Hawaii - James Michener [526]
"It is, but have you ever noticed the way in which people in such jobs always fall prey to the very thing they are fighting against? It's uncanny. I've intervened in some three hundred cases like this, and almost every time the man has been from the Deep South."
"What has that to do with us?" Reiko-chan asked.
"You see, at home these Southern boys have been taught from birth that anyone with a different color is evil and to be despised. In their hearts they know this can't be true, so as soon as they get a fair chance to investigate a girl with a different color, they find a human being and they suffer a compulsion to fall in love and marry her."
"Are you from the South, Lieutenant? Do you act from such a compulsion?"
"I'm from Seattle, but I have a compulsion greater than any of them. After Pearl Harbor my father, a pretty good man by and large, was the one who spearheaded the drive to throw all Japanese into concentration camps. He knew he was doing an evil thing. He knew he was giving false testimony and acting for his own economic advantage. But nevertheless, he went ahead. On the night he made his inflammatory speech over the radio I told him, Top, you know what you said isn't true,' and he replied, 'This is war, son.' "
"So you want to marry me to get even with him?" Reiko asked. "I couldn't marry you on those terms."
"The compulsion is much deeper, Reiko-chan. Remember that I lived in Japan. No matter how old we both get, Reiko, never forget that at the height of the war I told you, 'When peace comes, Japan and America will be compatible friends.' I am positive of it. I am positive that my father, since he is essentially a good man, will welcome you graciously as his daughter. Because people have got to forget past errors. They have got to bind separated units together."
"You talk as if your father were the problem," Reiko said quietly.
"You mean yours is?"
"We will never get married," Reiko said sorrowfully. "My father would never permit it."
"Tell your father to go to hell. I told mine."
"But I am a Japanese," she said, kissing him on the lips.
Kamejiro Sakagawa first discovered his daughter's love affair with a haole when his good friend Sakai appeared at the barbershop one morning to say, "I am sorry, Kamejiro, but my daughter cannot work here any more."
Sakagawa gasped and asked, "Why not? I pay her well."
"Yes, and we need the money, but I can't risk having her work here another day. It might happen to her too. So many haoles coming in here."
"What might happen?" Sakagawa stammered.
"More better we go outside," Sakai said. There, along a gutter on Hotel Street, he said sorrowfully, "You have been a good friend, Kamejiro, and you have paid our girl well, but we cannot run the risk of her falling in love with a haole man, the way your Reiko has."
Little bulldog Kamejiro, his neck muscles standing out, grabbed his friend by the shoulders, rising on his toes to accomplish the feat. "What are you saying?" he roared.
"Kamejiro," his friend protested, trying vainly to break loose from the frightening grip. "Ask anyone. Your daughter has lunch every day with the American ... at Senaga's."
In a state of shock, little Kamejiro Sakagawa thrust his friend away and stared down Hotel Street at the Okinawa restaurant run by the pig-farmer, Senaga, and as he watched, that crafty Senaga entered the shop, taking with him a haole friend, and in this simple omen Sakagawa saw the truth of what his compatriot Sakai had charged. Reiko-chan, as good a daughter as a man ever had, strong and dutiful, had been visiting with a haole in an Okinawan restaurant. Shattered, the stocky little man, then sixty-one, leaned against a post, oblivious of the flow of sailors and soldiers about him.
It was ironic, he thought, that war should have catapulted two of the groups he hated most into such postures of success. The damned Chinese had all the good jobs at Pearl Harbor, and with the income they got, were buying up most of Honolulu. Their sons were not at war, and their arrogance was high. As allies, followers