Hawaii

by James A. Michener

  “It’s Mrs. Janders,” Noelani said. “Didn’t you read about my divorce? It was rather messy?”

  “I didn’t,” Shig apologized.

  “I understand very well what you’re saying, Senator Sakagawa, and your views coincide with my own.”

  “But have you heard what I said about land reform?” he pressed.

  “That’s what we’re talking about,” Noelani said in her precise Bostonian accent.

  “You would hurt your father very much if you were active in my campaign,” Shigeo warned. “As a matter of fact, you would probably hurt me, too.”

  “I studied politics at Wellesley,” she replied firmly.

  “Were you at Wellesley?” he asked.

  “While you were at Harvard,” she said. “Amy Fukugawa pointed you out one day, at the symphony.”

  “What’s Amy doing?” he asked.

  “She married a Chinese boy. Both their parents disowned them, so they’re very happy in New York. He’s a lawyer.”

  “Do you understand what I’m saying about land reform, Mrs. Janders? How what I say will affect your father, and his friends?”

  “I want to know just one thing,” Noelani said. “When you speak of breaking up the big estates …”

  “I’m not sure I’ve ever used that phraseology,” he corrected. “I say that the big estates must not be allowed to hold out of productive use the land they are not using for constructive agriculture.”

  Noelani sighed with relief and said, “But under your system would you permit lands that are being used legitimately for sugar and pineapple some kind of preferential treatment?”

  “Look, Mrs. Janders,” Shig cried. “Apparently I haven’t made myself clear on this point.”

  “You haven’t,” she said, “and that’s why I wanted to help, because I knew you were too smart not to have thought about the fundamental problem of land in Hawaii.”

  “What problem do you mean?” the expert asked.

  She picked up two books and placed them on the desk. “Let’s call this book Hawaii,” she said, “and this one California. Now our problem is to get all the things we need, like food and building materials and luxuries, from California out here to Hawaii, and also to pay for them after we get them here. Let’s call this inkwell our ship. We can fill it up in California every day of the year and haul to Hawaii the things we need. But how are we going to pay for them? And what is the ship going to carry back from Hawaii to California, so that it won’t have to go back empty, which would double the freight costs on everything?”

  She paused, and Shigeo plopped the inkwell down on the Hawaii book, saying, “I know very well that the ship has got to take back some bulk crop like sugar or pineapple. The sale of agricultural products provides the money on which we live. And the freight that sugar and pineapple pay going to the mainland helps pay the freight of food and lumber coming this way. I know that.”

  “You certainly haven’t explained it to the people,” Noelani said critically. “Because the important point is this. You fighting young Japanese have got to reassure Hawaii that legitimate farm lands will be protected for the welfare of everybody. As to the lands that have been hiding along the edges of the legitimate farms, held there for tax-free speculation, I think even my father knows they must be sold off to the people.”

  “You spoke of helping,” Shig said. “What did you have in mind?”

  “I’d like to help you put into words, for the radio and television, just what we’ve been talking about. It will insure your election.”

  “But why should Hoxworth Hale’s daughter want to help a Japanese get elected?” Shig asked suspiciously.

  “Because I love these islands, Senator. My people were here long before yours arrived, so I am naturally concerned about what happens to Hawaii.”

  “You ought to be a Republican,” Shig said.

  “For the time being, they’re worn out,” Noelani replied. “I’ve been living a long time with worn-out people, so I’m ready to accept new ideas.”

  Shig felt certain that when Hoxworth Hale saw his daughter’s car with its bright-red bumper-banner, “Please Re-elect Senator Shigeo Sakagawa” the commander of The Fort would explode, but instead a most unexpected event transpired, for one afternoon Hong Kong Kee strolled into the McLafferty and Sakagawa offices and sat down with Shig. “I am in lots of trouble if my Republican friends see me down here,” the Chinese said.

  “What’s up?” Shig inquired.

  “I have a big surprise for you, Shigeo,” Hong Kong confided.

  “Trouble?” Shig asked, for in an election period every visitor brings anxiety.

