by Hawaii
"You think I did right?" Hong Kong asked in a sudden longing to talk.
"I'd attend my daughter's wedding, no matter whom she married," Hoxworth said flatly.
"I'm glad I did," Hong Kong confessed. "But I can't bring myself to visit them."
"Wait till the first baby's bom," Hoxworth wisely counseled. "It'll give you an excuse to retreat gracefully." And Hong Kong agreed, but he felt that he might not want to look at a grandchild that was only half Chinese.
To THE SAKAGAWA FAMILY 1954 was a year that brought lislocation and frustrationi. It started in January when iron-willed Kamejiro, whose threats about leaving America no one had taken seriously, announced unexpectedly that he was sailing on Friday to spend the rest of his life in Hiroshima-ken. Consequently, on Friday he and his bent wife boarded a Japanese freighter and without even a round of farewell dinners departed for Japan. He told the boys, "The store will pay enough to feed me in Hiroshima. I worked hard in America, and Japan can be proud of the manner in which I conducted myself. I hope that when you're old you'll be able to say the same." Never a particularly sentimental man, he did not
THE (OLDEN MEN
889
linger on deck gawking at the mountains he had pierced nor at the fields he had helped create. He led his wife below decks, where they had a sturdy meal of cold rice and fish, which they enjoyed.
It was usually overlooked in both Hawaii and the mainknd that of the many Orientals brought to America, a substantial number preferred returning to their homelands, and in the years after World War II there was a heavy flow from America to Japan, of which the Sakagawas formed only an inconspicuous part. With their dollar savings such emigrants were able to buy, in the forgotten rural areas of Japan, fairly substantial positions in a poverty-stricken economy, and this Kamejiro intended doing. He would buy his Japanese relatives a little more land beside the Inland Sea and there it would wait, the family homestead in Hiroshima-ken, in case his boys Goro and Shigeo ever decided to return to their homeland.
The old folks' departure grieved Shigeo, because the more solidly American he became, with a seat in the senate and a canny man like Black Jim McLafferty as his partner, the more he appreciated the virtues old Kamejiro had inculcated in his sons; but Goro felt otherwise, for although he too treasured his father's moral teachings, he was gkd to see his stern, unyielding mother go back to Japan, for he felt that this would give him a chance to keep his own wife, Akemi-san, in America. Accordingly, he and Shigeo gave Akemi a comfortable allowance, command of the Sakagawa house, and freedom from the old woman's tyranny. The brothers never laughed at Akemi's precise speech, and they showed her that they wanted her to stay.
But it was too late. One morning, as they were breakfasting, she said, "I am going back to Japan."
"Why?" Goro gasped.
"Where will you get the money?" Shigeo said.
"I've saved it. For a year I've bought nothing for myself and eaten mainly rice. I haven't cheated you," she insisted.
"No one's speaking of cheating, Akemi dear," Goro assured her. "But why are you leaving?"
"Because Hawaii is too dreadfully dull to live in," she replied.
"Akemi!" Goro pleaded.
She pushed back from the table and looked at the hard-working brothers. "In Hawaii I'm intellectually dead . . . decomposing."
"How can you say that?" Shig interrupted.
"Because it's true . . . and pitifully obvious to anyone from Japan."
"But don't you sense the excitement here?" Shig pleaded. "We Japanese are just breaking through to power."
"Do you know what real excitement is?" she asked sorrowfully. "The excitement of ideas? Quests? I'm afraid Hawaii will never begin to understand true intellectual excitement, and I refuse to waste my life here."
"But don't you find our arrival as a group of people exciting?" Shig pressed.
890
HAWAII
"Yes," she granted, "if you were going to arrive some place important it would be exciting. But do you know what your goal is? A big shiny black automobile. You'll never arrive at music or plays or reading books. You have a cheap scale of values, and I refuse to abide them any longer."
"Akemil" Goro pleaded in real anguish. "Don't leave. Please."
"What will you do?" Shig asked.
"I'll get a job in a Nishi-Ginza bar where people talk about ideas," she said flatly, and that day she started to pack.
