Michener, James

by Hawaii

  This ugly suspicion circulated, but it was soon stopped by robust

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  Hewlett Janders, who said gruffly, "Hell, what are you worrying about? I've warned Cousin Joe a hundred times never to lease his building without clearing things with me. As long as he holds fast, there's not going to be any trouble. What could a person do, with just these little . . ."

  "Call Joe," Hoxworth said imperatively.

  An ominous silence surrounded bluff Hewlett as he cried warmly, "Hell-lo, Joe! This is Hewie. Joe, you haven't leased your big store site, have you?"

  There was a ghastly silence, and Hewlett Janders, completely shaken, put down the phone. There was no cause to ask him what had happened; the news stood out from his sagging round face. "God damn!" Hoxworth Hale shouted, banging the table. "We've been outsmarted. Who did this?" he raged. "Hewlett, who leased that store?"

  Big Hewlett Janders kept his head down, staring at the table. "I'm ashamed to say. Kamejiro Sakagawa."

  "We'll break him!" Hoxworth stormed. "We'll not bring a single cargo of his into Honolulu. That man will starve on . . ."

  Icy John Whipple Hoxworth was speaking: "The problem is twofold. Who engineered this damnable thing? And for whom?"

  There was long discussion as to who could have accumulated enough capital and wisdom to have effected such a coup, and by a slow process of elimination all came to agree that only Hong Kong Kee could have swung it. "Ill challenge him right now," Hoxworth cried, and in a forthright manner he phoned Hong Kong and asked, "Did you buy up all the leases?" When the Chinese banker replied, Hoxworth nodded his head to his associates. "Whom were you representing, Hong Kong?" This time Hoxworth did not move his head, but listened in stunned silence. "Thank you, Hong Kong," he said, and put down the phone.

  "California Fruit?" Janders asked.

  "Gregory's," Hale replied.

  There was an aching, dumb silence as an era came to an end. Finally one of the Hoxworths asked, "Can't we fight this in the courts?"

  "I don't think so," Hale answered.

  "Surely we could get Judge Harper to issue an injunction on one of these leases. He's married to my cousin and I could expkin..."

  "If Hong Kong Kee arranged those leases . . ." Hale could not go on. He dropped his head into his hands, thought for a long time and then asked his associates, "How could these people do this to us? Your family, Whipple, why they looked after the Kees. Damn it, the whole Kee hui got its start with that land Old Doc gave them. And those damned Sakagawas. Imagine Kamejiro showing such ingratitude! Buying leases behind our backs. How do you explain it? You'd think they'd feel some kind of loyalty to us. We brought them here, gave them land, looked after them when

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  they were so damned poor they couldn't read or write. What's happening in the world when such people turn against you?"

  "That's what McLafferty's been doingl" Janders shouted. "He threw us off the track, talking about that hotel."

  Hale now had control of himself and said, "Gentlemen, this is the beginning of an endless fight. I personally am going to obstruct Gregory's and McLafferty at every turn. Not to keep them out of iihe islands, because if Hong Kong arranged these leases, they'll stand up in court . . ."

  One of the Hoxworths interrupted: "You'd think that in view of all we've done for Judge Harper, we could at least rely on him to void one of the leases."

  Hale ignored this stupid and unworthy observation, continuing: "We must fight for time. We'll establish branches of our own stores in Waikiki, in Waialae and across the Pali. Every one of you who controls a going concern, move a branch out into the suburbs. Multiply and tie everything up. By the time Gregory's get here, we'll have our stores so prosperous they'll die on the vine."

  So, in the curious way by which a deadly catfish, when thrown into a pool of trout, eats a few of the lazy fish but inspires the others to greater exertion, so that in the end there are more trout, and better, and all because of the evil catfish, the arrival of Gregory's into Hawaii, followed by California Fruit and Shea and Homer, drove the Hawaiian economy ahead by such spurts that soon The Fort was much better off than it had been before. In the same obtuse way, the increased wages that Goro Sakagawa's union had chiseled out of The Fort really made that establishment richer than ever, because much of the money filtered back into its enterprises, and the general prosperity of the islands multiplied.

