Hawaii by James A. Michener
“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 lilting melody to their speech borrowed from the Mexican. Much of their phraseology was incomprehensible to 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 André 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 a 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.”
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 Shig 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, in 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 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.”
“How have the marriages worked out?” Akemi-san asked.
“Well, if you take the thirty lucky girls who married Caucasians, about twen
“They wouldn’t go back to Japan?” Akemi gasped. “Were they girls who were interested in books or plays or music?”
“Much like you. But you see, when a haole man marries a Japanese girl, his parents are so shocked that they make a true spiritual effort to like the girl. And when they meet someone like you, gentle, well-bred, sweet to their son, they overcompensate. They love her more than is required. They make her life a heaven on earth.”
“Do such people listen to music?” Akemi asked.
“Usually a haole man hasn’t the nerve to marry a Japanese girl unless he’s rather sophisticated culturally. Such couples experience a very full spectrum.”
Akemi looked glumly at the bleak walls of the Sakagawa home, with a four-tube radio invariably tuned to a station that alternated American jazz with Japanese hillbilly songs. Whenever she and Goro went to a movie it was invariably a chanbara, a Japanese western in which the samurai hero fought sixty armed villains without suffering a wound.
“The Japanese girls who marry Chinese soldiers,” Dr. Yamazaki continued, “face a different problem. The Chinese parents are totally disgusted and convinced that there is no possibility of their liking the unseen daughter-in-law, so they spend the time till she arrives hating her so much that when she finally gets here, they find she isn’t anywhere near as bad as they had feared. When she demonstrates that she really loves their son, everyone reaches a plateau of mutual respect, and things go reasonably well.”
“But the Japanese marriages?” Akemi asked. “You won’t dare say they go well.”
“Some do,” Dr. Yamazaki assured her. “Where farm boys here have married farm girls from Hiroshima-ken, things work out rather well. But in a surprising number of cases, the Japanese-Japanese marriage does not do well. I think our figures are going to show that over fifty-five per cent of such marriages have run into trouble.”
“Why?” Akemi pleaded.
“I was born in Hawaii myself,” Dr. Yamazaki said. “From the very kind of family you married into. Stout Hiroshima peasants—and remember that even in modern Hiroshima our Hawaii people would seem very old-fashioned. Anyhow, I’m partial to the local people. But the curious fact is this. The Caucasian mothers-in-law and the Chinese realize that they have to make a special effort to understand and love their strange new daughters. So they do so, and find happiness. The stolid Japanese mothers-in-law, and God help the Japanese girl who marries my brother and who has to put up with my mother … Well, it’s obvious. They all think they’re getting the kind of Japanese bride that used to flourish in southern Japan forty years ago. They make no effort to understand, so they haven’t the slightest chance of finding happiness with their new daughters.”
“Do you know what’s killing my marriage?” Akemi asked bluntly. Dr. Yamazaki was not surprised at the forthrightness of the question, for she had watched the dissolution of several such marriages, but now Akemi paused, and it was apparent to Dr. Yamazaki that she was supposed to guess, so she volunteered: “In Japan young men are learning to accept new ways, but in Hawaii they have learned nothing.”
“Yes,” Akemi confessed. “Is that what the other girls say?”
“They all say the same thing,” Dr. Yamazaki assured her. “But many of them outgrow their distaste, or somehow learn to modify their husbands.”
“But do you know what will keep me from doing that?” Akemi asked. “What cuts me to the heart day after day?”
“What?” the sociologist asked professionally.
“The way they laugh at my correct speech. This I will not bear much longer.”
Dr. Yamazaki thought of her own family and smiled bitterly. “I have the same problem,” she laughed. “I have a Ph.D. degree.” Then, imitating her mother, she asked, “ ‘Do you think you’re better than we are, using such language?’ So at home, in self-defense, I talk pidgin.”
“I will not,” Akemi said. “I am an educated Japanese who has fought a long time for certain things.”
“If you love your husband,” Dr. Yamazaki said, “you will learn to accommodate yourself.”
“To certain things, never,” Akemi said. Then she asked abruptly, “Have you ever been married, Yamazaki-sensei?”
“I’m engaged,” the sociologist replied.
“To a local boy?”
“No, to a haole at the University of Chicago.”
“I see. You wouldn’t dare marry a local boy, would you?”
“No,” Dr. Yamazaki replied carefully.
Akemi tapped the sociologist’s notebook and laughed. “Now I’m embalmed in there.”
“One of many,” Dr. Yamazaki said.
“But can you guess where I’d like to be?”
