Hawaii - James Michener [411]
Then his father led him to one side and said quietly, "Be proud. Be Japanese. Put power in your stomach."
As he set forth from the village he saw by the shrine the flowering girl Yoko-san and he wanted to leave his weeping parents and rush over to her, shouting, "Yoko-chan! ,When I have made money I will send for you!" But his stocky legs were powerless to move him in that direction, and had he gone his voice would have been unable to speak, for officially they did not know each other, and all the exciting things that had transpired behind the darkened shoji had not really happened, for he had never removed his mask.
So he departed, a tough, stalwart little man with arms hanging down like loaded buckets, yet as he passed the shrine, looking straight ahead, he somehow received Yoke's assurance that if he cared to write for her, she would come; and a considerable happiness accompanied him on his journey.
For the first two miles his path lay along the Inland Sea, and he saw before him the shifting panorama of that wonderland of islands. Green and blue and rocky brown they rose from the cool waters, lifting their pine trees to the heavens. On one a bold crimson torii rose like a bird of god, marking some ancient Shinto shrine. On others Kamejiro saw the stained stone outlines of Buddhist temples, perched above the sea. How marvelous that footpath was! How the earth sang, while the rice fields swept their ripening grain back and forth in the winds creeping inland from the sea.
With every step Kamejiro encountered some unexpected beauty, for he was traversing one of the most glorious paths in the world, and the singing of that day would never leave his ears. Once he stopped to stare in wonder at the multitude of islands and at the magnificence of their position within the sea, and he swore, "A little time will pass and I will return to the Inland Sea."
When the Kyoto-maru landed him in Honolulu he advised the immigration interpreter: "Stamp my paper for five years." Fortunately, he could not understand the official when the latter muttered to his assistant, ''I wish I believed these little yellow bastards were gonna stay only five years."
There were others in Hawaii, however, who welcomed the Japanese ungrudgingly, for that day the Honolulu Mail editorialized: "Janders & Whipple are to be congratulated on having completed plans for the importation of 1,850 strong and healthy Japanese peasant farmers to work our sugar fields, with prospects for as many more at later intervals as may be required. We journeyed to the Kyoto-maru yesterday to inspect the new arrivals and can report that they seemed a sturdy lot. Lunas who have worked earlier crews of Japanese state unanimously that they are much superior to the unfortunate Chinese whom they are replacing. They are obedient, extraordinarily clean, law-abiding, not given to gambling and eager to accomplish at least eighty per cent more honest labor than the lazy Chinese ever did.
"Japanese avoid the Chinaman's tendency to combine into small and vicious groups. Themselves an agrarian people, they love plantation work and will stay in the fields, so that the trickery whereby in recent years crafty Orientals fled from honest work in the cane fields, so as to monopolize our city shops, can be expected to end. Japanese are notoriously averse to running stores, but J & W have taken the added precaution of importing only strong young men from rural areas. There are no wily Tokyo dwellers lurking ominously in their gangs. Plantation owners can expect a rapid improvement in the appearance of their camps, too, for Japanese love to garden and will soon have their buildings looking attractive.
"In two respects we are particularly fortunate in getting these Japanese. First, we have been assured that their men do not contract alliances with women of any other race but their