Hawaii - James Michener [585]
Hale's determination to fight the mainland intruders with increased economic energy of his own had one unforeseen effect upon Hawaii, and in subsequent years this was often cited as the real revolution of that trying age: if The Fort was going to compete on an equal footing with outfits like Gregory's, it could no longer afford to promote into top positions inadequate nephews and cousins and gutless second sons. So under Hoxworth Hale's sharp eye, a good many Hales and Hoxworths and Janderses and Hewletts were weeded out. His policy was forthright: Either give them minor jobs where they can't wreck the system, or give them substantial shares of stock on which they can live while real men run the companies." As a result, what crude Hewlett Janders called "the chinless wonders" found themselves with a lot of stock, a good yearly income and freedom to live either in France or Havana; while in their places appeared a flood of smart young graduates of the Wharton School, Stanford and Harvard Business. Some, out of sheer prudence, married Whipple girls or Hales or Hewletts, but most brought their own wives in from the mainland. And all Hawaii prospered.
But of the men who dominated The Fort, only shrewd, confused Hoxworth Hale, alternately fighting and surrendering, saw what the real menace of those days was. It was not the arrival of Gregory's, nauseating though that was, nor the triumph of the unions, seditious as that was: it lay in the fact that Black Jim McLafferty was a Democrat. His legal residence was now Hawaii. He no longer worked for Gregory's but had a small law practice of his own, which he combined with politicking, and whenever Hoxworth Hale passed McLafferty's office he studied the door with foreboding, for he knew that in the long run Democrats were worse than Gregory's or unions or communists.
He was therefore appalled one morning when he saw that McLafferty's door carried a new sign: McLafferty and Sakagawa. Shigeo was back from Harvard, an expert on land reform, a brilliant legalist, and thanks to Black Jim McLafferty's foresight, an official Democrat.
FOLLOWING THE STRIKE, two of the main protagonists were taken out of circulation by family problems, and for some time not much was heard of either Goro Sakagawa or Hoxworth Hale. At first it looked as if the former's troubles were the greater, for from that day in late 1945 when Goro had first met the slim and intense young Tokyo modenne, Akemi-san, their lives had been continuously complicated. First had come harassment by M.P.'s who had tried to enforce the no-fraternization edict of the occupation, and it had been unpleasant to be dating a girl you loved when, the M.P.'s had the right to intrude at any moment. Next had been the ridiculous difficulty faced by any American soldier who wanted to marry a Japanese girl, so that once Goro had remarked bitterly, "When good things are being passed out they never consider me an American, but when they're dishing out the misery I'm one of the finest Americans on record." The young lovers had evaded the anti-marriage edict by engineering a Shinto wedding at a shrine near the edge of Tokyo, and had later discovered that Goro couldn't bring a Shinto bride back to America, so there had been renewed humiliation at the consul's office, but in those trying periods Akemi-san had proved herself a stalwart girl with a saving sense of humor, and largely because she was so sweet to officialdom, her paper work was ultimately completed and by special connivance she found herself free to enter Hawaii.
In 1946, when the troop transport neared Honolulu, Akemi-san had been one of the most practical-minded brides aboard, suffering from few of the illusions whose shattering would mar the first days in America for many of the other girls. She had not been bedazzled by her young American, Goro Sakagawa. She had recognized that he was what modennes called a peasant type, stubborn, imperfectly educated and boorish; and even in the starving days when he had had access to the mammoth P.X.'s that blossomed across Japan,