic law he said to his brother, “I’ve been wondering what I ought to do, Goro. Talking so much with Dr. Abernethy has convinced me of one thing. There isn’t a single Japanese on Hawaii that’s educated. Oh, there are smart men like Pop and medical doctors like Dr. Takanaga, but they don’t really know anything.”

  “You’re so right,” Goro agreed sadly, slumping over his beer. “Have you ever talked to a real smart labor leader from New York?”

  “So I thought maybe I’d go to Harvard Law School.”

  “What a marvelous idea!” Goro cried. “But look, kid, I don’t want you to go there and just learn law.”

  “I have no intention of doing that,” Shig replied carefully. “Dr. Abernethy suggested that maybe I’d like to live with him. His wife’s a lawyer.”

  Goro became positively excited. “And you’d talk at night, and get a little polish and argue about world history. Shig! Take it. Look, I’d even help you with the money.”

  “Aren’t you going on to graduate school?” Shig asked.

  Goro blushed, toyed with his beer, then looked at his watch. “I think I have other plans,” he confessed. “I want you to meet her.”

  The Dai Ichi Hotel in Tokyo stood near the elevated loop that circled the city, and not far from the Shimbashi Station. In 1946 this area was filled each night with pathetic and undernourished Japanese girls, some of the most appealing prostitutes Asia had ever produced, and the tragedy of their near-starvation was that when they began to recover their health, and their cheeks filled out, they were so confirmed in streetwalking that they could not easily convert into any other occupation, and they conti
nued at their old trade, mastering a few English words and sometimes moving into surreptitious army quarters with their G.I. lovers.

  Now, as Shig and Goro walked through the bitter cold of a Tokyo January night, the horde of girls called to them in Japanese, “Nice Nisei G.I. Would you like to sleep with a real warm girl tonight?” Shig felt sick and tried not to look at the haunting, starved faces, but they pressed near him, begging, “Please, Nisei, I make you very happy for one night. I am a good girl.”

  They looked exactly like the prettier Japanese girls he had known in Hawaii, and as they tugged hungrily at his arms, he thought: “Maybe there’s something about losing a war that Dr. Abernethy doesn’t appreciate. Maybe it isn’t so good.”

  In time the brothers broke away from the Shimbashi girls and turned left toward the Ginza, but they kept away from that broad street which M.P.’s patrolled and headed instead for the Nishi, or west, Ginza, where they entered into an exciting maze of alleys, one of which contained a very tiny bar, not much bigger than a bedroom, called Le Jazz Bleu. Ducking swiftly inside, they found the little room thick with smoke, bar fumes and the sound of an expensive gramophone playing Louis Armstrong. Three customers sat on minute barstools, while from the rear an extremely handsome girl in western clothes approached. She was no more than twenty, tall, thin from undereating, and with an unforgettably alert face. Extending a slim hand to Goro she cried in Japanese, “Welcome to our center of culture and sedition!” And with these words she introduced Shig into one of the most fascinating aspects of postwar Japan: the intellectual revolution.

  With bad luck Akemi could have become, and she knew it, a Hershey-bar girl, cadging nylons and canned beef from G.I.’s at Shimbashi Station, but in the earliest days of the Occupation she had been lucky enough to meet Goro Sakagawa, and he was not a Hershey-bar boy. It is true that he gave her whatever food and money he could afford, but she gave him little in return except exciting talk, a knowledge of Japan and more spiritual love than he knew existed in the world. It took Shig about two minutes to see that this pair was going to get married.

  ‘Why does she work in a bar?” he asked Goro when Akemi disappeared to serve some customers.

  “She wants to work, and she likes the music,” Goro explained.

  “Is she an Edokko?” Shig inquired, referring to the old name for Tokyo.

  “The purest modenne,” Goro laughed. Postwar Japanese youth prided themselves on their use of French, and to be modenne—moderne—was their highest ambition. “This girl is a terrific brain,” Goro confided.

  “I’ll bet she’s not Hiroshima-ken?” Shig teased.

  “Have you seen Hiroshima?” Goro asked. “Pppssskkk!” he went, leveling his hand over the floor. “I don’t want anything to do with Hiroshima.”

  “Mom’s going to be very unhappy,” Shig warned. “You come all the way to Japan and don’t have sense enough to get yourself a Hiroshima girl.”

  “This is the girl for me,” Goro said as Akemi rejoined them, and when she came to a table, his or anyone’s, she added a new dimension to it, for she contained within her slim body an electric vitality which marked many people in the new Japan.

  At midnight she whispered, “Soon the customers will go, and then we have real fun.” Patiently she waited for the wandering drinkers to empty their glasses, and to each straggler she said a warm good night, thus insuring their subsequent return, but when the last had gone and the proprietor was turning out the lights, she sighed and said, “I wish drinks cost less. Then men would guzzle them faster.”