  “In a way,” Hong Kong confessed. “Hoxworth Hale and his boys commissioned me to ask you how about coming on the board of Whipple Oil Imports, Incorporated. They figure a smart young Japanese on the board will help them sell more to Japanese customers.”

  Shig was quite unprepared for such a suggestion and studied Hong Kong carefully. He liked the shrewd Chinese, and appreciated what he had done for the Sakagawas, never mind the motives. But he was appalled that Hong Kong had consented to be used so crudely by The Fort in an attempt at political blackmail, and it was with difficulty that he restrained himself when he replied, coldly, “The Fort cannot buy me off on this land-reform business, and you can tell them so.”

  Hong Kong instantly realized the unfavorable position he appeared to be in, but instead of showing his embarrassment he said quietly, “Nobody at The Fort wants you, Shigeo, if your price is no higher than that. They know you’re going to fight this land deal through to a conclusion. But what you don’t know is, they’re not too worried. They know it’s inevitable.”

  “So they offer me a trivial directorship at such a time! It’s contemptible.”

  “No, Shigeo, it’s sensible. Two years ago they asked me to nominate some promising young Japanese. I said Shigeo. Last year they asked again. I said Shigeo. This is not a hasty idea. The Fort has had you in mind for a long time.”

  “I’d be false to my people if I joined up with their principal enemy,” Shig said stubbornly.

  “Maybe when you get elected one more time, Shigeo, you will stop talking about ‘my people.’ All the people in Hawaii are your people, and you better start thinking that way.”

  “If I took a job from The Fort, every Japanese in Hawaii would say I had turned traitor,” Shig replied truthfully.

  “I’ll tell you this, Shigeo,” the quick-minded Chinese corrected. “Until the time comes when you accept a job with The Fort, on your own terms, you are a traitor to your people. The whole purpose of you young Japanese getting elected to office, and you know how strong I work for you, is to bring you into the full society of Hawaii. You’ve got to get on the boards. You’ve got to get appointed trustees for the big estates.”

  “Trustees?” Shig laughed. “After what I’ve been shouting about the estates?”

  “Exactly,” Hong Kong replied. “Because if you show yourself interested, before the year ends you’ll be suggested as a trustee.”

  “By whom?” the young senator asked contemptuously.

  “By Hoxworth Hale and me,” Hong Kong snapped. And as the young Japanese fell silent, the Chinese banker explained his view of Hawaii. He said: “The haoles are smarter than I used to think, Shigeo. First they worked the Hawaiians, and threw them out. Then they brought in my grandmother, and threw her out. Then they got your father, and dropped him when the Filipinos looked better. They always pick the winner, these haoles, and I respect them for it.

  “So I work hard and show them I can run real estate better than they can, and they make me a partner. Other educated Chinese are breaking in, too. If you smart young Japanese don’t pretty soon start joining up in the real running of Hawaii, it only means you aren’t clever enough for anybody to want you. Getting elected is the easy part, Shigeo, because you can rely upon stupid people to do that for you, but getting onto the boards, and running the schools, and directing the trusts is the rea
l test. Because there you have to be selected by the smartest people in Hawaii. Shigeo, I want you to join this board.”

  The young Japanese thought for a long time. If he were to join, he would be a spiritual traitor to his family and to his class. He could no longer say to his Japanese friends, “It was in the fields on Kauai that the lunas used to horsewhip our fathers. Well, those days are past.” He would lose the sweet solidarity that he felt when he and Goro and the other young Japanese swore: “We are as good as the haoles.” He would lose so much that had kept him fighting.

  He temporized: “Hong Kong, you must know that no matter what The Fort offers me, I’m still going to fight for this land reform.”

  “Damn it!” Hong Kong cried. “It’s because you’re going to fight for it that they want you. They know you’re right, Shigeo.”

  “All right!” the young senator snapped. “Tell them that after the election I’ll join.”

  “After the election it will have no moral force,” Hong Kong pleaded.