When it became obvious that she was determined to leave Hawaii, Goro disappeared from his labor office for several days, and Shigeo found him sitting dully at home, waiting for Akemi-san to return from the market, where she was informing her envious war-bride friends that she was sailing back to Japan. Goro's eyes were red, and his hands trembled. "Do you think that all we've been working at is useless, Shig?" he pleaded.
"Don't believe what this girl says," Shig replied, sitting with his brother.
"But I love her. I can't let her go!"
"Goro," Shigeo said quietly, "I love Akemi-san almost as much as you do, and if she walks out, I'm broken up, too. But I'm sure of one thing. You and I are working on something so big that she can't even dimly understand it. Give us another twenty years and we'll build here in Hawaii a wonderland."
Goro knew what his brother was speaking of, but he asked, "In the meantime, do you think we're as dull as she says?"
Shig thought several minutes, recalling Boston, on a Friday night, and Harvard Law with its vital discussions, and Sundays at the great museums. "Hawaii's pretty bad," he confessed.
"Then you think Akemwihan's justified?" GOTO asked with a dull ache in his voice.
"She's not big enough to overlook the fact that we're essentially peasants," Shig replied.
"What do you mean?" Goro argued contentiously. "We got good educations."
"But fundamentally we're peasants," Shig reasoned. "Everybody who came to these islands came as illiterate peasants. The Chinese, the Portuguese, the Koreans, and now the Filipinos. We were all honest and hard-working, but, by God, we were a bunch of Hiroshima yokels."
Goro, lacerated by his wife's threatened desertion, would not accept this further castigation and cried, "Yokels or not, our people now get a decent wage in the sugar fields and our lawyers get elected to the legislature. I call that something."
"It's everything," Shig agreed, pressing his arm about his brother's shoulder. "The other things that Akemi-chan misses . , . they'll come later. It's our children who'll read books and listen to music. They won't be peasants."
Goro now changed from misery to belligerency and cried, "Hell,
THE GOLDEN MEN
891
fifty years from now they'll put up statues to guys like you and me!" And he thought of many things he was going to tell his wife when she returned, but when he saw her come into the room, after carefully removing her gata at the door and walking pin-toed like a delicate Japanese gentlewoman, his courage collapsed and he pleaded, "Akemi-chan, please, please don't go."
She walked past him and into her room, where she completed her final packing and when she was ready to go to the boat she said softly, "I'm not running away from you, Goro-san. You were good to me and tender. But a girl has only one life and I will not spend mine in, Hawaii."
"It'll grow better!" he assured her.
In precise Japanese the determined girl replied, "I would perish here." And that afternoon she sailed for Japan.
Mr. Ishii, of course, wrote a long letter in Japanese script to the Sakagawas in Hiroshima-ken, and when the local letter reader had advised Mrs. Sakagawa of its contents, Goro began getting a series of delighted letters from his mother, which Ishii-san read to the boys, for although they could speak Japanese they could not read it: "I am so glad to hear that the superior-thinking young lady from Tokyo has gone back home. It's best for all concerned, Goro, and I have been asking through the village about suitable girls, and I have found several who would be willing to come to America, but you must send me a later picture
of yourself, because the one I have makes you look too young, and the better girls are afraid that you are not well established in business. I am sending you in this letter pictures of three very fine girls. Fumiko-san is very strong and comes from a family I have known all my life. Chieko-san is from a very dependable family and when made-up looks rather sweet. Yuri-san is too short, but she has a heart which I know is considerate, for her mother, whom I knew as a girl, tells me that Yuri is the best girl in the village where taking care of a home is concerned. Also, since Shigeo now has a good job and ought to be looking for a wife, I am sending him two pictures of the schoolteacher in the village. She is well educated and would make a fine wife for a lawyer, because even though she went away to college, she is originally from this village. After the grave mistake Goro made with the girl from Tokyo, I am sure it would be better if you boys both found your wives at home."
The brothers spread the five photographs on the table and studied them gloomily. "It's too bad we're not raising sugar cane," Goro growled. "That quartet could hoe all the fields between here and Waipahu."
