Michener, James

by Hawaii

  "This time it'll be a Cadillac! Want to bet?" She laughed and then an idea came to her: "Kellyl As long as we have the car, why don't we go on a picnic?" She insisted upon buying all the food, and at ten o'clock, when the tsunami was less than six hundred miles from Oahu, she pointed to a snug little valley on the north shore of the island and cried, "They saved this sandy beach for usl" And Kelly spread their blankets under a palm tree.

  They went swimming, and when they were drying in the sun, Elinor said, "I'm going to leave Hawaii, Kelly. Don't speak. I'm

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  falling in love with you, and I'm not the kind of woman who goes around robbing cradles."

  "I'm old enough to teach you a lot," Kelly protested.

  "I would never many you, Kelly . . . eight years younger than I am. And I will not contribute to your delinquency."

  "We could have a wonderful time," he insisted, pulling her toward him.

  "I think it's immoral when a girl gets involved with a man she has no possibility of marrying. It's disgraceful, the way girls use you, Kelly."

  He fell silent, then started pitching pebbles at a nearby rock. Finally he said, "If you ever go to another island, Mrs. Henderson, don't ask so many deep questions. Take it as it is."

  "I'll stay away from islands," she promised. "I wanted to see why my ancestors couldn't stomach this one."

  "Did you find out?" he asked.

  "Yes, and I can't stand it either."

  "Why not?" he asked drowsily.

  "I always side with the dispossessed. You know, Immanuel Quigley got into great trouble in Ohio, aiding the Indians."

  "I'm sorry I wrecked your book about Quigley. Will they be angry ... at Smith?"

  "The biography of one man is the biography of all men," she said. "In the passage of time, Kelly, we all become one person."

  "Do you honestly think a kanaka like me is as good as a haole like you?" he asked.

  "I was once taught that if a pebble falls in the Arabian desert, it affects me in Massachusetts. I believe that, Kelly. We are forever interlocked with the rest of the world."

  She saw that he was sleepy, so she cradled his sun-browned shoulders in her kp, and he asked for his guitar so that he might play a little slack-key, and he picked out melodies that spoke of the sun-swept seashores that he loved. After a while the guitar fell from his hands, and he dozed.

  Elinor, watching the panorama of sandy beach and palm trees, studied with interest what she thought was the changing of the tide, for the ocean waters seemed to be leaving the shore, until at last they stood far out to sea disclosing an emptier reef than any she had seen before, and she watched certain prominent puddles in which large fish, suddenly stranded, were whipping their tails in an attempt to escape. She began to laugh, and Kelly, forgetting where he was, asked drowsily, "Whassamatta you laff?" And she explained, "There's a fish trapped in a pool." And he asked, "How da heck he stuck in dis ..."

  In horror he leaped up, saw the barren reef and the withdrawn waters. "Oh, Christ!" he cried in terror. "This is a big one!" He grabbed her in his strong arms and started dashing across the sand,

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  past the useless Chewy convertible and on toward higher knd, but his effort was useless, for from the tormented sea the great tsunami that had sucked away the waters to feed its insatiable wave, now rushed forward at more than five hundred miles an hour.

  It was not a towering wave but its oncoming force was incredible. It filled the reef. It kept coming relentlessly, across the sand, across the roads, across the fields. In low areas it submerged whole villages, but if it was not constricted and could spread out evenly, its destruction was moderate. However, when it was compressed into a narrowing wedge, as at the mouth of a valley, it roared in with accumulating fury until at last it stood more than seventy feet higher than along its accustomed shore.

  In its first tremendous surge inward it trapped Kelly Kanakoa and Mrs. Henderson in their snug valley. It did not whip them about, like on ordinary breaker, for it was not that kind of wave; it merely came on and on. and on, bearing them swiftly inland until Kelly, who knew how awful the outgoing rush would be, shouted, "Elinorl Grab hold of somethingl"

  Vainly she grabbed at bushes, at trees, at corners of houses, but the implacable wave swept her along, and she could hold nothing. "Grab somethingl" he pleaded. "When the wave sucks back out . . ."

