Hawaii - James Michener [502]
The old stubborn light come into Kamejiro's eyes, but when he realized that if he did not speak the truth he might never again see his sons, he softened and said, "Will you promise never to tell my boys?"
"Yes," Hale said, for he had family problems of his own. He directed the interpreter to promise likewise.
"My wife and I are not married," Kamejiro began.
"But I saw the marriage certificate!" Hale interrupted.
"American yes, but it doesn't count," Kamejiro explained. "When I sent for a picture bride to Hiroshima-ken, a girl was picked out and she was married to me there, in proper Japanese style, and her name was put in the village book as my wife."
"Then what's the problem?" Hale asked.
Kamejiro blushed at his ancient indiscretion and explained, "So when she got here I didn't like her, and there was another man who didn't like his wife, either."
"So you swapped?" Hale asked. A smile came across his lips. It seemed rather simple.
"Yes. In each country I am married to a different woman."
"But of course this is your real country and this is what counts," Hale said.
"No," Kamejiro patiently corrected. "Japan is my real home, and I would be ashamed for my village to know the wrong thing I have done."
Hale was impressed by the man's forthright defense of Japan, even in such trying circumstances, and he said condescendingly, "I don't think it would really matter, at this distance of time."
"Ah, but it would!” Kamejiro warned. And what he said struck a vibrant chord in Hale's own memories. "Because the wife I got in the exchange turned out to be the best wife a man ever found. But the wife I gave my friend turned out to be a very bad woman indeed, and his life has been ruined and I have had to sit and watch it happen.
My happiness came at his expense, and I will do nothing now to hurt him any further. At least in our village they think he is an honorable man, and I will leave it that way."
Hale clenched his hands and thought of his own reactions to just such problems and of his insistence, against the pressure of friends, that his wife Malama stay with him, even though her mind had wandered past the limits usually required for commitment to an asylum, and in that moment of loving a woman, and knowing apprehension about the fate of one's son in a time of war, Hale felt a close kinship to the little bow-legged Japanese sitting before him. To the F.B.I, man he said, "This one can surely go free." And Kamejiro returned to his family.
Of course, when the gardener Ichiro Ogawa, who had been saved from internment by Hewlett Janders, later insisted that he ought to get a raise from the $1.40 a day that Janders was paying him, big Hewie hit the roof and accused the little Japanese of being unpatriotic by demanding a raise at such a critical time in America's history. "I think of your welfare all the time, Ichiro," Hewie explained. "You must leave these things to me."
"But I can't live on $1.40 a day any more. War expense."
"Are you threatening me?" Janders boomed.
"I got to have more money," Ichiro insisted.
As soon as the Japanese had left, Janders called security at Pearl Harbor. "Lemuel," he spluttered, "I've got a workman out here whose loyalty I'm damned suspicious of. I think he ought to be carted off right now."
"What's his name?"
"Ichiro Ogawa, a real troublemaker."
And that night Ogawa was spirited away and committed to a concentration camp on the mainland, after which there