The next mail brought three more applicants, stalwart little girls with broad bottoms, gold teeth and backs of steel. Mr. Ishii, after reading the letters to the brothers, got great pleasure from studying the photographs and making therefrom his own recommendations. "Of all the things I have done in my life," he explained, "I am
892HAWAII
happiest that I married a Hiroshima girl. If you boys were wise, you would do the same thing."
Then came the letter that contained two better-than-average pictures, and as they fluttered out, Mr. Ishii studied thev portraits with care and said, "I think these may be the ones," but his spirits were soon dampened by a passage from Mrs. Sakagawa which he could not find the courage to finish reading to the boys. It began, "Last week donna-san and I went to see Hiroshima City, a place we had not visited before, and I am ashamed to have to say that what the Americans reported is true. The city was bombed. It was mostly destroyed and you can still see the big bkck scars. Ishii-san, who will be reading this letter to you, ought to know that the damage was very bad and from looking at this city I don't see how anyone could believe any longer that Japan won the . . ."
Mr. Ishiii's voice trailed off. For a long time he sat looking at the fatal pages. Coming as they did, from his own mother-in-law, and a Hiroshima woman too, he could not doubt their veracity; but accepting her statement meant that all his visions for the past thirteen years since Pearl Harbor were fallacious, his life a mockery. The boys were considerate enough not to mention the facts which their mother had hammered home, and when the time came for them to go to work, they said good-bye to the little old man, their brother-in-law, and left him staring at the letter.
At about eleven that morning a Japanese man came running into the law offices of McLafferty and Sakagawa, shouting in English, "Jesus Christ! He did it on the steps of the Japanese Consulate."
Shig experienced a sinking feeling in his throat and mumbled, "Ishii-san?" And the informant veiled, "Yes. Cut his belly right
open."
"I'll go with you," McLafferty called, and the two partners roared up Nuuanu to where, from the days of the first Japanese in Hawaii, the little bow-legged laborers had taken their troubles. At the consulate a group of police waited for an ambulance, which in due time screamed up, and Shig said, "I'm a relative. I'll go with him." But the little old labor leader was dead. He had felt that if his fatherland had indeed lost the war, the only honorable thing he could do was to inform the emperor of his grief, so he had gone to the emperor's building, and with the emperor's flag in his left hand, had behaved as his institutions directed. With his death, the Ever-Victorious Group died also, and the sadness of national defeat was at last brought home even to the farthest remnants of the Japanese community.
After the funeral Shigeo faced his first difficult decision of the year, for GOTO hurried home late one afternoon with this dismaying news: "The communist trials begin next month, and Rod Burke wants you to defend him."
Shig dropped his head. "I knew it would come . . . sooner or
THE GOLDEN MEN
893
later," he said. "But why does he have to ask me just as I'm getting ready to run for a full term as senator?"
Goro replied, "That's when the case was called. Will vou take the job?"
Shig had anticipated that the communists would seek him as their counsel, and he had tried to formulate a satisfactory reply to the invitation; but whereas it is easy to prefabricate an answer to an expected question like "Shall we go to Lahaina next week?" it is not so easy to anticipate the moral and emotional entanglements involved in a more complex question like, "Am I, as a lawyer, obligated to provide legal aid to a communist?"
"I wish you hadn't asked me," Shig stalled.
"I wish Rod hadn't asked me," Goro countered.
"Are you determined to help him?" Shig asked.
"Yes, I'd have accomplished nothing without him."
"But you're sure he's guilty?"
"I suppose so," Goro grunted. "But even a communist is entitled to a fair trial . . . and a defending lawyer."
"Why me?"
"Because you're my brother."
"I can't answer this one so fast, Goro."
"Neither could I at first," Goro said. "Take your time."
So Shigeo spent long hours walking the streets of Kakaako, wondering what he ought to do. He reasoned: "In Hawaii I have one overriding responsibility�the land laws. To do anything about these, I've got to keep getting re-elected. If I defend Rod Burke, I'll surely lose all the haole votes I apparently picked up last time, and that would mean I'd be licked in November. So from that point of view I ought to say no.
