Hawaii - James Michener [450]
Normally, the plantation lunas were a tough, cynical, reasonably well-behaved lot. Imported mostly from Germany and Norway--with one man sending for his brother and both calling upon a cousin, so that luna families were constantly being refreshed from the old country--they were employed by firms like Janders & Whipple to supervise field hands for two reasons. It was unthinkable that an Oriental could rise above minor roles, partly because few ever learned to speak English and partly because none intended to remain in Hawaii, but mostly because haoles could not visualize Chinese or Japanese in positions of authority. And from sad experience, the great plantation owners had discovered that the Americans they could get to serve as lunas were positively no good. Capable Americans expected office jobs and incapable ones were unable to control the Oriental field hands.
Therefore Hawaii was forced to import Europeans to run the plantations, and if the upper crust of Hawaiian society consisted of New England families like the Hales and the Whipples, the second and operating layer was built of Europeans who had once been lunas but who had now left the plantations for businesses of their own. Of the Europeans, the Germans were the greatest successes, both as lunas and as subsequent citizens, and it was ironic that the historical event of which I speak should have been precipitated by a German, but his toothache can probably be blamed.
He was on his way through Ishii Camp at six o'clock one morning, his boots polished and his white ducks freshly pressed. Of late he had been pestered by Japanese laborers in the long bunkhouses who had taken to guzzling large amounts of soy sauce in order to induce temporary fevers, which excused them from work that day, and he was determined to end this farce. If a man claimed a fever, he personally had to breathe in the face of the German luna, and God help him if he smelled of soy sauce.
In the nineteenth century, lunas had had a fairly free hand in abusing Oriental labor, and there were instances in which sadistic foremen lashed the pigtails of two Chinese together and tied the knot to a horse's tail, whipping the beast as he dragged the terrified Orientals through the red dust. Other lunas had formed a habit of beating either Chinese or Japanese as one would thrash a recalcitrant child, and by such methods the Europeans had maintained a ruthless dictatorship of the cane fields, but with the coming of pineapple, where an abused man seeking revenge could easily pass down a row of flowering plants and knock off hundreds of the tiny individual flowers, so that the resulting fruit would lack some of the small squares of which it should have been built, the lunas by and large surrendered their old prerogatives of lash and fist, and life in the plantations was not too bad.
But on August 19, 1916, this German luna found two of his Japanese suffering from "soy-sauce fever," and he cuffed them out to the fields, temperature or no. He then left the long barracks where bachelors stayed and entered the wooden house where Kamejiro Sakagawa and his wife Yoriko lived, and to his disgust he found the former in bed. The luna did not stop to recall that for fourteen years Kamejiro had never once requested a day off for illness, so that malingering was not likely. All the German saw was another Japanese in bed, claiming a fever.
"You breathe my face," he growled in thick pidgin.
Kamejiro, who did not even know of the soy-sauce trick, failed to grasp the instructions, which convinced the luna of his perfidy. Shaking the little laborer, he shouted again, "You breathe my face!” He leaned over the bed, and since the wife Yoriko had felt sorry for her stricken husband and had both bathed him and fed him some rice and soy sauce, the unmistakable odor of the strong black sauce struck the luna's nose, and something in what he interpreted