Hawaii - James Michener [476]
There were ways a self-respecting family could protect itself from Etas, and Kamejiro often told his children, "When the time comes for you to marry, I'll go to the detective and he will tell me whether the other party is an Eta or an Okinawan." There were two such detectives in Hawaii, and since they kept dossiers on every Japanese family, few Etas or Okinawans were unknown to them. Their services were costly, but since they enabled prospective brides and grooms to avoid the shame of mismating, the general community was willing to pay their fee.
Then, as Reiko-chan approached the age when she must move on to a more advanced school, her father's attention was diverted from Etas and directed to a matter of more immediate importance. The haole citizens of Hawaii, properly disturbed by the abominable English spoken in the schools, united to demand at least one school on each island where all children would speak acceptable English, and out of this agitation the so-called English-standard school developed. To attain entrance a child had to undergo a verbal examination to prove that he was not corrupted by pidgin and would thus not contaminate his classmates, who were usually trying to gain entrance to some mainland college.
The basic concept of the English-standard school was meritorious, for in other schools there often appeared to be no standards at all and even teachers sometimes taught in pidgin; but the manner in which students were selected for these superior schools was one of the most shameful subterfuges ever permitted in the islands. Plantation managers soon let it be known that they would look with disfavor upon teachers who admitted to the preferred schools too many children of Oriental ancestry; so automatically the schools became costly private schools with superior facilities paid for out of general taxation but largely restricted to haole children. This discrimination was easy to enforce, for teachers who interviewed prospective enrollees were encouraged to disbar any child who evidenced even the slightest accent or the misuse of a single word; and a miserable mockery developed whereby teachers, who knew they were under the surveillance of plantation managers, conducted tests of Japanese and Filipino children, whose failures were ordained before they spoke a word. Of course, a few sons of Oriental doctors and lawyers were admitted, lest the abuse of tax dollars become too odious, but for the most part the English-standard school became another device to keep Orientals on the plantations, where they were supposed to belong. As Hoxworth Hale pointed out, when as a member of the Board of Education, he encouraged the establishment of the schools: "We mustn't educate field hands beyond their capacity."
In Honolulu the English-standard school was Jefferson, a superb institution with superior playing fields, laboratories and teachers. With real anxiety Japanese fathers like Kamejiro Sakagawa watched the results of the first entrance tests at Jefferson. Almost no Japanese children gained admittance, and Kamejiro warned: "See! You lazy children who will not study. None of your friends got into the fine school! But you will get in, because from now on you will study twice as much as before." He launched an ingenious program whereby his five children attended two different Christian churches each Sunday, listening to the preacher use good English. At any free public lecture, there would be Kamejiro and his five children. He could not understand what was being said, but when he got the young students home he would seat them in a circle and make them repeat again and again, what the speaker had said, in the speaker's intonation. Before long, Reiko-chan and Goro were adept in English.
The Sakagawa children had now reached the apex of their educational schizophrenia. In their American school they learned that all people were created equal, but their father kept teaching them who the Etas were, and the Okinawans. In their Japanese school they learned formal Japanese and were beaten if they made mistakes, but at night they