"But Rod Burke isn't the only defendant. There's his Japanese wife and two other Japanese. And if I go into court and give those people a stirring defense, I'll bind the Japanese vote to me forever, simply because I have dared to defend the underdog. So although I might lose this election, I'd probably be in stronger position next time, and the time after that.
"But are my personal interests the ones that ought to determine this decision? A man, charged with a crime has a right to a lawyer, and when the community is most strongly against him, his right is morally greatest. Somebody has got to defend Rod Burke, and I suppose it ought to be me.
"But I am not just the average, non-attached lawyer of the case books. I'm the first Japanese to get into the senate from the Nineteenth. I'm the one who has a chance of getting in again. If my brother Goro has come to represent labor, then I represent a cross-section ot all the Japanese. That's a major responsibility which I ought not destroy carelessly.
"But there are others in our family than Goro and me. There are Tadao and Minoru, and they gave their lives defending an ideal
894HAWAII
America. They never found it for themselves . . . certainly not here in Hawaii. But in Italy and France, fighting to defend America, they did find it. So did Goro and I. And what we found is definitely threatened by a communist conspiracy. How then can I go into court and defend identified communists?"
And then came the question of the age. It struck Shigeo as he was walking past a sashimi parlor on Kakaako Street, as it was striking hundreds of similar Americans in garages or at the movies or in church: "But if I turn my back on a supposed communist, how do I know that I am not turning my back on the very concept of liberty that I am seeking to protect? Honest men can always get someone to defend them. But what does justice mean if apparently dishonest men can find no one?"
So through this precise waltz the mind of Shigeo Sakagawa swayed, day after day. Finally he took his confusion to Black Jim McLafferty, asking, "How are you going to feel, Jim, first, as head of the Democratic Party, and second, as head of McLafferty and Sakagawa, if your partner defends the communists?"
Now it was Black Jim's turn to follow the devious paths of logic, emotion, politics, patriotism and self-interest. His two most int
eresting comments were stolen right from his father's Boston experiences: "It never hurts a Democratic lawyer to defend the underdog," and "As long as my half of our partnership is known to be Catholic, you're fairly free to defend whom you want to." Then, drawing from his Hawaiian experience, he added, "It would be a damned shame for the first Japanese elected from the Nineteenth to be thrown out of office on an irrelevancy." But prudently he refused to give a concrete recommendation.
With McLafferty's concepts adding to his confusion, Shigeo walked more miles, and the consideration which finally made up his mind for him was one that seemed at first wholly irrelevant. He recalled Akemi-san, his former sister-in-law, saying, on the day she left Hawaii, "In the entire Japanese community of Hawaii I have never encountered one idea." And Shig thought: "I have an idea. I have a concept that will move the entire community ahead," and he decided not to imperil his land-reform movement, so he refused his brother's request. "I won't defend the communists," he said, "and may God forgive me if it is cowardice."
"At least I do," Goro said.
This long travail explained why, when the electioneering season finally opened, Senator Shigeo Sakagawa spoke with unusual force and seriousness on the problem of land reform. He drew up charts showing how The Fort, and its members through their directorships on the great trusts, controlled the land of Hawaii. He pointed out how they released this land in niggardly amounts, not for social purposes, but to keep up values, "the way the diamond merchants of South Africa release an agreed-upon number of diamonds each year, to keep up prices. It's legitimate to do that with diamonds,
THE GOLDEN MEN895
which a man can buy or not, as he pleases, but is it right to do it with land, upon which we all exist or perish?"
His most damning chart was one which showed that certain families contrived to have their land, which they held back for speculation, assessed by a compliant government at two per cent of its real value, whereas three hundred typical shopkeepers with small holdings from which they lived had theirs assessed at fifty-one per cent of its real value. "You and I," Shig cried to his audiences, "are subsidizing the big estates. We allow them to pay no taxes. We encourage them to hold their land off the market. We permit them a tax refuge under which they can speculate. I am not angry at these families. I wish I were as smart as they appear to be. Because you and I know that when they sold their last piece of land to Gregory's for the big new store, they sold it for $3,000,000. What value had they been paying taxes on? $71,000. Because you and I have been careless, we have allowed the Hewletts to keep valuable land off the market and pay taxes on it at one-fortieth of its real value."
