Hawaii - James Michener [473]
The boys were a more rowdy lot, and no teacher in her right mind would have turned her class over to them. They specialized in the rougher games, for in accordance with the ancient rule that all who came to Hawaii were modified, the four Sakagawa boys were obviously going to be taller than their father, with better teeth, wider shoulders and straighter legs. It was noticeable that they threw like Americans and could knock bottles off fences with surprising accuracy, but their mastery of English fell markedly below their sister's, a fact of which they were proud, for in the Honolulu public schools anyone who spoke too well was censured and even tormented by his classmates. To be accepted, one had to speak pidgin like a moron, and above everything else, the Sakagawa boys wanted to be accepted.
The success of this family in the American school was the more noteworthy because when classes were over, and when haole children ran home to play, the five Sakagawas lined up and marched over to the Shinto temple, where the man who was a priest on Sundays appeared in a schoolteacher's black kimono to conduct a Japanese school. He was a severe man, much given to beating children, and since he was proud of the fact that he spoke no corrupting English and had only recently come from Tokyo, he tyrannized the children growing up in an alien land. "How can you ever become decent, self-respecting Japanese," he stormed, "if you do not learn to sit properly upon your ankles. Sakagawa Goro!” and the heavy rod fell harshly across the boy's back. "Do not fidget! Will you feel no shame when you return home and visit friends and fidget?" Bang, went the rod. Bang and bang again.
The priest was contemptuous of everything American and impressed upon his charges that they were in this alien land for only a few years until they took up their proper life, and when he described Japan, his eyes grew misty and a poetry came into his voice. "A land created by the immortal gods themselves!" he assured them. "In Japan there is no rowdyism like here. In Japan children are respectful to their parents. In Japan every man knows his place and all do reverence to the emperor. No man can predict what impossible things Japan will some day accomplish." He taught from the same books that were used in Tokyo, using the same inflections and the same stern discipline. For three hours each day, when other children were rollicking in the sun, the Sakagawas sat painfully on their ankles before the priest and received what he called their true education.
There was much agitation against the Japanese-language schools, as they were called, and there was no doubt that the priests taught an un-American, Shintoistic, nationalistic body of material, but in those years not a single child who attended the schools got into trouble with the police. Among the Japanese there was no delinquency. Parents were obeyed and teachers were respected. In the Japanese schools a severe rectitude was taught and enforced, and much of the civic responsibility that marked the adult Japanese community derived from these austere late-afternoon sessions; and it was a strange thing, but not a single child in later years ever remembered much of the jingoistic nonsense taught by the priests; few ever wanted to go back to Japan; but all learned respect for an established order of life. It was as if the great freedoms enjoyed in the American school in the first part of the day insulated the child against the nationalistic farrago of the afternoon, so that most Japanese children, like the Sakagawas, assimilated the best from both schools and were not marred by the worst of either.
Actually, their true education in these years took place at home. In their tiny Kakaako shack, which would have been cramped even for a family of