Hawaii - James Michener [629]
The young Japanese thought for a long time. If he were to join, he would be a spiritual traitor to his family and to his class. He could no longer say to his Japanese friends, "It was in the fields of Kauai that the lunas used to horsewhip our fathers. Well, those days are past." He would lose the sweet solidarity that he felt when he and Goro and the other young Japanese swore: "We are as good as the haoles." He would lose so much that had kept him fighting.
He temporized: "Hong Kong, you must know that no matter what The Fort offers me, I'm still going to fight for this land reform."
"Damn it!" Hong Kong cried. "It's because you're going to fight for it that they want you. They know you're right, Shigeo."
"All right!" the young senator snapped. "Tell them that after the election I'll join."
"After the election it will have no moral force," Hong Kong pleaded.
"After the election," Shigeo repeated, and he applied himself with greater dedication to the campaign that was to alter life in Hawaii, for he and Black Jim McLafferty had whipped together a sterling slate of young Japanese veterans. All the boys were mainland-educated. Some appeared on the hustings lacking arms that had been lost in Italy or legs shot off in France, and if they had so desired, they could have appeared with their chests covered with medals. In contrast to former elections, the serious young men spoke on issues, and pressed home Senator Shigeo Sakagawa's figures on land reform. There was great excitement in the air, as if this October were an intellectual April with ideas germinating.
One night Noelani Janders said, as she drove Shigeo home from four outdoor rallies, "For a moment tonight, Shig, I had the fleeting sensation that we were going to win control of both the house and the senate. There's a real chance that a hell of a lot of you Japanese are going to be elected. It's terribly exciting."
Then the campaign, at least so far as Shigeo Sakagawa was concerned, fell completely apart, because one day without any previous announcement, old Kamejiro and his stooped wife climbed down off a Japanese freighter, took a bus out to Kakaako, and announced: "We have decided to live in America."
Goro and Shig embraced them as warmly as their stubborn, rocklike father would allow and tried to uncover the reasons for this sudden change of plans. All they could get from Kamejiro was this: "I'm too old to learn to use those goddamned Japanese toilets. I can't stay bent down that long." He would say no more.
Mrs. Sakagawa allowed several hints to fall. Once she observed: "The old man said he had grown, so soft in America that he was no longer fit to be a real Japanese." At another time she said sorrowfully, "If you have been away from a farm for fifty-two years, when you go back the fields look smaller." As for herself, she said simply, "The Inland Sea is so terribly cold in winter."
Once, in late October when Shigeo was particularly nervous over the election, he snapped at his father: "I've seen a hundred of you people leave Hawaii, saying, 'I'm going back to the greatest land on earth!' But when you get there, you don't like it so much, do you?"
To his surprise old Kamejiro strode up to him, drew back and belted him severely across the face. "You're a Japanese!" he said fiercely. "Be proud of it!"
Mrs. Sakagawa had come home with several new photographs of Hiroshima-ken girls, and she arranged them on the kitchen table, admiringly, but when her boys showed no interest she sadly put them away. One night when she could not sleep she saw her youngest son come driving home with a haole girl, and it looked to her as if he had kissed the girl, and she called her husband and they confronted Shigeo, fearfully, and said, "Did you come home with a haole girl?"
"Yes," the young senator replied.
"Oh, no!" his mother groaned. "Kamejiro, speak to him."
The embittered session lasted for some hours, with old Kamejiro shouting, "If you get mixed up with a haole woman, all Japan