Hawaii - James Michener [623]
Mr. Ishii's voice trailed off. For a long time he sat looking at the fatal pages. Coming as they did, from his own mother-in-law, and a Hiroshima woman too, he could not doubt their veracity; but accepting her statement meant that all his visions for the past thirteen years since Pearl Harbor were fallacious, his life a mockery. The boys were considerate enough not to mention the facts which their mother had hammered home, and when the time came for them to go to work, they said good-bye to the little old man, their brother-in-law, and left him staring at the letter.
At about eleven that morning a Japanese man came running into the law offices of McLafferty and Sakagawa, shouting in English, "Jesus Christ! He did it on the steps of the Japanese Consulate."
Shig experienced a sinking feeling in his throat and mumbled, "Ishii-san?" And the informant veiled, "Yes. Cut his belly right open."
"I'll go with you," McLafferty called, and the two partners roared up Nuuanu to where, from the days of the first Japanese in Hawaii, the little bow-legged laborers had taken their troubles. At the consulate a group of police waited for an ambulance, which in due time screamed up, and Shig said, "I'm a relative. I'll go with him." But the little old labor leader was dead. He had felt that if his fatherland had indeed lost the war, the only honorable thing he could do was to inform the emperor of his grief, so he had gone to the emperor's building, and with the emperor's flag in his left hand, had behaved as his institutions directed. With his death, the Ever-Victorious Group died also, and the sadness of national defeat was at last brought home even to the farthest remnants of the Japanese community.
After the funeral Shigeo faced his first difficult decision of the year, for Goro hurried home late one afternoon with this dismaying news: "The communist trials begin next month, and Rod Burke wants you to defend him."
Shig dropped his head. "I knew it would come . . . sooner or later," he said. "But why does he have to ask me just as I'm getting ready to run for a full term as senator?"
Goro replied, "That's when the case was called. Will you take the job?"
Shig had anticipated that the communists would seek him as their counsel, and he had tried to formulate a satisfactory reply to the invitation; but whereas it is easy to prefabricate an answer to an expected question like "Shall we go to Lahaina next week?" it is not so easy to anticipate the moral and emotional entanglements involved in a more complex question like, "Am I, as a lawyer, obligated to provide legal aid to a communist?"
"I wish you hadn't asked me," Shig stalled.
"I wish Rod hadn't asked me," Goro countered.
"Are you determined to help him?" Shig asked.
"Yes, I'd have accomplished nothing without him."
"But you're sure he's guilty?"
"I suppose so," Goro grunted. "But even a communist is entitled to a fair trial . . . and a defending lawyer."
"Why me?"
"Because you're my brother."
"I can't answer this one so fast, Goro."
"Neither could I at first," Goro said. "Take your time."
So Shigeo spent long hours walking the streets of Kakaako, wondering what he ought to do. He reasoned: "In Hawaii I have one overriding responsibility--the land laws. To do anything about these, I've got to keep getting re-elected. If I defend Rod Burke, I'll surely lose all the haole votes I apparently picked up last time, and that would mean I'd be licked in November. So from that point of view I ought to say no.
"But Rod Burke isn't the only defendant. There's his Japanese wife and two other Japanese. And if I go into court and give those people a stirring defense, I'll bind the Japanese vote to me forever, simply because I have dared to defend the underdog. So although I might lose this election, I'd probably be in stronger position