  He was struck in the neck by a piece of wood and started to sink, but she caught him and kept his head above the rushing waters. How terrifying they were, as they came on with endless force. She was swept past the kst house in the village and on up into the valley's tight confines, the most dangerous spot in the entire island from which to fight a retreating tsunami, for now the waters began to recede, slowly at first, then with speed and finally with uncontrolkble fury.

  She last saw KeEy almost unconscious, hanging instinctively to a kou tree upon whose branches she had pkced his hands. She had tried to catch something for herself, too, but the waters were too powerful. At increasing speed she was sucked back over the route she had come, past the broken houses and the crushed Chewy and the reef she had seen so strangely bare. As the last stones whipped past she thought: "This cursed island!" And she thought no more.

  Now the drowsy life of the beachboy drifted from day to day, from week into week, and then into sleepy sun-swept months; the years of sand and sea crept on. In late November, when Florsheim drove his new Pontiac convertible off the Moana Loa and up to his old stand at the Lagoon, Kelly thought: "I wish I could tell Mrs. Henderson that it was neither a Buick nor a Cadilkc," and the old hurt returned.

  At the Swamp his mother Malama sang in the late afternoons with her Hawaiian friends: Mrs. Choy, Mrs. Fukuda, Mrs. Mendonca and Mrs. Rodriques, and they were never again bothered by Kelolo and

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  his haole girls. For the most part he kept strictly to the Lagoon, where he sang a little, played some slack-key, and got a lot of cables. In time he found great consolation in Johnny Pupali's summary of sex: "It's the greatest thing in the world. You never get enough until you've just had some."

  Once Florsheim remarked: "Kelly blalah, I t'ink dis one t'ing berry punny."

  "Wha' dat?" Kelly asked.

  "Allatime New York dey got pitchas wid' colors 'Come to Hawaii!' An' dey show dis rock wid wahines, grass skirts, flowahs in de hair, wigglin' de hips like to speak, 'You come to Hawaii, mister, we gonna screw till you dizzy.' "

  "Ain" nuttin' wrong wid dat," Kelly reflected.

  "But de punny t'ing, Kelly blalah, it ain' so easy to ketch a wahine on dis rock. It ain' dem mainland kanakas has de good time ovah heah, it's de wahines. You know what I fink, blalah?"

  "You speak."

  "I t'ink mo bettah dey get you 'n' me on de pitchas." And he fell into an exaggerated pose, his muscles flexed, his dark eyes staring out to sea past Diamond Head, and he made an ideal travel poster. Relaxing with laughter he yelled, "Kelly blalah, we de real attraction."

  Later when Kelly was locked in a room with a red-hot divorcee from Los Angeles her father arrived unexpectedly and banged on the door, shouting, "Betty! I don't want you wrecking your life with any beachboy bum." But Kelly slipped out through a side hallway, so no real damage was done.

  WHEN Shig Sakagawa landed at Yokohama in early 1946, he studied his ancestral homeland with care, and when he saw the starving people, the bombed-out cities and the pathetic material base from which the Japanese had aspired to conquer the world, he thought: "Maybe Pop's right, and this is the greatest country on earth, but it sure don't look it." In his first letter home he tried to report faithfully what he was seeing, but when Kamejiro heard it read, he sent his son a stern reply which said: "Remember that you are a good Japanese, Shigeo, and do not say such things about your homeland." After that Shig wrote mostly generalities.

  His first days in Japan were tremendously exciting, for the bustle of Tokyo was reviving, and hordes of little workmen, each of whom lo
oked like his father, scrambled over the bombed ruins, cleaning up as they went. Shig had never before seen such national vitality, and in time he became impressed with Japan's unconquerable resilience. Along the streets he saw innumerable elderly women like his own mother, wearing baggy canvas pants, and they worked harder than, the men, lugging away big baskets of rubble. Almost while he watched, Tokyo was cleaned up and prepared for a new cycle of life. "I have to admire such people," he wrote to his father, and old Kamejiro

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  liked this letter better than the disloyal one that had reflected upon Japan's defeat.

