Jiro hauled in the mooring line and got the Oshima Maru going. His sons went right on tossing the float back and forth. He finally lost patience with them. “Will you two knock off that foolishness?” he shouted.
“Sorry, Father,” Hiroshi said. He didn’t sound sorry. He didn’t look sorry, either. He had a silly grin on his face.
Grimly, Jiro steered the Oshima Maru south and west. “Careful, Father,” Kenzo said. “You don’t want to end up in the defensive sea area.”
The last three words were in English, but Jiro understood them. Kenzo meant the three-mile-square region south of the Pearl Harbor outlet that the Navy had declared off-limits to sampans. The Navy patrolled aggressively to make sure the fishing boats stayed out of it, too. If you got caught in the defensive sea area, you were sure to get a warning and an escort out; you’d probably also draw a fine.
“You think I’m going to give the Navy my money?” Jiro asked his younger son. “Am I that dumb?”
“No, Father,” Kenzo answered. “But accidents can happen.”
“Accidents. Oh, yes. They can happen,” Jiro Takahashi said. “They can, but they’d better not.” Straying into the defensive sea area wouldn’t be an accident, though. It would be a piece of stupidity Jiro had no intention of allowing. His boat went where it was supposed to.
A seaplane buzzed by overhead. A Navy man with a radio was probably reporting the Oshima Maru ’s position. Well, let him, Jiro thought. I’m not in their restricted area, and they can’t say I am.
On went the fishing boat. Pearl Harbor and Honolulu sank below the horizon. Jiro and his sons ate rice and pork his wife, Reiko, had packed for them. They drank tea. Hiroshi and Kenzo also drank Coca-Cola. Jiro had tried the American drink, but didn’t think much of it. Too sweet, too fizzy.
It was the middle of the afternoon before they got to a spot Jiro judged likely. He couldn’t have said why he thought it would be good. It felt right, that was all. Some combination of wind and waves and water color told him the tuna were likely to be here. When he was a boy, he’d gone out with his father to fish the Inland Sea of Japan. His father had seemed able to smell a good catch. When Jiro asked him how he did it, he’d just laughed. “If you know fish, you know where they go,” he’d said. “You’ll figure it out.”
And Jiro had. He glanced over to his strapping sons. Would they? He didn’t want to bet on it. Too many things distracted them. He could get them to fish with him, and even to do a good enough job while they were here. But he could have trained a couple of Portuguese cowboys from a cattle ranch on the Big Island to do that. It wouldn’t have made them fishermen, and it didn’t make Hiroshi and Kenzo fishermen, either. To them, this was only a job, and not such a good one. To Jiro, it was a way of life.
He cut the motor. The Oshima Maru drifted silently on the light chop. Not far away, a booby plunged into the sea. It came out with a fish in its beak. That was a good sign. The booby wasn’t big enough to catch a tuna, of course, but it caught the sort of fish on which tuna fed. If they were here, the tuna probably would be, too.
Nodding to his sons, he said, “Throw in the bait.”
Hiroshi tipped one of the tubs of minnows over the side. The little silvery fish, still very much alive, made a cloud in the water. Hiroshi and Kenzo and Jiro dropped their long lines into the Pacific, lines full of gleaming barbless hooks that a hungry tuna might mistake for a minnow. Greed killed. Jiro understood that. The tuna didn’t, which let him make a living. He wondered if his sons did. Compared to him, they’d had things easy. How much good had that done them? Jiro only shrugged.
Hiroshi and Kenzo went back and forth, mostly in English, now and then in Japanese. Jiro caught names: Roosevelt, Hull, Kurusu. He hoped the Japanese special envoy would find a way to persuade America to start selling oil to Japan again. Cutting it off seemed monstrously unfair to him. He didn’t say that to his sons. They saw everything from the U.S. point of view. Arguing over politics was usually more trouble than it was worth.
What Jiro did say was, “Now!” He and his sons hauled the lines back aboard the Oshima Maru. A lot of them had small Hawaiian striped tuna, locally called aku, writhing on the hooks. They’d been after minnows and found something harder, something crueler. The three men worked like machines, gutting them and putting them on ice.
Jiro grabbed an especially fine striped tuna. His knife flashed. What could be fresher, what could be more delicious, than sashimi cut from a still-wriggling fish? A slow smile of pleasure spread over his face as he chewed. He offered some of the delicate flesh, almost as red as beef, to his boys. They ate with him, though they didn’t seem to enjoy it quite so much as he did. He sighed. They gobbled down hamburgers and french fries whenever they got the chance. That wasn’t the food he’d grown up on, and it tasted strange to him. To them, it was as normal as what they got at home.
Once the last of the catch was on ice, he said, “Back to it.” He and Hiroshi and Kenzo dumped the guts overboard and spilled another tub of nehus into the Pacific. The lines with their freight of hooks followed. The fishermen waited while the aku struck. Then they hauled in the lines and began gutting fish again.
A shark snapped past just as Kenzo pulled the last of the tuna into the Oshima Maru. He laughed. “Waste time, shark!” he said in English. That was another fragment of the language Jiro followed, mostly because both his boys said it all the time. Waste time meant anything futile or useless.
They fished till they ran out of bait. Not all the sharks wasted time; they brought in several tuna heads, the wolves of the sea having bitten off the rest of the fish. That always happened, most often after they’d been working for a while. The minnows drew the tuna, and the tuna-and the blood in the water from their guts-drew the sharks.
But it was a pretty good day. When Hiroshi said, “Let’s go back,” Jiro nodded. They’d done everything they could do. They would get a good price from the men at the Aala Market. These tuna were too good to go to the canning plants. Once the dealers bought them, they’d be sold one by one, mostly to Japanese restaurants and Japanese housewives. Chinese and Filipinos would buy some, and maybe the odd haole would, too, though Jiro grimaced when he thought about what whites did to such lovely fish. He’d heard of tuna salad. He’d never had the nerve to try it.
The sun had just set when the Oshima Maru tied up in Kewalo Basin once more. Dealers-some Japanese, some Chinese (and mixed outfits, like Oshiro and Wo)-came aboard to examine the catch. They said what they could to disparage it, to bring down the price, but the aku were too good to let them get away with much. Jiro went home with almost twenty dollars in his pocket. He wished he could do that well every day.
WHEN THE USS ENTERPRISE sailed for Wake Island on the morning of November 28, the carrier had done so under Vice Admiral William Halsey’s Battle Order Number One. Right from the start of the cruise, torpedoes had had warheads mounted. Planes taking off from the carrier’s flight deck carried loaded guns. They had orders to shoot down any aircraft not known to belong to the USA. All of Task Force Eight, which included three heavy cruisers and nine destroyers along with the Enterprise, had ammunition ready at the guns. Planes patrolled out to two hundred miles around the task force. Halsey insisted the Japanese were liable to attack without bothering to declare war.
Now the task force was bound for Pearl Harbor again. Nothing untoward had happened. They’d delivered Marine Corps Fighter Squadron 211 to Wake without any trouble. No one had seen any airplanes that didn’t look American. No one had spotted any subs, either, and subs worried Halsey even more than enemy aircraft did.