Hawaii

  But on August 19, 1916, this German luna found two of his Japanese suffering from “soy-sauce fever,” and he cuffed them out to the fields, temperature or no. He then left the long barracks where bachelors stayed and entered the minute wooden house where Kamejiro Sakagawa and his wife Yoriko lived, and to his disgust he found the former in bed. The luna did not stop to recall that for fourteen years Kamejiro had never once requested a day off for illness, so that malingering was not likely. All the German saw was another Japanese in bed, claiming a fever.

  “You breathe my face,” he growled in thick pidgin.

  Kamejiro, who did not even know of the soy-sauce trick, failed to grasp the instructions, which convinced the luna of his perfidy. Shaking the little laborer, he shouted again, “You breathe my face!” He leaned over the bed, and since the wife Yoriko had felt sorry for her stricken husband and had both bathed him and fed him some rice and soy sauce, the unmistakable odor of the strong black sauce struck the luna’s nose, and something in what he interpreted as the mock-bewilderment of the little Japanese infuriated him, and with a judgment clouded by alcohol and his own substantial pain, he dragged the sick man from his bed and began thrashing him with the whip most tunas carried.

  He had struck Kamejiro some dozen blows, none of them very effective because of the crowded nature of the cabin, when he realized from Mrs. Sakagawa’s behavior and the flushed appearance of her husband that perhaps the man really was sick. But he had launched a specific course of action and found himself incapable of turning back. “Get dressed,” he growled, and as bewildered Kamejiro, sick for the first time in Hawaii, climbed into his clothes, the luna stood over him, flexing the whip. He drove Kamejiro out of the cabin and into the pineapple fields, announcing to the others: “Soy-sauce pilikia pau! Plenty pau!”

  Kamejiro, with a high fever, worked till noon and then staggered to one knee. “He’s fainting!” the Japanese cried, and work stopped while they hauled him back to his cabin. The German luna, frightened by this twist of events, hurried for the plantation doctor and said, “You’ve got to say it was soy-sauce fever. We’ve got to stick together.”

  The doctor, an old hack who had proved himself unable to hold down any other job, understood, but he was nevertheless appalled at the high fever in the Japanese, and before he publicly announced that the man had been malingering, he dosed him well. Then he supported the luna and gave a stormy lecture in pidgin against the evils of drinking soy sauce. But when he rode back with the luna he warned: “The little bastard won’t die this time, but sometimes they really are sick.”

  “How can you tell?” the German asked, and so far as he was concerned the incident was closed.

  But not for Kamejiro Sakagawa. For fourteen years he had given his employer the kind of loyalty that all Japanese are expected to give their superiors. Every monologue delivered by the frenetic, bald-headed reciter dealt with the loyalty that an inferior owed his master. The suicides, the immolations and the feat of Colonel Ito at Port Arthur had all stemmed from this sense of obedience, and the reason that reciters came from Tokyo to such remote areas as Kauai was that the Imperial government wanted to remind all Japanese of their undying loyalty to superiors, in this case the emperor and his army. None had mastered the lesson more firmly than Kamejiro; to him loyalty and rectitude were inborn nature, and the high point of his life continued to be the moment when he dressed in Colonel Ito’s uniform to stand at attention while the chanters screamed the story: “Colonel Ito and the Russian Guns at Port Arthur.” In his dream life, Kamejiro was that colonel.

  But what had happened to him now? When the fever abated he mumbled to his closest friends, “The worst part was not the whip, although it stung. But when I had fallen on the floor, he kicked me! With his shoe!”

  If the German luna had been asked by a judge if this had truly happened, he would not have known, for to him the kick was of no significance. But to a Japanese it was an insult past enduring. It was no use to argue with Kamejiro that a kick was no worse than a thrashing from a whip. He knew that in Japanese recitations the most terrifying scene came when the villain, having knocked the hero down, takes off his zori and ceremoniously strikes the fallen hero, for then men like Kamejiro gasped, knowing that only death could avenge this ultimate insult.

  “He kicked you?” one of the older men asked in a whisper.

  “Yes.”