  Hale's determination to fight the mainland intruders with increased economic energy of his own had one unforeseen effect upon Hawaii, and in subsequent years this was often cited as the real revolution of that trying age: if The Fort was going to compete on an equal footing with outfits like Gregory's, it could no longer afford to promote into top positions inadequate nephews and cousins and gutless second sons. So under Hoxworth Hale's sharp eye, a good many Hales and Hoxworths and landerses and Hewletts were weeded out. His policy was forthright: Either give them minor jobs where they can't wreck the system, or give them substantial shares of stock on which they can live while real men run the companies." As a result, what crude Hewlett Janders called "the chinless wonders" found themselves with a lot of stock, a good yearly income and freedom to live either in France or Havana; while in their places appeared a flood of smart young graduates of the Wharton School, Stanford and Harvard Business. Some, out of sheer prudence, married Whipple girls or Hales or Hewletts, but most brought their own wives in from the mainland. And all Hawaii prospered.

  But of the men who dominated The Fort, only shrewd, confused

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  Hoxworth Hale, alternately fighting and surrendering, saw what the real menace of those days was. It was not the arrival of Gregory's, nauseating though that was, nor the triumph of the unions, seditious as that was: it lay in the fact that Black Jim McLafferty was a Democrat. His legal residence was now Hawaii. He no longer worked for Gregory's but had a small law practice of his own, which he combined with politicking, and whenever Hoxworth Hale passed McLafferty's office he studied the door with foreboding, for he knew that in the long run Democrats were worse than Gregory's or unions or communists.

  He was therefore appalled one morning when he saw that McLafferty's door carried a new sign: McLafferty and Sakagawa. Shigeo was back from Harvard, an expert on land reform, a brilliant legalist, and thanks to Black Jim McLafferty's foresight, an official Democrat.

  FOLLOWING THE STRIKE, two of the main protagonists were taken out of circulation by family problems, and for some time not much was heard of either Goro Sakagawa or Hoxworth Hale. At first it looked as if the former's troubles were the greater, for from that day in late 1945 when Goro had first met the slim and intense young Tokyo modenne, Akemi-san, their lives had been continuously complicated. First had come harassment by M.P.'s who had tried to enforce the no-fraternization edict of the occupation, and it had been unpleasant to be dating a girl you loved when, the M.P.'s had the right to intrude at any moment. Next had been the ridiculous difficulty faced by any American soldier who wanted to marry a Japanese girl, so that once Goro had remarked bitterly, "When good things are being passed out they never consider me an American, but when they're dishing out the misery I'm one of the finest Americans on record." The young lovers had evaded the anti-marriage edict by engineering a Shinto wedding at a shrine near the edge of Tokyo, and had later discovered that Goro couldn't bring a Shinto bride back to America, so there had been renewed humiliation at the consul's office, but in those trying periods Akemi-san had proved herself a stalwart girl with a saving sense of humor, and largely because she was so sweet to officialdom, her paper work was ultimately completed and by special connivance she found herself free to enter Hawaii.

  In 1946, when the troop transport neared Honolulu, Akemi-san had been one of the most practical-minded brides aboard, suffering from few of the illusions whose shattering would mar the first days in America for many of the other girls. She had not been bedazzled by her young American, Goro Sakagawa. She
had recognized that he was what modennes called a peasant type, stubborn, imperfectly educated and boorish; and even in the starving days when he had had access to the mammoth P.X.'s that blossomed across Japan, where his military pay had made him a millionaire compared to the Japanese,

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  she had known that he was not a rich man. Furthermore, she had been specifically warned by friends who knew others who had lived in Hawaii that the islands were populated mostly by Hiroshima-ken people, who were clannish to a fault and not altogether contemporary. One lively Tokyo girl had whispered to her: "I've been to Hawaii. In the entire area, not one modenne." Akemi had no illusions about her new home, but even so she was not prepared for what faced her.

  At the dock she was met by Mr. Sakagawa and his son-in-law Mr. Ishii, with their wives standing stolidly behind the stocky little men, and she thought: "This is the way families used to look in Japan thirty years ago." However, she took an instant liking to bulldog little Sakagawa-san, with his arms hanging out from knees, and thought, as she looked down at him: "He is like my father." But then she saw grim-faced Mrs. Sakagawa, iron-willed and conservative, and she shivered, thinking to herself: "She's the one to fear. She's the kind we had to fight against in Tokyo."

