Hawaii (141 page)

They began when Hawaii established a committee of American citizens whose job it was to visit all Japanese homes, beseeching the parents to write to Japan to have the names of their children removed from village registers, thus canceling their Japanese citizenship. Hoxworth Hale was the committee member who visited the Sakagawas, and with Reiko as interpreter he explained on the day after Thanksgiving: "Mr. Sakagawa, Japan is a nation that insists upon dual citizenship. But since your five fine children were bom here, legally they're Americans. Emotionally they're Americans too. But because you registered their names in your Hiroshima village years ago they are also Japanese citizens. Suppose the war in Europe spreads. What if Japan and America get into it on opposite sides? Your sons might face serious difficulties if you allow them to retain two citizenships. To protect them, get it cleaned up."

The five children added their pleas. "Look, Pop," they argued. "We respect Japan;, but we're going to be Americans." Their father agreed with them. He nodded. He told Mr. Hale that it ought to be done, but as always before, he refused to sign any papers. This the children could not understand and they sided with Mr. Hale when he said, '% really isn't right, Mr. Sakagawa, for you to penalize your sons, especially with three of them being Punahou boys."

But Sakagawa-san was adamant, and after Mr. Hale had left, and

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his family began hammering him with their arguments, he felt caged and finally kicked a chair and shouted, "I'm going away where a man can get some peace." He sought out Mr. Ishii and sat glumly with him.

"Our evil has caught up with us, old friend," he said.

"It was bound to, sooner or later," Mr. Ishii reflected sadly.

"The children are insisting that I write to Hiroshima and take their names off the village registry."

"You aren't going to do it, are you?" Mr. Ishii asked hopefully.

"How can I? And bring disgrace upon us all?"

The two men, now gray in their late fifties, sat moodily and thought of the shame in which they were involved. In their village Kamejiro had been legally married by proxy to the pretty girl Sumiko, by whom he had had five children, all duly reported; and Mr. Ishii had been legally married to Miro Yonko, no children reported. Yet by convenient switching, Kamejiro had married Yoriko, American style, and she was the mother of the children; Mr. Ishii had likewise married Sumiko, and she had turned out to be a prostitute. How could they explain these things to the Japanese consulate on Nuuanu Street? How could they explain this accidental bigamy to the five children? Above all, how could they explain it to the village authorities in Hiroshima? "All Japan would be ashamed," Mr. Ishii said gloomily. "Kamejiro, we better leave things just as they are."

"But the children are fighting with me. Today even Mr. Hale came to the house. He had the papers in his hands."

"Of course he had the papersl" Mr. Ishii agreed. "But you watch his face when you try to explain who your wife is. Kamejiro, friend, let the matter drop."

But on Saturday, December 6, Mr. Hale returned to tie shack and said, "You are the last holdout on my list, Mr. Sakagawa. Please end your sons' dual citizenship. With Goro here in the army, and Tadao and Minoru in the R.O.T.C., it's something you've got to do."

"I can't," Kamejiro said through his interpreter, Goro, who had a weekend pass from Schofield Barracks.

"I don't understand the old man," Goro said, smoothing out his army uniform, of which he was obviously proud. "He's loyal to Japan, but he's no great flag waver. I'll argue with him again when you're gone, Mr. Hale."

"His obstinacy looks very bad," Mr. Hale warned. "Especially with you in the army. I've got to report it, of course."

Goro shrugged his shoulders. "Have you ever tried to argue with a Japanese papa-san? My pop has some crazy fixed idea. But 111 see what I can do."

That Saturday night the entire Sakagawa family battled out this problem of dual citizenship, in Japanese. "I respect your country, Pop," Goro said. "I remember when I had the fight with the priest about going back to Japan. When I finally surrendered, I really

intended to go. But you taiow what's happened, Pop. Football . . . now the army. Let's face it, Pop. I'm an American."

"Me too," Tadao agreed.

The sons hammered at him, and finally he said, "I want you to be Americans. When I put a newspaper picture like that over the sink, 'Four Sakagawa Stars,' don't you think I'm proud? Long ago I admitted you'd never again be Japanese."

"Then take our names off the citizenship registry in Japan."

"I can't," he repeated for the fiftieth time.