  “An ignorant, uneducated German kicked a Japanese?”

  “Yes.”

  “All Japan will be ashamed of this day,” the visitor mumbled and sharing this shame, departed.

  When the Sakagawas were left alone, Kamejiro turned his face to the wall and began to sob. He could not understand what had happened, but he knew that revenge of some kind was imperative. As his visitor had clearly said, “All Japan will be ashamed.”

  His lumpy, square-faced wife understood the agony he felt and tried by various gentle means to placate him and poultice with kindness his festering sores, but she accomplished nothing, and at sunset her husband announced his plan: “I will borrow Ishii-san’s sword, and after the darkness has fallen I will creep to the luna’s house and on his front steps I will cut out my bowels. This will bring him great shame and the honor of Japan will be restored.”

  “No!” Yoriko pleaded. “This stupid German would not understand.”

  “When he stumbles upon my body in the morning, he will understand,” Kamejiro replied.

  “Oh, no!” Yoriko wept. She had not yet lived with her husband for a year, but she had found him to be one of the finest men she had ever known or heard of. He was kind and jovial. He saved his money and was generous with friends. He got drunk sometimes but fell into laughing fits when he did and had to lean on her to get home. And at all public gatherings of the Japanese, he represented the honor of the homeland. In his uniform of Colonel Ito he was as handsome a man as she had seen, and she did not want him, not even for the honor of his country, to commit hara-kiri before the house of a clod like the German luna.

  “Kamejiro,” she whispered. “Forget the sword. There is a better way. Wait till you are stronger. I will feed you rice and fish and you will become powerful as before. Then hide along the path, and when the luna comes along, leap at him and knock him down and then kick him with your zori.”

  “Germans are big men,” Kamejiro reflected.

  “Then get some of the others to help you,” Yoriko plotted.

  “I would not hide,” Kamejiro replied. “That would offend the honor of Japan.”

  “Then walk up to him,” Yoriko counseled, “and knock him down.”

  The German luna seemed rather bigger to Kamejiro than he did to Yoriko, so on his feverish bed the little laborer worked out an alternative plot that would both humiliate the luna and restore his own besmirched honor. He waited until his strength returned, bided his time while he spied on the luna, and then laid his trap. Planting himself along a road which the German had to traverse on his way to the overseers’ quarters, he trembled with excitement as he saw the towering luna approach. When the German was almost abreast of him, he called sharply, “Mr. Von Schlemm!”

  Startled, the luna stopped and drew his fists into a protective position. Then he saw that his accoster was the model workman Kamejiro, and he forgot that he had recently whipped the man. He dropped his guard slightly and asked, “What fo’ you call?”

  To his amazement, the little Japanese bent down, carefully took off his zori, stood erect like a major in a German play, and tapped the man facing him on the shoulder with the dusty Japanese shoe. At this moment Kamejiro expected to be knocked down by the luna, whereupon his friends hiding in the bushes were supposed to leap out and thrash the luna roundly.

  But nothing happened. The big, bewildered German stared at his strange assailant, looked down at the one bare foot, and shrugged his shoulders. “You speak, Kamejiro?” he asked, unable to comprehend what was happening.

  In disgust with a man so lacking in honor, Kamejiro turned his back and
started hobbling with one shoe and one bare foot back to his quarters. The big luna, more perplexed than ever, watched him disappear, then shrugged his shoulders again and went along to his quarters, but as he walked he thought he heard in the sugar cane beside the road the muffled and derisive laughter of men, but when he turned suddenly to find them, he saw nothing but the waving cane.

  That night Sakagawa Kamejiro was a hero among the Japanese of Ishii Camp. “Tell us again how you humiliated the luna!” his admirers begged.

  “I went up to him just as I told my wife I would and I called, ‘Eh, you, Mr. Von Schlemm!’ Then I took off my zori and struck him on the head with it.”

  “On the head?” asked the Japanese who had not been in the cane. “And he did nothing?”

  One of the men who had been hiding in the cane explained: “He was astonished! He was afraid! I could see him tremble! What a sorry man he was that moment!”

