Hawaii (132 page)

The Sakagawa family trudged twenty-six miles into Honolulu, hoping that Mr. Ishii could find them some place to stay, but he could not, and they at last took up residence with more than four hundred others in an abandoned sake brewery, where rats crawled over the children at night. There Reiko-chan caught the flu and it seemed that she was going to die. At first her mother was tempted to rail at Kamejiro for having supported the strike and having brought such misery upon his family, but when she saw with what passionate care he tended Reiko, even though she was a girl, the stolid woman forgave her husband and said, "Danna-san, we will win the strike this time, I am sure."

But next day the Board of Health met and listened to Wild Whip Hoxworth as he pointed out: "We're engaged in war, gentlemen, and in war you use every weapon you have. Every one. I passed by the old sake brewery last night, and if s a health menace. I want the people in there evicted, and I want it closed."

"Sir, there's a lot of children in there with the flu," a doctor protested.

"That's why it's got to be closed," Hoxworth replied.

"But these people will have no place to go," the doctor argued.

"I know. I want them to learn what it means to strike against the elements of law and order in a community."

"But, sir, we've got to think . . ."

"Close that goddamned brewery!" Hoxworth bellowed, and it was closed.

The temperature in Hawaii never indulges in extremes, except on the tops of the volcanic mountains, where snows persist through much of the year, but February nights can be miserably chilling, and for two influenza-ridden nights the Sakagawas slept on the ground near Iwilei. Kamejiro held the sick girl Reiko in his arms and his wife cradled Shigeo, the baby, and the nights were bad, but on the third day Mr. Ishii found them and said, "I have found a hut where an old woman died," and they wolfed down the food that she would have eaten had she lived.

For three weeks the epidemic raged and the deaths of exposed workmen reached toward the hundred mark. At the end of this time, Mr. Ishii, Kamefiro and Inoguchi-san organized a committee of sixteen who marched lawfully up Nuuanu to the Japanese consulate, seeking help in that quarter. They were met by an official in black-rimmed glasses, cutaway coat and nervous grin. Allowing Mr. Ishii to do their speaking, the men said, "We are being very poorly treated by the Americans, and we must come to the Imperial government for help."

"The Imperial government is protecting Japanese interests with

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studious care," the official assured the deputation. "Only yesterday His Excellency protested to the Chief of Police against keeping the Japanese from holding legal meetings."

"But they are throwing us out of our homes, and our men are dying in the fields," Mr. Ishii said quietly.

With equal calmness the spokesman explained, "His Excellency only last week looked into the law and found that the plantations have the right to expel you ... if you strike."

"But there is a great sickness in these islands," Mr. Ishii protested.

"Then perhaps the strike ought to terminate," the spokesman suggested.

"But we can't live on seventy-seven cents a day."

"In Japan your brothers surely live on much less," the official assured the strikers, and the fruitless interview was concluded.

Another accident which worked against the strikers was the discovery, in early May, of a schoolbook used in the Japanese schools which had a long passage explaining what was meant by the phrase used by Japan's first emperor, "All the world under a roof of eight poles." Quite obviously, the book explained to the children of Japan �and it was never intended for use in Hawaii but had somehow got into the islands by mistake�it was the Emperor Jimmu Tenno's idea that all the world must some day be united into one great family paying homage to the sun goddess and obedience to the emperor, her lineal descendant. Cried the Honolulu Mail: "If anyone has wanted proof of the contentions of this newspaper that Japan intends one day to conquer the world, with Hawaii as the first step in the conquest, this evil little book proves the fact beyond contention. All the world under one roof! The local Japanese Bolsheviks have already taken the first step in that domination, and unless we remain steadfast and defeat their foul aspirations, we shall be the first foreign territory to be submerged beneath tie Japanese roof." If sugar men were growing faint-hearted as the long strike headed for its sixth harrowing month, this timely discovery of what was being taught in Japan fortified them.