  Opening the darkened door a crack she whispered, “No M.P.’s,” and the trio ducked down a series of the smallest alleys in the world, barely wide enough for two to pass if one stood sideways, and finally they came to a darkened door which Akemi-san pushed slowly open, revealing a rather large room in which more than a dozen young men and women sat in the most rigid silence, for an imported gramophone was playing music that neither Shig nor Goro could recognize, but its name was obvious, for on a music stand, with a single shaft of light playing upon it, rested the album from which the records had been taken: Mahler’s Kindertotenlied sung by a German group. Quietly the newcomers sank to the floor, and when the music ended and more lights were lit, they saw that they were among an intense Japanese group composed of handsome young men and pretty girls. When talk began, it was all about Paris and André Gide and Dostoevski. Much of it was in French, and since Shig had acquired a smattering of that language, he was well received.

  Then talk turned to the new Japan: freedom for women, the breaking up of large estates, the new role of labor, and both Shig and Goro were able to contribute much, but just as it seemed as if the old Japan were forever dead, Akemi appeared in a frail, tattered kimono which she kept by the gramophone, and the room grew deathly silent, with all assuming old, formal poses as Akemi began the tea ceremony, and as she moved through the curious and ancient ritual of making tea in a set way, and serving it just so, Shig sensed that these young Japanese were no different than he: they were caught in the changing of history, so that with part of their minds they embraced French words and everything modenne, while with the great anchors of the soul they held fast to the most inexplicable secrets of Japan. “Hawaii and Japan face the same problems,” Shig mused, but when frail Akemi nodded that it was his turn, and another girl came creeping toward him on her knees, presenting him with the cup of bitter tea, he took it in both hands as he had been taught, turned the old cup until its most treasured edge was away from his unworthy lips, and drank.

  When the ceremony ended, talk resumed and the girl who had brought him his bitter tea said, “American M.P.’s can destroy anything but the tea ceremony. No matter how hard you strike at our souls, you always seem to miss.”

  The statement irritated Shig and he said, “Not being an M.P., I wouldn’t know. For myself, I bring freedom.”

  “What freedom?” the girl asked angrily.

  “Land for the peasants,” Shig said, and for a few minutes he was a hero, but then the lights lowered, the single shaft struck the music stand and Shig read: Bruckner, The First Symphony. This was a London recording, and he liked the music.

  That night, as they made their way back through the remnant of Shimbashi girls that had caught no men for the evening, but who still hoped, not knowing what might turn up following a late brawl, Shig said, “I’d marry her, Goro. She’s marvelous.”

  “I’m going to,” his brother replied.

  And in these strange ways the brothers Sakagawa discovered their ancestral homeland and saw how different it was from what their parents remembered, but they also discovered Hawaii, so that one night Goro slammed down his beer at the Dai Ichi Hotel and fumed: “It’s insane that we should be here, Shig. We ought to be doing the same jobs at home.” And as they worked in Japan, they thought of Hawaii.

  IN 1947 the great Kee hui faced memorable excitements, for Nyuk Tsin was one hundred years old and her family initiated a round of entertainments celebrating that fact, climaxed by a massive fourteen-course dinner at Asia’s brassy restaurant. The little old matriarch, who now weighed ninety-one pounds, appeared at each celebration dressed in black, her sparse gray hair pulled severely back from her temples. She chatted with her huge family and felt proud of their accomplishments, being particularly pleased when Hong Kong’s youngest daughter, Judy, brought a pianist from the university, where she was studying, to sing a series of songs in Chinese. Nyuk Tsin, watching Judy’s animated face, thought: “She could be a girl from the High Village. I wonder what’s happening there now?”

  One hundred and forty-one great-great-grandchildren attended the festivities, and upon them Nyuk Tsin poured her special love. Whenever one was presented she would ask the child in Hakka, “And what is your name, my dear?” The child’s mother would poke her offspring and say in English, “Tell Auntie your name.” But if the child replied, “Harry Rodriques,” Nyuk Tsin would correct him and insist upon his real name, and the child would reply, “Kee
Doh Kong,” and by decoding this according to the family poem, Nyuk Tsin understood who was standing before her.

  With her own name she also had trouble, for now there was no one alive in the world who knew what it was. Even her remaining sons, now in their agile seventies and eighties, had never known her name, for she had submerged her own personality in this powerful hui of which she was now the head. She was content to rule as Wu Chow’s Auntie, the concubine without a name, but when she thought of herself it was invariably as Char Nyuk Tsin, the daughter of a brave peasant who had risen to be a general. She was deeply moved, therefore, when the celebrations were ended and her sons Asia and Europe said to her, “Wu Chow’s Auntie, I see no further reason why we should continue to send money to our mother in the Low Village. She must surely be dead by now, and her family has never done anything for us.”

  “On the other hand,” Nyuk Tsin reasoned, “she may still be alive, just as I am, and if so she would need the money more than ever. After all, she is your mother and you owe her that respect.”

  Only one misfortune clouded her hundredth birthday: her principal grandson Hong Kong was obviously in trouble, for he was ill at ease, nervous and irritable. Nyuk Tsin guessed that he was having difficulty meeting payments on the various ventures into which she had goaded him, and she was sorry that it was he who had to bear the burden of these trying days and not she. Therefore, when the mammoth dinner at Asia’s ended, the little old lady told the women about her that she wanted to talk with Hong Kong, and after she was taken home and had examined her body for leprosy, and had inspected her big disgraceful feet, she appeared in a black gown with buttons down the right side and asked in Hakka, “Hong Kong, are things so very bad?”