  “I think we had better celebrate with some sake,” an older man suggested, proud of the manner in which Kamejiro had recovered the honor of Ishii Camp, but before the celebration could be properly launched, Ishii-san himself ran breathlessly in from Kapaa with shocking news. At first he could not speak, but then, with tears bursting from his bloodshot eyes, he blurted out: “My wife has run away!”

  “Sumiko-san?” everyone cried.

  “She has run away to Honolulu,” the stricken man wailed. “She said she could not live in Kauai any longer.”

  “What was the matter?” one of the older men asked. “Weren’t you able to pin her down in bed?”

  “We had a good time in bed,” Ishii-san explained, “but she laughed at me for having no suit. I pleaded with her … Maybe some of you heard the fights in our house.”

  He stood, a dejected man, ashamed of his fiasco and humiliated, and some of the men of Ishii Camp felt exceedingly sorry for him, for he could read and write and he had spent a good deal of money bringing a wife from Japan, and the one he finally got turned out to be the most beautiful Japanese girl in Hawaii, but he had not been able to hold her. There was a silence in the camp, and then Mrs. Sakagawa, the stocky, square-faced woman he had rejected, went up to him and said, “Forget this ill-mannered girl, Ishii-san. On the boat we grew to despise her and we knew she would never make a good wife. The blame is not yours. I announce to everyone here that the blame is not Ishii-san’s.”

  The little scribe looked into the face of the rugged woman he had imported from Hiroshima, and in great dejection mumbled, “Then you forgive me, Yoriko-chan?”

  “I forgave you long ago,” the stocky peasant girl replied, “for you enabled me to find my true husband.” She used the Japanese word Danna-san, Sir Master, and although she had never yet allowed Kamejiro to master her at anything, she sang the word in a lilting, wifelike manner and dropped her eyes, and all the men there thought: “How lucky Kamejiro was to make that swap.”

  In their own little house Kamejiro whispered to his wife, “Tonight I shivered to think that Sumiko might have been my wife.”

  “She would have run away from you, too.”

  “I was lucky! I was lucky!” Kamejiro chanted. “The four hundred thousand gods of Japan were looking out for me that day.”

  Yoriko looked down at her man and asked, “Did you truly strike Von Schlemm-san on the head with your zori?”

  “I did.”

  “All Japan is proud of you, danna-san.”

  They fell together on the bed, and Kamejiro said, “It’s very funny to me, but I knew little about girls and I thought that when a man and woman got married and slept together, babies always came along pretty quickly.”

  “Sometimes they do,” Yoriko assured him.

  “But not for us … it seems.”

  “We must work harder,” Yoriko explained, and they blew out the oil lamp.

  She also worked hard at other tasks. When the pineapples ripened, she helped harvest them at fifty-four cents a day. Later she would get a few days’ employment stripping the crowns of unnecessary leaves so that when planted they would germinate faster. For this difficult and tedious work she got seventy-five cents a thousand crowns, and by applying a dogged concentration to the job, she learned to strip upwards of four thousand a day, so that she became the marvel of the plantation, and husbands in other camps asked their wives, “Why can’t you strip crowns the way Kamejiro’s wife does?” and the wives snapped, “Because we are human beings and not machines, that’s why.”

  Yoriko also took over the cooking of meals for bachelors in the long house. They provided the food and she did the work. Now both she and her husband rose at three-thirty each day, he to gather wood both for his bath and for her stove, she to prepare the men’s breakfasts, and together they earned substantial wages, but their goal of $400 clear in cash continued to slip away from them. There were military events in Japan to be underwritten, and various Imperial requests forwarded by the consulate in Honolulu. There were priests to support and schoolteachers who educated the young, for who would want to take children back to Hiroshima if they knew no Japanese? And although the Sakagawas had no children of their own, they helped those who did.

  But most often the flight of dollars was accounted for by some personal tragedy within the camp community, as on the evening when Ishii-san burst into their home with a plea for thirty dollars. “I’ve got to go to Honolulu, right away,” he mumbled, trying to keep back his tears.

  “Sumiko?” Mrs. Sakagawa asked.

