Michener, James

by Hawaii

"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 warl" 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. Abemethy 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," GOTO agreed sadly, slumping over his beer. "Have you ever talked to a real smart kbor leader from New York?"

  "So I thought maybe I'd go to Harvard Law School."

  "What a marvelous ideal" Goro cried. "But look, kid, I don't want you to go there and just learn kw."

  "I have no intention of doing that," Shig replied carefully. "Dr. Abemethy suggested that maybe I'd like to live with him. His wife's a kwyer."

  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,

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  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 continued 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. Abemethy 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 GOTO 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 expkined.

  "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.

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  "111 bet she's not Hiroshima-ken?" Shig teased.

  "Have you seen Hiroshima?" Goro asked. "Pppssskkkl" he � leveling his hand over the floor. "I don't want anything to do 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 Andr6 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 2 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

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  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 s
truck 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

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  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?"

  "Wu Chow's Auntie, the detectives are back again," he explained.

  "But you don't know whether that means good or bad," she observed.

  "Detectives are never good," he assured her.

  "How do you know they're back?"

  "Kamejiro Sakagawa said they were digging into his land deal again. They were also asking sly questions at Australia's."

  "How are we fixed for taxes and mortgage payments?" she asked.

  This was the one bright spot, and he said with some relief, "Not too bad. With the money we saved kst year we're out of trouble."

  "Then we'll be prudent and wait," she advised. "If someone wants to hurt you, Hong Kong, keep him off balance. Make him take the first tep toward you, for then you can watch him coming and take precautions."

  Four days later the first step came, in the person of a husky, quiet-spoken Irishman from Boston with huge, bushy-black eyebrows, who said that his name was McLafferty and who appeared in Hong Kong's office asking idle questions a/bout real estate, and from the assured 'manner in which the visitor behaved, Hong Kong deduced: "This one has the detective reports in his pocket. He knows."

  Not much happened that first day. Hong Kong probed: "You looking for a hotel site? You got something else in mind?"

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  "What hotel sites have you?" Mr. McLafferty parried, but it was obvious that he wasn't interested. "I'll be back," he said.

  As soon as he was gone, Hong Kong started half a dozen Kees on his trail, but all they turned up was that he really was Mr. McLafferty and he was a lawyer from Boston, stopping at the Lagoon. Hong Kong took this information to his grandmother, and they carefully weighed the various possibilities that might bring a Boston lawyer to Hawaii, and Hong Kong was all for dispatching a cable to a Kee who was studying at Harvard asking for detailed information on McLafferty, but his grandmother told him to wait. "Don't get excited until he makes some specific move," she cautioned him.

  Two days later Mr. McLafferty returned and said casually, "If my syndicate decided on one of the big hotel sites ... at your price? Could you deliver title to the land?"

  Hong Kong realized that considering the intricate Hawaiian system of land ownership, this apparently trivial question was a trap, so he answered slowly and cautiously, "Well, I'd better explain, Mr. McLafferty, that out here we don't sell land fee simple. What I'd be willing to do is guarantee you a fifty-year lease."

  "You can't sell us any land outright?" McLafferty probed cautiously.

  "My hui�are you familier with the word hui?�well my hui has a little fee simple, but not choice hotel sites. What we do have is control of some of the best leases in Honolulu."

  "Why don't you people sell fee simple?" McLafferty asked directly, but not bluntly. He was a careful operator.

  Hong Kong decided not to waste time. "Mr. McLafferty, I don't think you're paying attention to land problems here. If you're far enough along to talk seriously about a hotel site you're bound to know that our estates never sell land. They lease it."

  Mr. McLafferty liked this blunt answer, liked all he knew about Hong Kong, which was considerable, and felt that the propitious moment had come. "Could we send your secretary out? For maybe an hour?"

  "Certainly," Hong Kong replied, his pulse hammering. He had learned that when this happened he must slow down . . . instantly. So he took some minutes giving his girl exaggerated instructions which Mr. McLafferty recognized as stalling. Then the wiry Chinese banker closed the door carefully, locked it, and returned to his desk, his pulse back to normal. In order to make his visitor think he had been taken in by the hotel talk he said, "Now we have three wonderful hotel sites . . ."

  "I'm not interested in hotels," the visitor said.

  "What are you interested in?" Hong Kong asked evenly.

  "I represent GregoryV"

  The name literally exploded in the quiet office, ricocheted around Hong Kong's ears and left him stunned. Finally he asked, "You going to bull your way into the islands?"

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  "You have used exactly the right word," McLafferty said coldly. "Six months from now, Mr. Kee, we will have bulled our way into the biggest goddamned store right," and he whipped out a secret map of downtown Honolulu, "here." Forcefully he jabbed his finger at a prime intersection.

 
When Hong Kong saw the location he gasped. "The Fort will break you, Mr. McLafferty," he warned.

  "Nope. We're too strong. We're ready to lose five million dollars the first three years. We have resources of nearly half a billion behind that. The Fort is not going to break us."

  "But it won't let you buy that land, or lease it either. You simply aren't going to get in there."

  "You're going to buy it for us, Mr. Kee."

  "It's not for sale," Hong Kong protested.

  "I mean, you're going to get the leases. You'll use an assumed name ... a dozen assumed names. After today I won't see you again, but we'll arrange some system of keeping in contact. Gregory's is breaking into Honolulu, and don't you ever doubt it."

  "If The Fort doesn't break you, it'll break whoever buys the land for you. It has great power to retaliate."

  "We've thought about that ... a lot, Mr. Kee."

  "Why don't you call me Hong Kong?"

  "And we spent more than a year analyzing your position out here. If you keep in a solvent position, Hong Kong, nobody can hurt you. And if they try, we stand ready to spend a good deal of the five million we know we'll lose, shoring you up."

  Hong Kong liked this daring, cold-blooded Boston Irishman, and after a moment's reflection asked, "You have to have that specific comer."

  "No other," the lawyer said.

  "How long do I have?"

  "Six months."

  "You agree to pay fifty per cent above going rates?"

  "We'll do better. You give us a strict accounting of actual costs, and we'll give you a hundred per cent commission.'

  "You know that if The Fort hears about this . . ."

  "We know. That's why we chose you to negotiate the leases."

  Hong Kong leaned back. "You're certainly aware, Mr. McLafferty, that the profit to me is not very substantial. But nevertheless you're asking me to risk my business life in a head-on tangle with The Fort. How do you reason?"

  "We say this. O. C. Clemmons wants to come into these islands, but The Fort won't let them. Won't sell them land. Won't provide shipping. Won't do anything. Same with Shea and Horner, same with California Fruit. The Fort has cold-bloodedly decided that no mainland firm will be allowed in Hawaii. They are determined to sat their own prices, keep competition out, garner all profits to The Fort."