Finally, there was the disgraceful affair of dynamiting the home in which Inoguchi-san of Malama Sugar was living. No one was killed, fortunately, but when the Honolulu Mail disclosed that Inoguchi had been dynamited because he had been in secret negotiations with the sugar planters, telling them nightly what Mr. Ishii and the committee were planning next, the community had to acknowledge that the Japanese labor leaders really were a group of determined Bolsheviks. Swift police raids swept up nineteen or the leaders, including Mr. Ishii, and threw them into jail on charges of criminal conspiracy. Wild Whip Hoxworth visited the judges involved and pointed out that the charges might better be criminal syndicalism, and they thanked him for his interest in the case.

But now the question arose as to who had taught the committee how to handle dynamite, and a reporter remembered that Kamejiro Sakagawa, who had not yet been arrested, had learned the trade

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while working on the tunnel. He was known to be a friend of Mr. Ishii's, and so the police arrested him. He was thrown into jail, even though he had had nothing to do with the dynamiting, whereupon his wife Yoriko proved to the police that he had been at home caring for his sick children. The sugar committee, who were advising the district attorney as to how he should handle the case, refused to accept this alibi, pointing out: "A clever man like Sakagawa didn't have to be actually at the scene of the crime. He could well have prepared the sticks in advance and shown his fellow conspirators how to explode them. He is obviously guilty." And he was kept in jail.

Then the strike ended, with the workmen having gained little, and sugar was once more produced by some of the cheapest labor in America. H & H made millions carrying fresh cargoes to California, and J & W made more millions managing the plantations in the good old way. The conspirators were brought to trial and Mr. Ishii was sentenced to ten years in jail. He sagged when the words were thrown at him, falling backwards as if they had actually struck him, and from that day on he was never much of a man again. He grew to mumble and imagine things, and no one took much account of him.

Surprisingly, Kamejiro, the dynamiter by trade, was not convicted, for one day before the trial began he had a visitor in his cell. It

was Wild Whip Hoxworth, lean and tall and handsome, flushed with victory. Eh you, Kamejiro. Boys say you plant dynamite. That true?"

"No, Mr. Hoxuwortu. No."

"Me, I think no too." And Wild Whip told the district attorney, "You better drop charges against Sakagawa. He wasn't involved."

"How do you know?" the young lawyer asked, nervous with excitement over the trial that was going to make his reputation.

"Because he told me so," Whip explained.

"And you're going to take his word?"

"He's the most honest man I know. Besides, his alibi is a good

one.

"But I think we've got to convict the actual dynamiter, whether his alibi is good or not."

"Turn him loosel" Whip thundered. He was sixty-six years old and tired of arguing with fools.

So on the morning that the trial convened, Kamejiro was quietly set free. Of course, he was never again able to get a job at Malama Sugar, for the great plantations prudently maintained blacklists in order to keep out troublemakers, and he had now proved himself one who fought with lunas and supported Bolsheviks like Ishii. He found a small, rat-infested shack in the Kakaako area of Honolulu, from which he did odd jobs, principally the cleaning out of privies after midnight. Children whose fathers had better jobs called him "King of the Night Brigade," and indeed the name King was fitting, for whatever he was required to do, he did with the most earnest

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skill, so that in spite of the fact that he was surreptitiously known | as Sakagawa the Dynamiter, the man who had tried to kill Inoguchi, I people nevertheless continued to seek him out when their privies I needed unloading, for he merited the title, "King of the Night Brigade."

IN 1926 the disreputable old English botanist Dr. Schilling developed another striking idea about the growing of pineapple. Recovering from a four-month drunk, he turned fresh, if bloodshot, eyes upon the great fields of Kauai, and as he studied the swarms of Japanese women hoeing out the weeds from the red soil, he thought: "Why don't we spread paper over the whole damned field, punch holes in it where we plant the baby pineapple, and make it impossible for weeds to grow?"