"Damn it, Pop, sometimes you make me madl" Goro cried.

Kamejiro stood up. He stared at his sons and said, "There will be no shouting. Remember that you are decent Japanese sons." They came to attention, and he added sorrowfully, "There is a good reason why I cannot change the register."

"But why?" the boys insisted.

Through the long night the argument lasted, and stubborn Kamejiro was unable to explain why he was powerless to act; for even though his sons were American, he was forever Japanese, and he expected one day to return to Hiroshima; when he got there he could quietly tell his friends about the mix-oip in Hawaii, but he could not do so by letter. He himself could not write, and he could not trust others to write for him. It was two o'clock in the morning when he went to bed, and as he pulled the covers up about his shoulders, on a group of aircraft carriers six hundred miles away, a task force of Japanese airmen, many of them from Hiroshima, prepared to bomb Pearl Harbor.

Shigeo, the youngest of the Sakagawas, rose early next morndng and pedaled his bicycle down to Cable Wireless, where he worked on Sundays delivering cables that had accumulated during the night and those which would come in throughout the day. His first handful he got at seven-thirty and they were all addressed to people in the Diamond Head area like the Hales and the Whipples, who lived in big houses overlooking the city.

He had reached Wadkiki when he heard from the vicinity of Pearl Harbor a series of dull explosions and he thought: "More fleet exercises. Wonder what it means?"

He turned his back on Pearl Harbor and pedaled up an impressive kne leading to the estate of Hoxworth Hale, and while waiting in the porte-cochere he looked back toward the naval base and saw columns of dense black smoke curling up into the morning sunlight. More explosions followed and he saw a series of planes darting and zigzagging through the bright blue overhead. "Pretty impressive," he thought.

He rang the Hale bell again, and in a moment Hoxworth Hale appeared in a dark business suit, wearing collar and tie, as if such a leader of the community were not allowed to relax. Shig noticed that the man's face was colorless and his hands trembling. The radio was

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making noises from a room Shig could not see, but what it was saying he could not determine. Gulping in a manner not common to the Hales, Hoxworth pushed open the screen door and said to the star of the Punahou eleven, My God, Shig. Your country has declared war on mine."

For a moment Shig could not comprehend what had been said. Pointing back to Pearl Harbor he asked, "They having a make-believe invasion?"

"No," Hoxworth Hale replied in a hollow, terrified voice. "Japan is bombing Honolulu."

"Japan?" Shig.looked up at the darting planes and saw that where they passed, explosions followed and that as the planes sped toward the mountains, puffs of gunfire traced them through the sky. "Oh, my God!" the boy gasped. "What's happened?"

Hoxworth held the door open, ignoring the cable, and indicated that Shig should come inside, and they went to the radio, whose announcer was repeating frantically, yet with a voice that tried to avoid the creation of panic: "I repeat. This is not a military exercise. Japanese planes are bombing Honolulu. I repeat. This is not a joke. This is war."

Hoxworth Hale covered his face with his hands and muttered, "How awfuJ this is going to be." Looking at bright-eyed Shig, who was only a year older than his own son, he said, You'll need all the courage you have, son."

Shig replied, "Outside you said, Tour country has declared war on my country.' Yours and mine are both the same, Mr. Hale. I'm an American.'

"I'm sorry, Shig. That's a mistake many of us will make in the next few days. God, look at that explosionl" The two watchers winced as an enormous thunder filled the air, accompanied by a slowly rising pillar of jet-black smoke that billowed and twisted upward from the ruins at Pearl Harbor. "Something terrible is taking place," Hale mumbled.

Then from a stairway behind him came a haunted voice, weak and piping like a child's, and he made as if to push Shigeo out the door, but before he could do so the person on the stairs had come down into the room and stood facing her husband and his visitor. It was Mrs. Hale, a frail and very beautiful woman of thirty-eight. She had light auburn hair and wide, level eyes that found difficulty in focusing. She wore a wispy dressing gown such as Shig had never seen before outside the movies, and she walked haltingly. "What is the great noise I hear, Hoxworth?" she asked.

"Malama, you shouldn't have come down here," her husband admonished.

"But I heard a shooting," she explained softly, "and I wondered if you were in trouble."