  She was right. Mrs. Sakagawa never eased up. Gentle with her husband, she was a terror to her daughter-in-law. Long ago in Hiroshima, when a son brought home a wife to work the rice fields, it was his mother's responsibility to see that the girl was soon and ably whipped into the habits of a good farm wife, and Mrs. Sakagawa proposed to perform this task for Goro. In fact, as soon as she saw Akemi at the railing of the ship she realized that Goro had made a sad choice, for she whispered contemptuously to her daughter Reiko, "She looks like a city girl, and you Know what expensive habits they have."

  If Goro had had a well-paying job which permitted him to live away from home, things might have settled down to a mutual and smoldering disapproval in which the two women saw each other as little as possible and were then studiously polite for the sake of Goro, but this could not be, for Goro's salary at the union did not permit him to have his own home, so he stayed with his parents. Early in her battle to subdue Akemi, Mrs. Sakagawa established her theme: "When I came to Hawaii life was very difficult, and there is no reason why you should be pampered."

  "Does she expect me to go out and chop a few fields of sugar each afternoon?" Akemi asked Goro one night, and in time he began to hate coming home, for each of his women would in turn try to grab him off to some corner to explain the faults of the other and the turmoil of that day.

  What angered Akemi most was a little thing, yet so recurrent that it began eroding her happiness with Goro. The Sakagawas had not spoken the best Japanese even while growing up in Hiroshima, and their long imprisonment in Hawaii had positively corrupted their speech, so that they now used many Hawaiian, Chinese, haole and Filipino words, with a Kiting melody to the speech borrowed from the Mexican. Much of their phraseology was incomprehensible to

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  Akemi, but she said nothing and would have been, polite enough never to have commented on this to the Sakagawas, for as she told another war bride whom she met at the store, "I find their horrible speech rather amusing," and the two girls had laughed pleasantly together.

  The Sakagawas were not so considerate. They found Akemi's precise Japanese, with its careful inflections and pronunciations, infuriating. "She thinks she's better than we are," Mrs. Sakagawa stormed one night at Goro. "Always talking as if her mouth were full of beans which she didn't want to bite." Often when the family was gathered for evening meal, Akemi would make some casual observation and Mrs. Sakagawa would repeat one or two words, pronouncing them in the barbarous Hawaiian manner. Then everyone would laugh at Akemi, and she would blush.

  She fell into the habit of waiting at the market till one or another of the war brides came in, and hungrily, like refugees in an alien land, they would talk with each other in fine Japanese without fear of being ridiculed. "It's like living in Japan a hundred years ago," Akemi said angrily one day. Then she broke into tears, and when the other girl handed her a mirror, so that she could make up her face and be presentable, she looked at herself a long time and said, "Fumiko, would you think that I had once been the leader of the modennes? I love Bruckner and Brahms. I was fighting to set the Japanese girl free. Now I'm in a worse prison than any of them, and do you know why it's worse? Because it's all so horribly ugly. Ugly houses, ugly speech, ugly thoughts. Fumiko, I haven't been to a concert or a play in over a year. Nobody I know, except you, has ever even heard of Andr6 Gide. I think we've made a terrible mistake." Later, when alone at the Sakagawas, she thought: "I live for the few minutes I can talk with a sensible human being, but every time I do, I feel worse than before."

  One night she said forcefully, "Goro, there's an orchestra concert tonight, and I think we should go." Awkwardly they went, but she did not enjoy it because Goro felt ill at ease, and the entire audience, except for a few students, were haoles. "Don't the Japanese ever go to plays or music?" she asked, but he interpreted this as the beginning edge of the complaint, so he mumbled, "We're busy working." "For what?" she snapped, and he said nothing.

  When Akemi next met Fumiko at the market she asked, "What is it they're working for? In Japan, a man and woman will work like idiots to get tickets for the theater or to buy a beautiful ceramic. What do they work for here? I'll tell you what for. So that they can buy a big black automobile, and put the old mama-san in the back, and drive around Honolulu and say, 'Now I am as good as a haole.' I'm ashamed whenever I see Japanese doctors and lawyers in their big black automobiles."