He got some asphalt paper, rolled it across a trial field, and planted a crop of pineapple in the small holes he had punched in the black covering. To his surprise, the simple trick not only killed off all the weeds, saving hundreds of dollars in labor charges, but also provided two unforeseen advantages which proved to be more profitable than even the extermination of weeds: the paper trapped moisture and held it about the roots of the plants, and on sunny days it accumulated heat which was later dissipated exactly when the plants required it.

When Wild Whip saw the results of the experiment he gave an instant and dramatic order: "Hereafter all pineapple on our plantations will be grown under paper," and he worked diligently with Dr. Schilling and the California wood-plup people in devising a special paper that resisted water for the first seven months of its life, then slowly disintegrated so that by the tenth month the field was clean. When the project was completed, Wild Whip reminded the pineapple men: "You can always find somebody from Yale who can accomplish anything you want. Treat them well, pay them a little, and call, them Doctor. That's all they expect. But somebody with brains has got to set the problem for them."

And then, in 1927, this nonpareil of planters died at the brawling, bruising age of seventy. He died, as he had often predicted, of no ordinary disease but from an aggravated cancer of the prostate occasioned, the islands felt sure, by his numerous cases of gonorrhea and syphilis, plus cirrhosis of tie liver brought on by endless overdoses of alcohol, all aggravated by the fact that the small airplane in which he was flying back from Hanakai Plantation to Honolulu flew into the mountain that he had pierced with his great tunnel. He had lain exposed in cold rain for nearly twenty-four hours, but even under those conditions the vital old man fought a fairly even contest with death for a period of three weeks, during which he summoned to his hospital bed the leading members of H & H and J & W, including all who might logically aspire to his chairmanship. Raising himself in pain to a sitting position, which appalled the

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nurses, he grunted, "We're entering a difficult period, and our job is to make half a dozen right decisions." He spoke as if he were to be with the managers for many years to come, and possibly forever. "I'm sure our present prosperity can't continue forever, and when there's a leveling off, sugar and pineapple will be hard hit. Thank God, it doesn't seem likely the Democrats will ever return to Washington, so we don't have to worry about radical communism. But we do have to worry about keeping our share of the market.

"We've got to have somebody heading up our enterprises who is clever enough to anticipate the future and bold enough to fight what's wrong. I've given a good deal of thought as to who tha.t should be, and I've come up with only one solid conclusion. Don't ever, under any conceivable circumstances, allow either of my sons, Jesus Duarte or John, to meddle in this business. Pay them well, pay them regularly, and keep them to hell out of Hawaii. If my other son, Janders, had lived . . . well, that might have been a different story.

"Naturally I've thought a great deal about Mark Whipple. He has his father's brains and would have been my first choice, except that being a West Point man, he thinks he ought to stay with the army, and maybe he's right. But if he ever decides to resign his commission, get him back into the company quick.

"I've also given a good deal of consideration to Hewie Janders," and here the big, rugged, florid man who had starred as guard at Yale blushed, but Wild Whip continued, "and I fear that Hewie's attributes do not include intellectual force, which is what we need now.

"I've passed over, as you can see, all the older fellows, because we need somebody who's going to give our firms a long, continued and strong leadership. So I've chosen as my executor, and the man to vote my shares as long as he remains intellectually and morally capable, this fellow." And he reached out and took the hand of Hoxworth Hale, then twenty-nine years old and aching for authority. The other directors could not protest the decision, nor had they any cause to do so, for Hale was obviously the man to take over at this juncture.

"Three rules, Hoxworth, and the rest of you listen. Don't ever sell sugar short. I went into pineapple, that's true, but only when I had a solid, secure base in sugar. You do the same. Protect sugar by research, protect your quotas by legislation, protect the plantations, protect your labor supply. Stay with sugar. It's better than money, more dependable than blood.

"Second, never allow labor to rear its head an inch. Study what's happened on the mainland. If a labor leader tries to get onto these islands, throw him back into the ocean and tell him to swim, but don't even show him which way California is. Be careful of the Japanese. They're making sounds like they wanted a union. Trust only the Filipinos, because nobody else can be trusted. But if the bole-boys attempt any foolishness, bat them down.

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