At this moment one of the bombing planes was driven off course by a burst of unexpected anti-aircraft fire, and it swerved from its

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planned escape route, winging swiftly over tihe Diamond Head area, and as it passed, Shig and Mr. Hale could see on its underbelly the red circle of Japan. "You'd better go now," Mr. Hale said.

"You haven't signed for the cable," Shig pointed out, and as Hoxworth took the cable and signed the receipt, his wife walked ghostlike to the door and looked toward Pearl Harbor, where the bombs were still exploding.

"Ahhhhhh!" she shrieked in a weird guttural cry. "It's war and my son will be killed." Throwing her filmy sleeves over her face, she ran to her husband, sobbing, "It's war, and Bromley will not come back alive."

Hale, holding his wife in his right arm, returned the receipt with his left hand and gripped Shigeo by the shoulder. "You must not speak of this," he said.

"I won't," Shigeo promised, not understanding exactly what it was that he was expected to keep secret.

Kamejiro had risen at six that morning and had gone down to the barbershop to sterilize everything again, for part of the success of his shop stemmed from his mania for cleanliness. Now he was back home waiting for his breakfast. His wife Yoriko, who never did her customers' laundry on Sunday, was leisurely preparing a meal, having already fed Shigeo. GOTO, enjoying his pass, was sleeping lalte, but Tadao, who was in the R.O.T.C. at the university, had already risen. Reiko-chan was dressed and ready to go to an early service at the Community Church in Moih'ili. Minoru, nineteen and already in training for basketball at Punahou, was also sleeping.

The first to comprehend what was happening was Goro, for when the bombs struck he thundered out of bed, ran in his shorts into the yard and shouted, "This is no game. Somebody's declared war!" He ran to the radio he had built for the family and heard official confirmation of his suspicions: "Enemy planes of unknown origin are bombing Pearl Harbor and Hicfcam Field." Turning to his family he announced in Japanese: "I think Japan has declared war against us."

The escape route used by those bombers who attacked the eastern segment of Pearl Harbor carried them across Kakaako, and now as they flashed by in triumph the Sakagawa family gathered on their minute lawn surrounded by flowers and watched the bright red rising sun of Japan dart by. As soon as the enemy was identified GOTO shouted, "Tad! We better report right away!" Accordingly, he hurried into his army uniform and hitchhiked a ride out to Schofield Barracks, while Tadao and Minoru climbed into their R.O.T.C. uniforms, Tadao reporting to the university and Minoru to Punahou. But before the boys left, they bowed ceremoniously to their bewildered father.

The impact of these sudden happenings on Kamejiro staggered him. In an uncomprehending daze he sat down on the steps of his shack and stared at the sky, where puffs of ack-ack traced the departure of the Japanese planes. Three times he saw the red sun of his homeland

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flash past, and once he saw the evfl snout of a low-flying Japanese fighter spewing machine-gun bullets ineffectively into the bay. He tried to focus his thoughts on what was happening and upon his sons' prompt departure for the American army; but the inchoate thoughts that were rising in his mind were not allowed to become words. Japan must have been in great trouble to have done such a thing. The boys must have been in great trouble if they left so promptly to defend America. That was as far as he could go.

At eleven o'clock that Sunday morning a group of four secret police, armed and with a black hearse waiting on Kakaako Street, rushed into the Sakagawa home and arrested Kamejiro. "Sakagawa," said one who spoke Japanese. "We've been watching you for a long time. You're a dynamiter, and you're to go into a concentration camp."

"Wait!" Reiko protested. "You know who the Sakagawa boys are. At Punahou. What's this about concentration camp?"

"He's a dynamiter, Miss Sakagawa. He gave money to Japan. And he refused to denationalize you. It's the pokey for him." The efficient team whisked. bewildered Kamejiro into the hearse and it drove on, picking up other suspected seditionists.

At eleven-thirty Shigeo pedaled by on his Cable Wireless bicycle to share with the family the frightening things he had been seeing, but he said nothing of them, for Reiko's announcement that their father had been hauled away to concentration camp stunned him. This was really war, and he and all other Japanese were instantly involved. "Pop couldn't have been doing anything wrong, could he?"

The brother and sister looked at each other and it was Shigeo who formulated their doubt: "On the other hand, Pop used to prowl around every night."