“If Japan wins, she can send us diesel fuel,” Jiro said.
To his annoyance, Hiroshi and Kenzo both laughed at him. “Don’t you remember, Father?” his older son said. “One of the big reasons Japan got into a fight with the United States was that we wouldn’t sell them oil any more. They won’t have any to spare for Hawaii.” Kenzo nodded in agreement with his brother.
Jiro glared at his sons. He had forgotten about the oil embargo. Not only were they rude for laughing, they were right, which made it three times as bad. And, to Hiroshi and Kenzo, the United States was we and Japan was they. Jiro had already bumped into that, but he liked it no better now.
Hiroshi rubbed his nose in the point: “Everything except pineapple and sugar comes from the mainland, just about. If we need blue jeans or shoes or canned milk or canned corn or flour for bread or-or-anything, they have to ship it in.”
“Remember when they had the dock strike on the West Coast five years ago?” Kenzo added. “We were down to two weeks’ worth of food by the time it ended-and that was when things were coming in from the East Coast, and from Australia and Japan, too. Where will we get supplies now? We’ll start going hungry a lot faster.”
“All right. All right.” Jiro wanted to cuff both of them. He couldn’t. They were grown men, and both bigger than he was. And they were so very, very different from him. He wondered what he’d done wrong. If he’d been a better father, wouldn’t he have had sons who were more Japanese?
He busied himself on the sampan, not that there was much to do. The engine chugged away. It was noisy, but it was reliable. He almost wished it would have broken down. That would have given him the excuse to haul out the tool kit and tinker with it. Then he could have ignored his milkshake-guzzling, hamburger-munching boys. As things were, he just stared back toward the receding bulk of Oahu.
Hiroshi said something in English. Kenzo laughed. Neither of them bothered to translate for Jiro. They must be talking about me, he thought resentfully. They thought they knew everything and their old man didn’t know anything. Well, by the look of things, they’d backed the wrong horse in the war. Every day the rumble of artillery came closer to Honolulu. The Japanese advanced. The Americans retreated. They couldn’t retreat much farther, or they’d go into the Pacific.
He felt the way the Oshima Maru bumped over the waves. He watched terns and boobies and frigate birds. He remembered gulls raucous over the Inner Sea when he was young. They could guide a fisherman to schools of smelt or mackerel. But gulls, except for rare vagrants, didn’t come to Hawaii. A man had to use what other birds gave him.
There were boobies, plunging into the sea. Japanese dive bombers must have looked like that when they swooped down on the American ships at Pearl Harbor. They hadn’t gone into the sea, though; they’d pulled up and flown away to strike again and again. “Banzai! ” Jiro said softly. “Banzai! ” He didn’t think his sons heard him. That was just as well.
He steered toward the boobies. One of them came to the surface with a foot-long fish writhing in its beak. Jiro nodded. He waved to Hiroshi and Kenzo. They’d already started dumping nehus into the water and getting the lines ready. They did know what needed doing.
Thrilled to be free, unaware of the fate awaiting so many of them, the minnows swam off in all directions, silver flecks under the blue of the sea. And bigger flashes of silver rose to meet them. Some of those fish would get themselves a meal. Some would bite down on silver hooks, not silver scales. Instead of getting meals, they would become meals themselves.
Across miles of ocean, booms came from the north. “Are those the coast-defense guns again?” Kenzo asked.
That would have been Jiro’s guess, too. But Hiroshi shook his head. “I don’t think so,” he said. “I think those are some of the ships in Pearl Harbor, shooting at the Japanese as they come farther south.”
“You notice they couldn’t get out of Pearl Harbor,” Jiro said. Both his sons sent him stony looks. He ignored them. He knew it was true, and so did they, however little they liked it. The very day the war started, Japanese bombers in the third wave had sunk two light cruisers in the channel leading from the harbor to the Pacific. That had corked the bottle and made sure the rest of the ships stayed put. Since then, Japanese planes had pounded them again and again.
Some of the ships still had working guns. Every so often, they opened fire. They were heavier artillery than any based on land except the coast-defense batteries. Jiro suspected Japanese planes would return before long. After that, very likely, fewer Navy guns would fire on his country’s soldiers.
My country’s soldiers, Jiro thought again, and nodded to himself. Yes, Japan was his country. It always would be. And if Hiroshi and Kenzo didn’t like that or couldn’t understand it, too bad.
The fish didn’t seem to care about the distant artillery. When the Takahashis pulled in the lines, they had plenty of aku and ahi on them, as well as a few mahimahi that had come to join the feast. The frenzy of gutting them and getting them into storage came next.
Then it was more minnows over the side, and fish guts, too, and the lines went back into the Pacific with them. The guts, Jiro knew, would draw sharks, but sharks were also good to eat, even if a lot of haoles were too dumb to believe it. He didn’t think he would have any trouble selling them, not today.
He and his sons brought in fish till the sun sank low in the west. Then Jiro started up the diesel again and took the Oshima Maru back to Kewalo Basin. “Now we see how we do,” he said as they tied up there.
“We see how scared people are, you mean,” Hiroshi said. Jiro only shrugged his aching shoulders. In the end, it all boiled down to the same thing.
Along with the Japanese and Chinese buyers in the marketplace, there were also tall American soldiers with bayonets on their rifles. Fear stabbed at Jiro when he saw them. Were they there to enforce price controls or, worse, to confiscate the fish the Takahashis had worked so hard to catch? If they were, Jiro was damned if he intended to go out again the next morning. He’d built his life on the cornerstone of hard work, but hard work with the expectation of fair pay for it. If he didn’t get his reward, what point to putting to sea?
But the soldiers only kept order. They needed to keep order, too, because the buyers sprang at Jiro, Hiroshi, and Kenzo like starving wolves. They frantically bid against one another. By the time they were through, Jiro had three times as much money in his pocket as he’d imagined in his fondest dreams.
He had so much money, he was tempted not to take home some especially fine ahi for Reiko. But the thought of what his wife would say if he didn’t was plenty to conquer even greed. “We’ll be rich!” he said to his sons. “Rich, I tell you!” He could think about the money he had made, if not the bit of extra cash that would have been in his pocket if he’d sold the rest of the tuna.
Then Hiroshi spoiled even that, saying, “No, we won’t. The buyers will just jack up the price they charge. Everybody’s jacking up the prices he charges. Look at that.” He pointed to the window of a haole grocery store they were walking past. He and Kenzo both read English fluently, which Jiro didn’t. “Flour is half again what it was when the war started. Rice the same. Onions are double. And look at oranges-a dollar thirty-five a dozen! That’s two and a half times what they were before, easy.”
Some of Jiro’s glee evaporated. Then it returned, or a portion of it did. “Yes, the prices are up, but what I got paid is up even more.”