Hawaii - James Michener [588]
"Your kimono has told me all about you, Mrs. Sakagawa," she joked, in excellent Japanese.
"Call me Akemi, please."
"These are your complaints," the clever young sociologist said. "In Tokyo you were a modenne, fighting for women's rights. Here you find yourself in an ancient Japan that even your parents never knew. You find the local speech barbarous, the intellectual outlook bleak, and the aesthetic view of life nonexistent." Dr. Yamazaki hesitated, then added, "You feel that if this is America, you had better go back to something better."
Akemi-san gulped, for she had not yet formulated that bitter conclusion, though for some time she had suspected its inevitability. Now, through the soft speech of another, the frightening words had been spoken. "Do many feel as I do, Yamazaki-sensei?"
"Would it help you to know?" the young woman asked.
"Indeed it would!" Akemi cried eagerly.
"You understand that my figures are only tentative . . ."
Akemi laughed nervously and said, "It's so good to hear a person use a word like tentative."
"I'm afraid you're bitter," Dr. Yamazaki said reprovingly.
"Any more than the others?" Akemi asked.
"No."
"I think you reached me just at the right time," Akemi said eagerly.
"The general pattern is this," Dr. Yamazaki said, but before she could continue, Akemi interrupted and asked, "Would you think me a very silly girl, Yamazaki-sensei, if I said that I wanted to serve you tea? I am most terribly homesick."
The two women sat in silence as Akemi prepared tea in the ceremonial manner, and when the ritual was ended, Dr. Yamazaki continued: "Suppose that a hundred local soldiers married Japanese girls. Sixty of the husbands were Japanese. Thirty were Caucasians. Ten were Chinese."
"How have the marriages worked out?" Akemi-san asked.
"Well, if you take the thirty lucky girls who married Caucasians, about twenty-eight of them are quite happy. Some of the girls say they're deliriously happy. They say they wouldn't go back to Japan even if I gave them all of Hibiya Park."
"They wouldn't go back to Japan?" Akemi gasped. "Were they girls who were interested in books or plays or music?"
"Much like you. But you see, when a haole man marries a Japanese girl, his parents are so shocked that they make a true spiritual effort to like the girl. And when they meet someone like you, gentle, well-bred, sweet to their son, they overcompensate. They love her more than is required. They make her life a heaven on earth."
"Do such people listen to music?" Akemi asked.
"Usually a haole man hasn't the nerve to marry a Japanese girl unless he's rather sophisticated culturally. Such couples experience a very full spectrum."
Akemi looked glumly at the bleak walls of the Sakagawa home, with a four-tube radio invariably tuned to a station that alternated American jazz with Japanese hillbilly songs. Whenever she and Goro went to a movie it was invariably a chanbara, a Japanese western in which the samurai hero fought sixty armed villains without suffering a wound.
"The Japanese girls who marry Chinese soldiers," Dr. Yamazaki continued, "face a different problem. The Chinese parents are totally disgusted and convinced that there is no possibility of their liking the unseen daughter-in-law, so they spend the time till she arrives hating her so much that when she finally gets here, they find she isn't anywhere near as bad as they had feared. When she demonstrates that she really loves their son, everyone reaches a plateau of mutual respect, and things go reasonably well."
"But the Japanese marriages?" Akemi asked. "You won't dare say they go well." '
"Some do," Dr.