  Shig took great interest in his work as a translator for the Harvard professor whom General MacArthur had brought over to advise the Occupation on land reform. Dr. Abemethy was a curious, lanky man of most acute insights, and although he had to depend upon Captain Sakagawa for actual translations of what the Japanese farmers told him, he relied ultimately upon his own perceptions, and for the first time in his life Shig was able to study at close hand a refined human mind at work. A rice farmer would tell Shig, "I have two hundred and forty tsubo for paddy," and Shig would translate this for Dr. Abernethy, but the latter seemed hardly to be listening, for he was surveying the knd himself and judging its productive quotient; so that almost before either Shig or the farmer spoke, Dr. Abernethy knew what the knd was worth, and if Shig's translated evidence contradicted his, Shig had to reconcile the facts, and usually Abernethy was right.

  On long jeep trips through the countryside, while Shig drove, Abernethy expounded his theories of land reform. "What General MacArthur's up against here, Shig, is a classic medieval concept of land ownership. In each area half a dozen wealthy men control the knd and parcel out portions of it according to their own economic interests. That's not a bad system, really. Certainly it's a lot better than communism. But where the trouble comes is when personal economic interests, usually of an arbitrary nature, override national survival interest."

  "Like what?" Shig asked, finding deep pleasure in Abemethy's willingness to talk to him on a mature, adult level. It was hell when well-meaning colonels insisted upon speaking pidgin.

  "Well, like when a landowner in an area that needs more food holds back his land for other speculation, or doesn't use it at all."

  "Does this happen?"

  "Look around you! It's obvious that even during Japan's war for survival this kndowner held his knds back. When such a thing occurs, to save your nation you ought to have a revolution. Throughout history that's been the inevitable concomitant of abusive land ownership. Fortunately, a knd revolution can develop in either of two ways. In France the land was held so irrationally that the French Revolution was required before the whole rotten system could be swept away . . . with great loss of life. That's the poorest kind of revolution. In England, the same result was accomplished by taxation. In time the huge landholders simply couldn't hang onto their land any longer. Taxes were too high. So they were forced to sell, and so far as I know not a single human life was lost. That's the logical way to accomplish knd reform."

  "You think Japan faces the same problem as France and England?"

  "All nations do," Abernethy said as they bounced along a rocky road in Shiba Prefecture. "The relationship of man to his land is

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  simple and universal. Every nation began with land evenly distributed among producers. As a result of superior mentality or manipulative skill, able landlords begin to acquire large holdings, in which society confirms them. As long as there is no great pressure of population, these great holders are allowed to do pretty much as they wish. But when families multiply, their marriageable sons begin to look longingly at the expanse of idle land. For the moment all the conventions of society, religion, politics and custom support the krge landholders, and in most nations those peasants who make the first protests are hanged. Here in Japan, when the first agitators asked for land, they were crucified, upside down. Later the pressures become greater, and you have a bloody revolution . . . unless you're smart, like the English, and then you accomplish the same end by adroitly applied taxes."

  "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 rnarvelous 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 knd reform. All it can do is determine the course it wfll take: bloody revolution or taxation."

  "It seems to me that here in, Japan we have a tihird 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 knd 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 kugh. "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. The 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

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  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 knd 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," Abemethy 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 GOTO, who served as transktor in General MacArthur's labor division. He had been in Nagoya when Shig knded, 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 lab
or 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

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  good in Japan, they're good in Hawaii. If the zaibatsu are bad in Japan, they're bad in Hawaii. Yet Tin 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. Abemethy, says exactly the same thing about the find 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?"

  " 'Whafs 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 kbor was stupid. Next time I'll win because of what I'm learning in Japan."