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My TIMES, My TRAVELS Page 2
To our complete surprise, what we encountered in Hawaii were Japanese!!! To be exact, Japanese-Americans, who were mostly the children and grandchildren of immigrants from Japan.
The images were not quite the same -- no more cloth caps with the flapping neck-covers, no brown uniforms, no rifles or bayonets, no more bullet bandoliers across their chests. But the Japanese looked the same, with their arrogance and unsmiling faces, their look of "You are nothing but a stranger to me!" and their cold demeanor, for the most part. To me, they did not need to have Imperial Japanese Army uniforms to exhibit the same arrogance as was seen in World War II.
There were, of course, exceptions, as there were during the war. Exceptions like Dr. Ishikawa, who treated my mother of some maladies when medicine was scarce and Filipino doctors were not around
when all we had to rely on were some half-forgotten medicinal properties of certain tree leaves.
We learned, however, that in combat it was each Japanese soldier for himself, and when wounded, he might as well have been shot dead for all the care he was entitled to, that is, an officer would go over to the wounded soldier and calmly put him out of his misery with a bullet to the head. This was not just a wild story going around during the occupation of the Philippines, it was witnessed by several reliable neighbors and friends of the family.
There were also some literary Japanese officers whom my mother had met and conversed with during the war, as she was a journalist and had only literary connections among her friends. I never found out how she got to meet these literary Japanese journalists but evidently their main purpose in the occupation was not to kill innocent civilians like their armed forces counterparts but to spread the Greater East Asian Co-Prosperity Sphere propaganda for their leaders.
In the civilian life environment of post-War Honolulu, my mother got to meet many Japanese-Americans [and Japanese, no hyphen, citizens
of their home country of Japan] among her journalistic contemporaries, as in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin where she ended up working as a columnist after she had left the Philippine Consulate-General. Some of these Japanese-Americans were in fact quite pleasant, surprisingly, in contrast to the rest of their kind.
Statistics I learned decades later showed that fully 27 percent of Hawaii's population consisted of Japanese-Americans, a number that has remained constant for decades. However, of the filled occupations of Hawaii 68 percent were filled by Japanese-Americans, incidentally, a people with long lives and, therefore, longevity at work. This situation made it practically impossible for a job-seeker to obtain work in Hawaii unless there were some Japanese-American connections to help.
In fact, in the early '80's, when my wife and I had been forced by my mother to come back to Hawaii to live with her, the only job I could find, in keeping with the difficulty of my finding work all through my teen years, I obtained through the help of a former St. Louis College Prep classmate, Alex Yuen, who worked in personnel for the City and County of Honolulu. I worked monthly rotating shifts as a computer operator along with several Japanese-American ("What else?)
other clerks who were very subtle about their resentment that someone who WAS NOT JAPANESE-AMERICAN was working alongside them. I did not last more than six months at the job, being let go for no clear reason
as I felt I was doing a good job and was learning along the way. When I later encountered my former supervisor and I asked him how "the new guy was doing", he replied, "What new guy?" This made me wonder just what kind of arrangement there was to my working in the City and County of Honolulu computer department.
It was with some effort that we were able to sublimate our hatred for the Japanese who had crushed our countrymen and deny our revulsion at anything Japanese. The situation was like a suspension of disbelief when one is at the movies or reading a work of fiction. It was not easy, considering the renowned "inscrutability of the Oriental" most of which was based on the encounters of many noted authors. It is not even easy to know what a Japanese person is thinking when one is face to face with a Japanese-American, especially when it is learned later that the person was suspicious of you. After years of experiencing that feeling, one becomes aware almost automatically that the person with whom you are speaking is suspicious of you, your ideas, your point of view, your attitude, your whole mental makeup.
I suppose it is not only with Japanese, or Japanese-Americans from whom this feeling of suspicion arises when one is speaking with anyone else, but this suspicion is most evident when one is speaking with a person whose eyes do not show as clearly as the eyes of others what the person seems to be thinking. Plenty of people have slitty eyes but these other people are, somehow, easier to "read", their expressions are more transparent than an inscrutable Japanese face.
Call it prejudice on my part, but if you try a little experiment
and really scrutinize others' expressions as you are conversing with them, without their knowledge, of course, you might be surprised at the amount of information one can gather from peoples' expressions.
When I get to the part about Europe and China and Mexico and other places to which we have traveled, I will attempt to explain my findings about the expressions of people with whom I have talked.
But these thoughts belonged to an older, reasonably wiser me, and not the 14-year-old that I was when we arrived at Honolulu Airport.
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