  "I am too," Fumiko confessed. "To think that they surrendered everything Japanese for such a set of values."

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  Things got a little better when Shigeo returned from Harvard with his honors degree in law, for then Akemi had an intelligent person with whom she could talk, and they had long discussions on politics and art. Akemi was astonished to find that Snig had been to visit the museums in Boston, but he explained: "I'd never have gone on my own account, but I was living with Dr. Abernethy and his wife, and they said that any Sunday on which you didn't do something to improve your mind was a Sunday wasted, and I had a great time with them."

  "Tell me about the Boston Symphony," Akemi pleaded. "In, Japan we think it's one of the best."

  At this point shrewd Mrs. Sakagawa took Shigeo aside and said, "You must not talk any more with Akemi-san. She is your brother's wife, and not a good girl at all, and she will try to make you fall in love with her, and then we will have a tragedy in the family. I told both you and Goro that you ought to avoid city girls, but neither of you would listen, and now see what's happened."

  "What has happened?" Shigeo asked.

  "Goro has been trapped by a vain and silly girl," his mother explained. "Music, books, plays all day long. She wants to talk about politics. She is no good, that one."

  The reasons his mother gave did not impress Shigeo, but the fact that Akemi was temptingly beautiful in her soft Japanese way did, and he stopped being alone with her, so that her life became even more desperate than before. It was rescued by the arrival one day of a young sociologist from the University of Hawaii, a Dr. Sumi Yamazaki, whose parents were also from Hiroshima. Dr. Yamazaki was a brilliant girl who was conducting three hundred interviews with Japanese girls married to G.I.'s, and she got to Akemi late in her study, when her findings had begun to crystallize.

  Akemi, hoping that her intended visitor might be a woman of sophisticated intelligence, had first dressed in her most modenne Tokyo style, so that she looked almost as if she had come from Paris; but when she saw herself in the mirror she said, "Today I want to be very Japanese," and she had changed into a languorous pale blue and white shantung kimono with silver zori, and when she met Dr. Yamazaki, she found that it was the attractive young sociologist who was dressed like a real modenne, with bright eyes
and quick intelligence to match. The two women liked each other immediately, and Dr. Yamazaki made a brief mental note that she would transcribe later: "Akemi Sakagawa appeared in formal kimono, therefore probably very homesick." And after two exploratory questions the sociologist was able to categorize her hostess with precision.

  "Your kimono has told me all about you, Mrs. Sakagawa," she joked, hi excellent Japanese.

  "Call me Akemi, please."

  "These are your complaints," the clever young sociologist said. "In Tokyo you were a modenne, fighting for women's rights. Here

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  you find yourself in an ancient Japan that even your parents never knew. You find the local speech barbarous, the intellectual outlook bleak, and the aesthetic view of life nonexistent." Dr. Yamazaki hesitated, then added, "You feel that if this is America, you had better go back to something better."

  Akemi-san gulped, for she had not yet formulated that bitter conclusion, though for some time she had suspected its inevitability. Now, through the soft speech of another, the frightening words had been spoken. "Do many feel as I do, Yamazaki-sensei?"

  "Would it help you to know?" the young woman asked.

  "Indeed it would!" Akemi cried eagerly.

  "You understand that my figures are only tentative . . ."

  Akemi laughed nervously and said, "It's so good to hear a person use a word like tentative."

  "I'm afraid you're bitter," Dr. Yamazaki said reprovingly.

  "Any more than the others?" Akemi asked.

  "No."

  "I think you reached me just at the right time," Akemi said eagerly.

  "The general pattern is this," Dr. Yamazaki said, but before she could continue, Akemi interrupted and asked, "Would you think me a very silly girl, Yamazaki-sensei, if I said that I wanted to serve you tea? I am most terribly homesick."

  The two women sat in silence as Akemi prepared tea in the ceremonial manner, and when the ritual was ended, Dr. Yamazaki continued: "Suppose that a hundred local soldiers married Japanese girls. Sixty of the husbands were Japanese. Thirty were Caucasians. Ten were Chinese."