Hawaii - James Michener [501]
In the following days Minoru and Tadao were to be repeatedly tested. Having been born in America, they were technically citizens and even eligible to become President; but they were also Japanese and were thus subjected to humiliations worse than those suffered by aliens. Several times they were threatened by drunken soldiers, and prudence told them to keep off the streets.
Nevertheless, animosity against all Japanese increased when Hawaii, staggered by the completeness with which Japan had defeated the local troops, understandably turned to any logical rationalization at hand "You can't tell me the Japs could have bombed our ships unless the local slant-eyes were feeding them spy information," one man shouted in a bar.
"I know for a fact that plantation workers at Malama Sugar cut arrows across the cane fields, showing Nip fliers the way to Pearl Harbor," a luna reported.
"The F.B.I, has proved that almost every Jap maid working for the military was a paid agent of the Mikado," an official announced.
And the Secretary of the Navy himself, after inspecting the disaster, told the press frankly, "Hawaii was the victim of the most effective fifth-column work that has come out of this war, except in Norway."
It was therefore no wonder that many Japanese were arrested and thrown into hastily improvised jails, whereupon those not yet picked up were ready to believe the rumor that all Japanese in Hawaii were to be evacuated to tents on Molokai. But when the jails were jammed and ships actually appeared in the harbor to haul those already arrested to concentration camps in Nevada, an unusual thing happened, one which more than any other served to bind up the wounds caused by the attack on Pearl Harbor. Hoxworth Hale and Mrs. Hewlett Janders and Mrs. John Whipple Hoxworth and a maiden librarian named Luanda Whipple went singly, and not as a result of concerted action, to the jails where the Japanese were being held. Being the leading citizens of the community, they were admitted, and as they walked through the corridors they said to the jailers, "I know that man well. He can't possibly be a spy. Let him go."
Mrs. Hewlett Janders even went so far as to bring her husband, big Hewie, to the jail in his naval uniform, and he identified half a dozen excellent citizens whom he had known for years. "It's ridiculous to keep those men in a concentration camp. They're as good Americans as I am."
"Will you vouch for them if we let them go?" the F.B.I, man asked.
"Me vouch for Ichiro Ogawa? I'd be proud to vouch for him. You come out of there, Ichiro. Go back to work."
Some three hundred leading Japanese citizens were removed from jail by these voluntary efforts of the missionary descendants. It wasn't that they liked Japanese, or that they feared Imperial Japan less than their neighbors. It was just that as Christians they could not sit idly by and watch innocent people maltreated. In California, where the imaginary danger of trouble from potential fifth columnists was not a fraction of the real danger that could have existed in Hawaii, cruel and senseless measures were taken that would be forever an embarrassment to America: families of the greatest rectitude and patriotism were uprooted; their personal goods were stolen; their privacy was abused; and their pride as full-fledged American citizens outraged. Such things did not happen in Hawaii. Men like Hoxworth Hale and Hewlett Janders wouldn't allow them to happen; women like Miss Whipple and Mrs. Hoxworth personally went through the jails to protect the innocent.
But when Hoxworth Hale came to the cell in which Kamejiro Sakagawa sat, a more intricate moral problem presented itself, for at first Hale was not ready to swear to the F.B.I, men, "This fellow I know to be innocent." What Hale did know was this: Kamejiro was a known dynamiter who had been in trouble during the strike at Malama Sugar; he had obstinately refused to terminate the Japanese nationality