“In a small coffee shop in the Nishi-Ginza, surrounded by exciting conversation on books and politics and music.”
“How could you guess so accurately?” Akemi asked.
“Because I’d like to be there, too,” Dr. Yamazaki confessed. “That’s where I met my fiancé, so I know how lovely Japan can be. But I would say this, too. Hawaii can be just as exciting. To be a young Japanese here is possibly one of the most exhilarating experiences in the world.”
“But you said you wouldn’t marry one of them,” Akemi-san reminded her.
“As a woman, seeking happiness in a relaxed home, I’ll stick with my haole from Chicago. But as a pure intellect, if I were not involved as a woman, I would much prefer to remain in Hawaii.”
“Tell me truthfully, Yamazaki-sensei, do you think that any society which has as its ideal a long, black automobile can ever be a good place to live?”
Dr. Yamazaki considered the question for some moments and replied: “You must understand that the visible symbols of success which our Japanese here in Hawaii are following are those laid down by the established haole society. A big home, a powerful car, a boy going to Yale whether he learns anything or not … these are the symbols people living in Hawaii must accept. You can’t suddenly require the Japanese to prove themselves superior to the symbols upon which they’ve been raised.”
“For three years I’ve hoped my husband would,” Akemi said bitterly.
“Be patient,” Dr. Yamazaki pleaded, “and you’ll find Hawaii improving.”
“I think not,” Akemi said slowly. “It’s a barren, stupid place and nothing will ever change it.”
The two young women parted, and that night Dr. Yamazaki called Shig Sakagawa, whom she had known at Punahou, and said, “Shig, it’s none of my business, but your brother Goro is going to lose his wife.”
“You think so?”
“I know so. She used every phrase the girls use before they catch the boat back to Japan. I’ve watched nineteen of them go back so far.”
“What could he do?” Shig asked.
“Buy her three Beethoven symphonies,” Dr. Yamazaki said, knowing that to blunt Goro such a step would be beyond the outer limits of imagination. Besides, Mrs. Sakagawa Senior would never allow such music in her house.
WHILE the labor leader Goro Sakagawa faced these problems—or rather did not face them—Hoxworth Hale was concerned principally with the forthcoming marriage of his daughter Noelani to her cousin twice removed, Whipple Janders, the son of bold, straightforward Hewlett Janders, on whom Hoxworth had grown to depend so much in recent years. At one time, when Noelani was younger, Hoxworth had rather hoped that she might go outside The Fort and find herself a completely new kind of husband … somebody from Yale, of course, but perhaps an easterner who had never seen Hawaii. For a while when Noelani was a senior at Wellesley she dated an Amherst boy, which was almost as good as Yale, but nothing had come of it, and when young Whip Janders, who was belatedly completing his Yale education, asked her to a spring dance at New Haven, each of them instinctively knew that they ought to marry. After all, they had known each other at Punahou; they were f
However, at one point in their engagement Noelani had experienced haunting doubts as to the propriety of their marriage, for Whipple had returned from the war somewhat changed. He was thinner, and his fashionable crew-cut did not entirely hide a tendency toward strongly individualistic behavior. Once at a Vassar dance he had appeared in formal dress but with a garish vest made of Hong Kong silk embroidered in purple dragons. He had been a sensation, but he had also been disturbing, for he had told one of the professors’ wives, “Thorstein Veblen would have loved this vest,” and she had stammered, “What?” and he had given his imitation of a dying tubercular patient, adding, “If you’re going to have consumption, it ought to be conspicuous.” It had been gruesomely funny, but unfortunately the professor’s wife didn’t catch on.
Now Whip and his crew-cut were back in Honolulu, dressed in Brooks Brothers’ most austere fashion, and the wedding was about to take place. Shortly before the event, Noelani asked her father, for her mother was in one of her spells and could not comprehend questions, “Do you think it’s proper for kids like us to go on intermarrying, Dad? I mean, frankly, what are the chances that our children will be more like Mother than like you?”
In considerable embarrassment, for this was the nagging fear that had made him hope that Noelani would marry some easterner, Hoxworth dodged the question and suggested: “Why don’t we look into this with Aunt Lucinda. We always ask her about the family.”
“Which family?” Noelani asked.
“The family … all of it,” Hoxworth replied, and he drove his daughter up to see Aunt Lucinda in the mist-haunted house in Nuuanu Valley. When they arrived, they found that she was entertaining half a dozen ladies of nearly her own age, and most of them were drinking gin, so that the conversation wasn’t exactly on focus, but there was a sweet, relaxed gentility about it.