Hawaii by James A. Michener
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 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 the 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 black 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. Ishii’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 goodbye 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 yelled, “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 Goro 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 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 you 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 granted. “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 of 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 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 interesting 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 decide
“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, 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.”
In public parks, on the radio and on television Shigeo Sakagawa hammered home his dominant theme, and when citizens asked him if he was a radical, advocating the breaking up of landed estates the way they did in Russia, he kept his temper and replied, “No, I am a conservative English parliamentarian, trying to do in Hawaii what men like me accomplished in England one hundred years ago. Remember this. I am the conservative. It is the people who think that this problem can be endlessly postponed who are the radicals. Because their course leads to tragedy, mine to democracy.”
But at every rally somebody sooner our later heckled: “Aren’t you a communist, too, like your brother Goro?”
Shigeo had worked out a good answer to this question. He dropped his arms, looked off into space, and said quietly, “In any American election that’s a fair question, and the voters have a right to an honest answer. I wonder in what form I can best give you my answer?” He seemed to be thinking, and after a moment, in a very relaxed voice he started speaking.
“Is the man who asked that question old enough to remember the McKinley-Punahou game of 1938? It was in the last fifteen seconds of the game, if you’ll remember, and Punahou was trailing by four points, 18–14. Then, from a rather rough scrimmage, Punahou’s star back broke loose, and I can see him now dashing down the sideline … ten yards, twenty, forty. He was going to score a magnificent touchdown and win the game, and I can remember even to this day how thrilled I was to see that run, because that runner was my brother Tadao Sakagawa, the first ordinary Japanese ever to get into Punahou and one of the greatest stars they ever had.
“But can you recall what happened next? From the McKinley players a tackle got up from one knee and started out like a fire engine after my brother, and although Tad could run fast, this McKinley man ran like the wind, and on the five-yard line, that close mind you, this McKinley man brought my brother down and saved the game. You all know who he was. He was my other brother, Goro, the one who had wanted to get into Jefferson and couldn’t.
“Now the point of my story is this. Goro could have held back and let his brother Tad score the winning touchdown and be the biggest hero of the year, but he never wavered in his duty. He tackled his own brother on the five-yard line and saved the day. That’s the way we Sakagawas were brought up by our parents. Duty, duty, duty.
“But the more important point of my story is this. Do you know where the great halfback Tadao Sakagawa is now? Buried beneath a military cross in the Punchbowl. He gave his life for America. And where is his brother, Minoru Sakagawa? Buried beneath a military cross in the Punchbowl. He also gave his life for his country. That is also the kind of boys we Sakagawas are. Tough, resolute, uncompromising fighters.
“I will tell you this. If my brother Goro Sakagawa was, as you charge, a communist, I would personally hound him out of the islands. I would never cease fighting him. I would tackle him down the way he tackled down Tadao, for I will make no compromise with communism.”
Then his voice would take on a harder tone as he continued: “But Goro Sakagawa is not a communist. He is a very fine labor leader, and the good he has done for the working people of Hawaii is beyond calculation. I am for such labor leaders, and I want that fact to be widely known. Goro and I are two edges of the same sword, he in labor, I in politics. We are cutting away old and unfair practices. We are slashing at the relics of feudalism.”
In conclusion his voice changed to one of exhortation: “And neither Goro nor I will stop, because we can remember the day our father took us to the old plantation camp on Kauai and showed us the barracks where the lunas used to tramp through with whips and lash the field hands, and we swore that that would stop. Now, sir, you who asked the question about communism, I want to ask you two questions in return: where were you when my brothers Minoru and Tadao were giving their lives for American democracy? What have you done comparable to what Goro and I have done to clean up the democracy they saved? Won’t you please come up to see me after the rally, and if you have done half as much as we have done, I want to embrace you as a damned good American, because, brother, you are certainly not a communist, nor am I.”
The audience always applauded madly at this point, and when Black Jim McLafferty first heard the reply he cried, “My God, we’ve got to plant somebody in the audience to ask that question every night. I never heard a better answer. Demagoguery at its best, and of course you know what they call demagoguery at its best? Oratory.” But Shig refused to have anybody planted, because he was afraid that that might cut the edge of his conviction, because his answer had this merit: on more than half the occasions at which he used it, the questioner did come up afterwards to talk about old army days or the unhappy plantation experiences of his family, so that Shig’s reply actually converted hecklers into supporters, which, as McLafferty pointed out, “is about the best you can expect of any answer.”
But one thing that McLafferty said rankled in Shig’s memory: the word demagoguery. “Am I guilty of that?” he asked himself, and as he analyzed each portion of his well-known reply, he could explain everything until he got to the part about the lunas, and then he always stumbled. “What actually happened?” he asked himself. “One day, one luna hit my father one time. The first time Pop told about it, he told the truth. ‘Here is where the luna hit me that day.’ Then our family constructed the legend: ‘Here is where the lunas used to beat us.’ And finally it comes out: ‘Here is where the lunas used to beat all the Japanese.’ ” And he saw clearly that this conversion of the truth was indeed demagoguery of the worst sort, because it kept alive community hatreds, which, even if they had been legitimately founded were better dead in the graves of memory; but the speech did get votes, and one night after a particularly heated rally he put the problem frankly to Black Jim. “That part about the lunas beating the Japanese? Do you think I ought to keep saying that?”
Black Jim was tooling his old Pontiac down Kapiolani Boulevard and for some time said nothing. Then grudgingly he admitted, “It gets votes.”
“What I asked was, ‘What do you think of it?’ ” Shig pressed.
“Well, when I hear it coming, I usually go out in the alley,” Black Jim confessed. “Just in case I have to vomit.” So Shig dropped that part of
When the campaign reached its height, complicated by the trial of the communists, Shigeo received in his office a visitor he had never heard of and whose existence surprised him. It was a young haole woman, twenty-six years old and marked by a pallid beauty. She said nervously, “My name is Noelani Hale Janders. I’m divorced but I haven’t taken back my maiden name. I like what you’ve been saying on the radio, and I wish to work in your campaign.”
“What was the name again?” Shig asked.
“Noelani Hale is my real name,” she explained.
“What Hale is that?” Shig asked.
“Hoxworth Hale is my father.”
“Sit down,” Shig said weakly. When he had caught control of himself he pointed out, “Are you sure you’ve heard what I’ve been saying, Mrs. Hale?”