  “After the election,” Shigeo repeated, and he applied himself with greater dedication to the campaign that was to alter life in Hawaii, for he and Black Jim McLafferty had whipped together a sterling slate of young Japanese veterans. All the boys were mainland-educated. Some appeared on the hustings lacking arms that had been lost in Italy or legs shot off in France, and if they had so desired, they could have appeared with their chests covered with medals. In contrast to former elections, the serious young men spoke on issues, and pressed home Senator Shigeo Sakagawa’s figures on land reform. There was great excitement in the air, as if this October were an intellectual April with ideas germinating.

  One night Noelani Janders said, as she drove Shigeo home from four outdoor rallies, “For a moment tonight, Shig, I had the fleeting sensation that we were going to win control of both the house and the senate. There’s a real chance that a hell of a lot of you Japanese are going to be elected. It’s terribly exciting.”

  Then the campaign, at least so far as Shigeo Sakagawa was concerned, fell completely apart, because one day without any previous announcement, old Kamejiro and his stooped wife climbed down off a Japanese freighter, took a bus out to Kakaako, and announced: “We have decided to live in America.”

  Goro and Shig embraced them as warmly as their stubborn, rocklike father would allow and tried to uncover the reasons for this sudden change of plans. All they could get from Kamejiro was this: “I’m too old to learn to use those goddamned Japanese toilets. I can’t stay bent down that long.” He would say no more.

  Mrs. Sakagawa allowed several hints to fall. Once she observed: “The old man said he had grown so soft in America that he was no longer fit to be a real Japanese.” At another time she said sorrowfully, “If you have been away from a farm for fifty-two years, when you go back the fields look smaller.” As for herself, she said simply, “The Inland Sea is so terribly cold in winter.”

  Once, in late October when Shigeo was particularly nervous over the election, he snapped at his father: “I’ve seen a hundred of you people leave Hawaii, saying, ‘I’m going back to the greatest land on earth!’ But when you get there, you don’t like it so much, do you?”

  To his surprise old Kamejiro strode up to him, drew back and belted him severely across the face. “You’re a Japanese!” he said fiercely. “Be proud of it!”

  Mrs. Sakagawa had come home with several new photographs of Hiroshima-ken girls, and she arranged them on the kitchen table, admiringly, but when her boys showed no interest she sadly put them away. One night when she could not sleep she saw her youngest son come driving home with a haole girl, and it looked to her as if he had kissed the girl, and she called her husband and they confronted Shigeo, fearfully, and said, “Did you come home with a haole girl?”

  “Yes,” the young senator replied.

  “Oh, no!” his mother groaned. “Kamejiro, speak to him.”

  The embittered session lasted for some hours, with old Kamejiro shouting, “If you get mixed up with a haole woman, all Japan will be ashamed!”

  Mrs. Sakagawa held that it was the gods themselves who had inspired her return to America in time to save her son from such an irrevocable disgrace. She wept, “With all the fine girls I told you about from Hiroshima, why do you ride home with a haole?”

  Strong threats were made, in the course of which Shigeo’s mother cried, “It’s almost as bad as if you married a Korean,” at which Goro, who was now awake, pointed out, “Who said anything about getting married?” and Mrs. Sakagawa replied, “It’s the same everywhere. Haole girls, Korean girls, Okinawa girls, Eta girls, all trying to trap decent Japanese boys.”

  This was too much for Goro, who suggested, “Mom, go to bed,” but when she saw in Goro visible proof of the wreck her older son had made of his life she wept again and mourned, “You wouldn’t listen to me. You went ahead and married a Tokyo girl, and see what happened. Let me warn you, Shigeo, haole girls are even worse than Tokyo girls. Much worse.”

  Goro pleaded ineffectively, “Shig, tell her that you’re not marrying the girl.”

  “I saw him kissing her!” his mother cried.

  “Mom,” Goro cried. “I kissed a Filipino girl the other night. But I’m not marrying her.”

  Mrs. Sakagawa stopped her ranting. Dropping her arms she stared at her son and repeated dully, “A Filipino girl?” The idea was so completely repugnant that she could find no words with which to castigate it, so she turned abruptly on her heel and went to bed. Chinese girls, Okinawans, even Koreans you could fight. But a Filipino!

  When the old people were gone, Goro asked quietly, “There’s nothing between you and the haole, is there?”

  “I don’t think so,” Shig replied.

