He rang the Hale bell again, and in a moment Hoxworth Hale appeared in a dark business suit, wearing collar and tie, as if such a leader of the community were not allowed to relax. Shig noticed that the man’s face was colorless and his hands trembling. The radio was making noises from a room Shig could not see, but what it was saying he could not determine. Gulping in a manner not common to the Hales, Hoxworth pushed open the screen door and said to the star of the Punahou eleven, “My God, Shig. Your country has declared war on mine.”
For a moment Shig could not comprehend what had been said. Pointing back to Pearl Harbor he asked, “They having a make-believe invasion?”
“No,” Hoxworth Hale replied in a hollow, terrified voice. “Japan is bombing Honolulu.”
“Japan?” Shig looked up at the darting planes and saw that where they passed, explosions followed and that as the planes sped toward the mountains, puffs of gunfire traced them through the sky. “Oh, my God!” the boy gasped. “What’s happened?”
Hoxworth held the door open, ignoring the cable, and indicated that Shig should come inside, and they went to the radio, whose announcer was repeating frantically, yet with a voice that tried to avoid the creation of panic: “I repeat. This is not a military exercise. Japanese planes are bombing Honolulu. I repeat. This is not a joke. This is war.”
Hoxworth Hale covered his face with his hands and muttered, “How awful this is going to be.” Looking at bright-eyed Shig, who was only a year older than his own son, he said, “You’ll need all the courage you have, son.”
Shig replied, “Outside you said, Your country has declared war on my country.’ Yours and mine are both the same, Mr. Hale. I’m an American.”
“I’m sorry, Shig. That’s a mistake many of us will make in the next few days. God, look at that explosion!” The two watchers winced as an enormous thunder filled the air, accompanied by a slowly rising pillar of jet-black smoke that billowed and twisted upward from the ruins at Pearl Harbor. “Something terrible is taking place,” Hale mumbled.
Then from a stairway behind him came a haunted voice, weak and piping like a child’s, and he made as if to push Shigeo out the door, but before he could do so the person on the stairs had come down into the room and stood facing her husband and his visitor. It was Mrs. Hale, a frail and very beautiful woman of thirty-eight. She had light auburn hair and wide, level eyes that found difficulty in focusing. She wore a wispy dressing gown such as Shig had never seen before outside the movies, and she walked haltingly. “What is the great noise I hear, Hoxworth?” she asked.
“Malama, you shouldn’t have come down here,” her husband admonished.
“But I heard a shooting,” she explained softly, “and I wondered if you were in trouble.”
At this moment one of the bombing planes was driven off course by a burst of unexpected anti-aircraft fire, and it swerved from its planned escape route, winging swiftly over the Diamond Head area, and as it passed, Shig and Mr. Hale could see on its underbelly the red circle of Japan. “You’d better go now,” Mr. Hale said.
“You haven’t signed for the cable,” Shig pointed out, and as Hoxworth took the cable and signed the receipt, his wife walked ghostlike to the door and looked toward Pearl Harbor, where the bombs were still exploding.
“Ahhhhhh!” she shrieked in a weird guttural cry. “It’s war and my son will be killed.” Throwing her filmy sleeves over her face, she ran to her husband, sobbing, “It’s war, and Bromley will not come back alive.”
Hale, holding his wife in his right arm, returned the receipt with his left hand and gripped Shigeo by the shoulder. “You must not speak of this,” he said.
“I won’t,” Shigeo promised, not understanding exactly what it was that he was expected to keep secret.
Kamejiro had risen at six that morning and had gone down to the barbershop to sterilize everything again, for part of the success of his shop stemmed from his mania for cleanliness. Now he was back home waiting for his breakfast. His wife Yoriko, who never did her customers’ laundry on Sunday, was leisurely preparing a meal, having already fed Shigeo. Goro, enjoying his pass, was sleeping late, but Tadao, who was in the R.O.T.C. at the university, had already risen. Reiko-chan was dressed and ready to go to an early service at the Community Church in Moiliili. Minoru, nineteen and already in training for basketball at Punahou, was also sleeping.
The first to comprehend what was happening was Goro, for when the bombs struck he thundered out of bed, ran in his shorts into the yard and shouted, “This is no game. Somebody’s declared war!” He ran to the radio he had built for the family and heard official confirmation of his suspicions: “Enemy planes of unknown origin are bombing Pearl Harbor and Hickam Field.” Turning to his family he announced in Japanese: “I think Japan has declared war against us.”
The escape route used by those bombers who attacked the eastern segment of Pearl Harbor carried them across Kakaako, and now as they flashed by in triumph the Sakagawa family gathered on their minute lawn surrounded by flowers and watched the bright red rising sun of Japan dart by. As soon as the enemy was identified Goro shouted, “Tad! We better report right away!” Accordingly, he hurried into his army uniform and hitchhiked a ride out to Schofield Barracks, while Tadao and Minoru climbed into their R.O.T.C. uniforms, Tadao reporting to the university and Minoru to Punahou. But before the boys left, they bowed ceremoniously to their bewildered father.
The impact of these sudden happenings on Kamejiro staggered him. In an uncomprehending daze he sat down on the steps of his shack and stared at the sky, where puffs of ack-ack traced the departure of the Japanese planes. Three times he saw the red sun of his homeland flash past, and once he saw the evil snout of a low-flying Japanese fighter spewing machine-gun bullets ineffectively into the bay. He tried to focus his thoughts on what was happening and upon his sons’ prompt departure for the American army; but the inchoate thoughts that were rising in his mind were not allowed to become words. Japan must have been in great trouble to have done such a thing. The boys must have been in great trouble if they left so promptly to defend America. That was as far as he could go.
At eleven o’clock that Sunday morning a group of four secret police, armed and with a black hearse waiting on Kakaako Street, rushed into the Sakagawa home and arrested Kamejiro. “Sakagawa,” said one who spoke Japanese. “We’ve been watching you for a long time. You’re a dynamiter, and you’re to go into a concentration camp.”
“Wait!” Reiko protested. “You know who the Sakagawa boys are. At Punahou. What’s this about concentration camp?”
“He’s a dynamiter, Miss Sakagawa. He gave money to Japan. And he refused to denationalize you. It’s the pokey for him.” The efficient team whisked bewildered Kamejiro into the hearse and it drove on, picking up other suspected seditionists.
At eleven-thirty Shigeo pedaled by on his Cable Wireless bicycle to share with the family the frightening things he had been seeing, but he said nothing of them, for Reiko’s announcement that their father had been hauled away to concentration camp stunned him. This was really war, and he and all other Japanese were instantly involved. “Pop couldn’t have been doing anything wrong, could he?”
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 chil
dren, 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,” Shig 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 ten 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 th
eir 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.
Hawaii Page 110
