Michener, James

by Hawaii

  "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. GOTO, enjoying his pass, was sleeping lalte, 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 Moih'ili. 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 Hicfcam 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 GOTO 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

  FROM THE INLAND SEA711

  flash past, and once he saw the evfl 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."

  "Shdgeo!" Reiko-ohan cried. "That's unworthyl"

  "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 rright Japan will be in complete control." To the amazement of the Sakagawa children, 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.

  712

  HAWAII

  "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," Slug 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.

  FROM THE INLAND SEA713

  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 tiie 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 sourc
es 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 tea hours late, delivered on bicycle by a Japanese messenger boy.

  The speed with which GOTO 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 Scho-field 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 trucldoad of local Japanese boys invading the wrecked air strip they yelled, "They're invadingl" 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, "Christl 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 arel"

  714HAWAII

  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 tnis 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 their 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

  FROM THE INLAND SEA715

  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 pintoed 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 ait 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.

  "Why don't you wear shoes, like decent Americans?" the rowdies cried. They hectored her into a corner, without her understanding at all what was happening, and a big man kept kicking at the offensive zori. "Take 'em off, goddamn it. Take 'em off!"

  Swiftly Minoru and Tadao leaped among the crowd to protect their mother, and some sports fans recognized them and shouted, "It's the Sakagawa boys." The incident ended without further embarrassment, but Tadao, who was a diplomat, whispered to his terrified mother, "Kick off your zori. That's what made them mad." Deftly she kicked away the Japanese shoes, and the crowd cheered. On the way home Tadao warned her, "You've got to stop coming out in public wearing your kimono."

  "And buy some shoes!" Minoru snapped, for like all the boys of his age, he could not understand why his parents kept to their old ways.

  In the following days Minoru and Tadao were to be repeatedly tested. Having been born in America, they were technically citizens and even eligible to become President; but they were also Japanese and were thus subjected to humiliations worse than those suffered by aliens. Several times they were threatened by drunken soldiers, and prudence told them to keep off the streets.

  Nevertheless, animosity against all Japanese increased when Hawaii, staggered 'by the completeness with which Japan had defeated the local troops, understandably turned to any logical rationalization at

  hand "You can't tell me the Japs could have bombed our ships unlessss the local slant-eyes were feeding them spy information," one

  man shouted in a bar.

  "I know for a fact that plantation workers at Malama Sugar cut arrows across the cane fields, showing Nip fliers the way to Pearl Harbor," a luna reported.

 
"The F.B.I, has proved that almost every Jap maid working for the military was a paid agent of the Mikado," an official announced.

  And the Secretary of the Navy himself, after inspecting the disaster, told the press frankly, "Hawaii was the victim of the most effective fifth-column work that has come out of this war, except in Norway."

  It was therefore no wonder that many Japanese were arrested and thrown into hastily improvised jails, whereupon those not yet picked up were ready to believe the rumor that all Japanese in Hawaii were to be evacuated to tents on Molokai. But when the jails were jammed and ships actually appeared in the harbor to haul those already arrested to concentration camps in Nevada, an unusual thing happened, one which more than any other served to bind up the wounds caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hoxworth Hale and Mrs. Hewlett Janders and Mrs. John Whipple Hoxworth and a maiden librarian named Luanda Whipple went singly, and not as a result of concerted action, to the jails where the Japanese were being held. Being the leading citizens of the community, they were admitted, and as they walked through the corridors they said to the jailers, "I know that man well. He can't possibly be a spy. Let him go."

  Mrs. Hewlett Janders even went so far as to bring her husband, big Hewie, to the jail in his naval uniform, and he identified half a dozen excellent citizens whom he had known for years. "It's ridiculous to keep those men in a concentration camp. They're as good Americans as I am."

  "Will you vouch for them if we let them go?" the F.B.I, man asked.

  "Me vouch for Ichiro Ogawa? I'd be proud to vouch for him. You come out of there, Ichiro. Go back to work."

  Some three hundred leading Japanese citizens were removed from jail by these voluntary efforts of the missionary descendants. It wasn't that they liked Japanese, or that they feared Imperial Japan less than their neighbors. It was just that as Christians they could not sit idly by and watch innocent people maltreated. In California, where the imaginary danger of trouble from potential fifth columnists was not a fraction of the real danger that could have existed in Hawaii, cruel and senseless measures were taken that would be forever an embarrassment to America: families of the greatest rectitude and patriotism were uprooted; their personal goods were stolen; their privacy was abused; and their pride as full-fledged American citizens outraged. Such things did not happen in Hawaii. Men like Hoxworth Hale and Hewlett Janders wouldn't allow them to happen; women like Miss Whipple and Mrs. Hoxworth personnaly went through the jails to protect the innocent.