Hawaii - James Michener [420]
"She isn't from one of the houses," Hashimoto explained. "She's a good girl from a good hard-working family."
"But she's not Japanese!” Kamejiro argued.
He made no progress with Hashimoto, who was determined not to live alone any longer. Since there were no Japanese girls available on Kauai, he would live with his Hawaiian and marry her. But in his ardor for feminine companionship he had failed to consider the even greater ardor of the Japanese community, and when it was noised abroad what he had done, he experienced the full, terrible power of the sacred Japanese spirit.
"You have sullied the name of Japan," warned the older men, who had learned to live without women.
"You have disgraced the blood of Japan," others mourned.
"Have you no pride, no Yamato spirit?" younger men asked.
"Don't you realize that you bring disgrace upon us all?" his friends pleaded.
Hashimoto proved himself to be a man of fortitude. "I will not live alone any longer," he repeated stubbornly. "I am going to live with my wife, the way a man should."
"Then you will live forever apart from the Japanese community," a stern old man cried. He had been in Kauai for many years, also longing for a woman, but he had behaved himself as a decent Japanese should, and now on behalf of all the emperor's subjects he pronounced the ostracism: "Because you have been shameless, and because you have not protected the sacred blood of Japan, you must live apart. We don't want a man like you to work with us or to eat with us or to live with us. Get out."
Hashimoto began to feel the awful force of this sentence, and pleaded, "But a man needs a woman! What do you expect me to do?"
A fiery younger man replaced the one who had delivered the ostracism, and this one shouted belligerently, "We don't expect you to marry other women! You're no Chinese who is willing to marry anybody he can get his hands on. You're a Japanese!”
"What am I to do?" Hashimoto screamed. "Live alone all my life?"
"Use the prostitutes each month, like we do," the fiery young man cried, referring to the girls which the plantation bosses provided on paydays, moving them from camp to camp according to schedule.
"But the time comes when a man doesn't want prostitutes any longer," Hashimoto pleaded.
"Then live without them," an older man snapped. "Like Akagi-san. Eh, you Akagi-san? How many years you live without a woman?"
"Nineteen," a wiry veteran of the cane fields replied.
"And you, Yamasaki-san?"
"Seventeen," a sunburned Hiroshima man replied.
"They're decent, honest Japanese!" the younger man shouted. "They will wait here till they die, hoping for a Japanese wife, but if none arrives they would not think of marrying anyone else. In them the Japanese spirit is high. In you, Hashimoto, there is no honor. Now get out!"
So Hashimoto left Ishii Camp and lived with his Hawaiian wife in the town of Kapaa. He had to be fired by Hanakai Plantation, for other Japanese refused to work with an outcast who had sullied the blood of Japan. Sometimes when men from the camp went into Kapaa to play a little pool or get drunk on okolehau, a potent illegal brew made from the root of the ti plant, they would meet their former friend Hashimoto, but they never spoke. He could not attend the Japanese church, nor any of the socials, nor play in Japanese games, nor listen to the heroic reciters who came from time to time from Tokyo, spending days among the camps, reciting the glories of Japanese history.
From all such normal intercourse Hashimoto was excluded, and although the dreadful example of his banishment was frequently recalled by other young men who may have wanted women and who were certainly tempted to marry Hawaiian or Chinese or drifting white girls, his proscribed name was never mentioned. Men hungry for girls did not warn each other: "Remember what happened to Hashimoto!" Instinctively they remembered,