Hawaii - James Michener [418]
"It would be better if the priest were here. That's his job.
"But wouldn't it be all right if we ourselves faced Japan and said a prayer?"
"I would like to do so," Ishii-san admitted, and the two laborers knelt in the red dust of Kauai and each thought of Hiroshima, and the rice fields, and the red torii looking out over the Japan Sea, and they prayed that their courageous country might always know victory.
By this time Kamejiro had saved, from his wages and the hot bath, an additional thirty-eight dollars, and the camp suspected this, so when word reached Kauai that a splendid victory celebration was to be held right in the heart of Honolulu, for all Hawaii to see, and that the island of Kauai was invited to send two men to march in Japanese uniforms and play the roles of immortal military leaders like Admiral Togo, everyone agreed that Kamejiro should be one of the men, because he could pay his own way, and a man named Hashimoto was the other, because he also had some savings, and in late May, 1905, the two stocky laborers set out on the inter-island boat Kilauea for Honolulu. There the committee provided them with handsome uniforms which local Japanese wives had copied from magazine pictures, and Kamejiro found himself a full colonel in memory of a leader who had personally thrown himself upon the Russian guns at the siege of Fort Arthur. This Colonel Ito had been blown to pieces and into national immortality. It was with bursting pride that Colonel Sakagawa lined up on the afternoon of June 2, 1905, to march boldly through the streets of Honolulu and across the Nuuanu to Aala Park, where thousands of Japanese formed a procession that proceeded solemnly to the Japanese consulate, where a dignified man in frock coat and black tie nodded gravely. A workman from one of the Janders & Whipple plantations on Oahu was dressed in Admiral Togo's uniform, and from the steps of the consulate he led the Banzai and the formal marching broke up. Kamejiro and his fellow Kauai man, Hashimoto, walked back to Aala Park, where exhibitions of Japanese wrestling and fencing were offered to an appreciative crowd; but the victory celebration was to have overtones of another kind which Kamejiro would never forget, for at ten o'clock, when the crowd was greatest, a pathway was formed and eight professional geisha girls from one of the tea houses passed through the confusion to take their places on the dancing platform, and as they went one walked in her gently swaying manner quite close to Kamejiro and the powder in her hair brushed into his nostrils and he admitted, for the first time in three years, how desperately hungry he was for that girl Yoko back in Hiroshima.
A haze came over his eyes and he imagined that the mask was once more upon his face while he prepared to slip into her sleeping room. He could feel her arms about him and hear her voice in his ear. The crowd pressed in upon him but he was not part of it; he was in Hiroshima in the spring when the rice fields were a soft green, and a horrible thought took possession of him: "I shall never leave Kauai! I shall die here and never see Japan again! I shall live all my life without a woman!"
And he began, in his agony, to walk among the crowd and place himself so that he might touch this Japanese wife or that. He did not grab at them or embarrass them; he wanted merely to see them and to feel their reality; and his glazed eyes stared at them. "I am so hungry," he muttered to himself as he moved so as to intercept a woman at least twenty years older than he. She shuffled along with her feet never leaving the ground, Japanese style, and the soft rustle of her passing seemed to him one of the sweetest sounds he had ever heard. Instinctively he reached out his hand and clutched at her arm, and the shuffling stopped. The housewife looked at him in amazement, pushed his hand down, and muttered, "You are a Japanese!