  “Yes. Hashimoto-san, the photographer at Kapaa, was in Honolulu to buy another camera and he discovered that the man who took Sumiko away left her in the city and she …” He could not finish.

  “And she’s working in one of the brothels?” Yoriko asked coldly.

  “Mmmmmmm,” Ishii-san nodded, his face buried in his hands from humiliation.

  “That is her destiny, Ishii-san,” the Hiroshima woman assured him. “Leave her there. You can do nothing.”

  “Leave her there?” Ishii-san screamed. “She’s my wife!”

  “Believe me, Ishii-san,” Mrs. Sakagawa asserted, “that one will be no wife, never.”

  “Then you won’t let me have thirty dollars?” the little scribe pleaded.

  “Of course we will,” Kamejiro said, and although his wife protested at the waste, for she knew the trip to be useless, the passage money was delivered.

  Five days later little Mr. Ishii, his eyes ashamed to meet those of his friends, returned alone to Kauai. For a long time no one questioned him about his wife and he went about his work with his head down, until finally at breakfast one morning in the long room Kamejiro banged the table and asked in a loud voice, “Ishii-san, is your wife still working in the brothel?”

  “Yes,” Ishii-san replied, happy that someone had openly asked the question.

  “Then in due time you will divorce the no-good whore?”

  “Yes,” the scribe replied.

  “You’re better off that way,” Kamejiro said, “but remember that you owe me thirty dollars.” The men laughed and that was the last Ishii Camp heard of beautiful Sumiko, but sometimes at the dock Kamejiro, fascinated by the peril he had so narrowly escaped, inquired of sailors from Honolulu, “Whatever happened to that girl Sumiko?” and finally he learned, “She went back to Japan.”

  That night when he started to tell his wife Yoriko the news, he was interrupted by her own startling intelligence: “We are going to have a baby!”

  Kamejiro dropped his hands and all thoughts of Sumiko vanished. “A baby!” he cried with explosive joy. “We’ll name him Goro.”

  “Why Goro?” Yoriko asked in her practical way. “That’s no name for a first son.”

  “I know,” Kamejiro admitted. “But years ago I decided that my first son should be Goro. The name sounds good.” And it was agreed.

  I HAVE SAID that the heroic encounter between Kamejiro Sakagawa and the German luna Von Schlemm was one with historic consequences, and that is true, but they did not become apparent until forty yea
rs later. What followed immediately was that as soon as word of the affair reached Honolulu, Kamejiro’s revenge was inflated into an incipient riot, and plantation managers whispered apprehensively about “that Japanese who kicked the bejeezus out of the German luna.” Fortunately, Wild Whip was absent at the time, on vacation in Spain, but as soon as he climbed down off the H & H liner he was told about it.

  His neck muscles tensed and blood rushed to the ugly scars across his cheek. “Who was the Jap?” he asked.

  “Man named Kamejiro Sakagawa,” an H & H official replied, and for several moments Wild Whip remained stationary on the dock, repeating the name “Kamejiro!” and looking off toward the Koolau Range. His tension increased, and on what seemed like an impulse he grabbed the reporting official by the collar.

  “How soon can I get a boat to Kauai?” he rasped, and as the little inter-island craft left for the Garden Island, the H & H official mumbled, “God help that poor Jap when Whip gets hold of him.”

  When the ferry reached Lihue, Wild Whip in great agitation leaped onto the dock, hired a taxi and went roaring out to Hanakai, where as soon as he reached his plantation he bellowed, “Bring me that goddamned Kamejiro who thinks he can kick my lunas around.”

  When Kamejiro approached, holding his cap in his hands, as was the custom when speaking to a white man, Whip rushed up to him and yelled, “I hear you smashed up my luna?”

  Kamejiro did not understand what was happening, and thought: “I’m going to be fired. And with a baby girl to feed, what shall I do?”

  “Well?” Whip growled. “Were you the one who did it?”

  The little Japanese fumbled with his cap and said weakly, “I not hit the luna like you say … hontoni … Hoxuwortu. You b’lee me. I speak truth.”