Tayama received money and an assistant, Yoko, a good-looking Nisei, a Japanese-American of immigrant Japanese parentage. In her early twenties, she had been told to assist Tayama Omura in running the food stall. They hardly spoke for the first three days, he confining his remarks to instructions on the need for cleanliness — the thousands of sailors from Pearl Harbor were used to very high standards of hygiene aboard their ships. A food poisoning aboard a ship, some of them had told Tayama, could spread like a “prairie fire.” Despite her being born in Oahu, Yoko was not familiar with the phrase “prairie fire” and felt embarrassed that she didn’t understand. Tayama’s explanation was given kindly, devoid of any of the pomposity she’d had to endure from other male Nisei bosses. She and Tayama worked well together, neither getting flustered by the rush of noonday and dinner customers, most of the crowd being sailors from the big American carriers Enterprise, Lexington, and Saratoga, which were tied up in Pearl, each of the three big aircraft carriers housing more than four thousand men and many fighters and torpedo bomber planes.
Soon Yoko was smiling and joking with the sailors, which, while it pleased Tayama from a business point of view, annoyed him intensely as a man who was sliding helplessly in love, despite the fact that he thought she must surely be a Kempei Tai operative.
She was.
July 4 was not a big celebration in Hawaii, which, as the Kempei Tai controllers never tired of reminding their agents, was not a state of the U.S. but still a territory, “stolen” from the Hawaiian Islanders by an act of Congress four years after an armed group of businessmen, led by a missionary’s son, Sandford Dole, declared itself the provisional government of Hawaii, following which the islanders’ beloved Queen Liliuokalani was arrested, tried, and humiliated in her own palace, deliberately referred to as “Mrs. Dominic,” her American husband’s last name. Sentenced at first to five years hard labor, this later commuted to a year’s house arrest, Queen Liliuokalani died twenty-two years later in a house ironically called “Washington Place,” situated one block away from the palace. But if July 4, 1941 was yet another American holiday despised by the Kempei Tai, it was not so for the 39 percent of the Hawaiian population who were Japanese. For them it was a holiday, a day off from hard labor in the rice and pineapple plantations. And for Tayama Omura, it was one of the most memorable days in his life, and Yoko’s, as he finally told her he loved her and she confirmed her love for him — and her “blackmail” status as a Kempei Tai spy. It was an enormous relief for both of them. At least they could live together, as long as the Kempei Tai allowed them, free at least in each other’s arms, unwilling spies, their horrible secret shared. Occasionally, one of the Kempei Tai’s blackmailed Nisei agents couldn’t take the pressure any longer, squeezed into an unbelievable psychological space between loyalty to family and loyalty to America, the country that had given them so much, a land of freedom impossible in Japan, from which their parents had fled through emigration. One such agent, a fisherman, had decided he could no longer take the strain and, knowing it was too dangerous to go directly to the Oahu police, wrote a letter to the Honolulu police chief.
Soon gruesome pictures of the man’s headless corpse were found by Tayama, Yoko, and Kempei Tai agents at their individual drop-off points.
It was this agent’s execution, his body having been dumped in shark-infested waters off Molokini’s atoll near Maui, that was responsible for a sudden increase in American counterespionage surveillance of the large Hawaiian-Japanese population. For Yoko, her American citizenship exacerbated her guilt at times to almost unbearable proportions, despite her public face, especially as the Kempei Tai increased pressure on them to spend more time on their days off collecting as much intelligence as possible about the fleet anchored in Pearl Harbor. It was becoming too dangerous for Tayama to use his grandfather’s Voigtlander camera.
On December 6, 1941, watching dancers already practicing for next summer’s Prince Lot Hula Festival, Tayama and Yoko were stopped by a Japanese-Hawaiian man in his late twenties. Dressed in a colorful hibiscus-patterned shirt and matching shorts, and carrying a tightly rolled-up copy of the Honolulu Advertiser, he showed them a badge — police, FBI, Naval Intelligence, they didn’t know which — and motioned them away from the edge of a noisy crowd nearby who were watching a hula competition. He led them toward the carp ponds and golden-stemmed bamboo in front of the Gardens’ Chinese hall, where a blush of yellow-orange ilima flowers against the green bowed obediently beneath the gentle, cooling flow of plumeria-tinged trade winds. Yoko, so frightened she felt she could barely breathe, fixed her eyes on the ilima blossoms that cast softly moving shadows along the edge of the pond in which big red-sashed carp glided by, Yoko envying the fishes’ tranquillity. They heard the carefree laughter of a group of Nisei boys passing them, shouldering a six-foot koa-wood surfboard, another boy “heading” an even more prized sixteen-foot olo board, once allowed only to Hawaiian royalty, the youths’ raucous chatter, and the fact that the boys seemed not to notice anyone else’s presence in the park, increasing Yoko’s fear.
The government agent stopped in the shade of a multitrunked banyan tree, well away from the hula spectators. “I’m Lieutenant Suzuki, U.S. Naval Intelligence. You know what that is?”
Yoko looked somewhat puzzled, but answered, “Police?”
“Sort of,” Lieutenant Suzuki said.
“Oh,” said Tayama, “we have a license for stall.”
Suzuki turned quickly, his right hand grasping his newspaper, trying to hit a wasp. “You have a what?” he asked Tayama brusquely.
“A license,” explained Tayama, “for our stall.”
“No, no,” said Lieutenant Suzuki, suddenly twisting away from the wasp, smacking at it simultaneously. “Get outta here!”
“Wasp sting very bad,” said Yoko with a sweet seriousness.
“What? — oh yeah. Damn things. It’s the crowd. Too many people.”
Yoko and Tayama waited politely as the wasp came in at Suzuki’s head again. This time Suzuki’s rolled-up Advertiser hit its target, the wasp momentarily flung into the brown grass, where the lieutenant’s sandal quickly squashed it.