  “Look, blalah,” Goro said, reverting to an old and dear phrase of their pidgin childhood, “she’s a Hale, a Janders, a haole, a divorcee, all in one. Don’t try it. You’re strong, but you’re not that strong.”

  Election Day, 1954, was one that will never be forgotten in Hawaii. Hula teams surrounded voting places. Candidates wearing mountainous flowered leis passed out sandwiches to haole voters and sushi to Japanese. Bands blared all day long, and trucks with long streamers ploughed through the streets. It was a noisy, gala, wonderful day, and that night when the votes were tallied, Hawaii realized with astonished pain that for the first time since the islands had joined America, Democrats were going to control both houses. The days were forever past when Republicans dominated by The Fort could rule the islands with impunity.

  Then, toward midnight, when each specific contest approached final settlement, a second discovery was made, even more sobering than the first. Of the Democratic victors, the majority were going to be young Japanese. In the senate, out of fifteen seats, Japanese won seven. In the house, out of thirty seats, Japanese won fourteen. On the board that ran Honolulu, out of seven vacancies, Japanese won four, and at midnight Hewie Janders, sitting glumly with John Whipple Hoxworth and the Hewlett boys, faced the unpalatable facts: “Gentlemen, we are now to be governed from Tokyo. And may God help us.”

  Black Jim McLafferty’s team of brilliant young Japanese war veterans had swept into commanding power. Their average age was thirty-one. The average number of major wounds they had received in battle was two. Their average number of medals was four. They were honor graduates, of great mainland universities like Harvard, Columbia, Michigan and Stanford, and together they would compose the best-educated, most-decorated group of legislators elected that day in any of the forty-eight American states; there would be no finer legislature than that put together by the serious young Japanese lawyers of Hawaii.

  Some pages back in this memoir I predicted that when, in 1916, the drunken luna Von Schlemm unfairly thrashed the sick Japanese field hand Kamejiro Sakagawa, the act was bound to have historic consequences which would not appear obvious for nearly forty years. Now, on Election Day of 1954, this old and almost forgotten event came home to roost. The Japanese, convinced that their labor
ing parents had been abused by the lunas, voted against the Republicans who had supervised that abuse. Von Schlemm’s single blow had been transmuted by oratory into daily thrashings. In the early part of the campaign Senator Sakagawa, who should have known better, used this incident to lure the Japanese vote, but later he had the decency to drop such inflammatory rabble-rousing. In the labor troubles that haunted our islands, Goro Sakagawa originally used this same incident to inflame his workers, but later he also reconsidered and abandoned his irresponsible harangues. Nevertheless, for a few months in 1954 it looked as if a deep schism had been driven down the middle of our community, pitting Japanese against haole, but the Sakagawa boys had the courage to back away from that tempting, perilous course. They reconciled haole and Japanese, and it is to their credit that they did so. If there was one man in the history of Hawaii that I should have liked to strangle, it was that accidental, unthinking luna Von Schlemm. By the grace of God, our islands finally exorcised the evil that he so unwittingly initiated.

  When the election returns were all in, toward two in the morning, and the Democratic victors were flushed with congratulations, Black Jim McLafferty leaned back in his chair at headquarters and warned Senator Sakagawa: “This victory is going to delay statehood. Last year our enemies rejected us on the grounds that Hawaii wasn’t ready because the Japanese weren’t Americanized. When they hear these returns, they’ll reject us again because you Orientals are too damned well Americanized. But whether we ever become a state or not, we’re going to build a great Hawaii.”

  His reflections were interrupted by the entrance into headquarters of a man whom no one expected to see there, for stern, black-coated Hoxworth Hale appeared bearing a maile lei whose fragrance was apparent even above the tobacco smoke and the shouting. The commander of The Fort looked gloomily about the unfamiliar terrain, then saw Shigeo Sakagawa among a group of cheering friends and noticed the bright-red lipstick on his yellow cheek, as if strangers had been kissing him. Moving toward the most important victor in the senatorial contests, Hoxworth extended his hand and said, “Congratulations.” Then he placed the maile chain about the young Japanese boy’s shoulders and said, “You’ll forgive me if I don’t kiss you.”