Shimura Trouble (6 page)

“This is delicious!” I said after I’d swallowed it. “Who made them?”

“It’s from a little okazu-ya in Waipahu. If you like okazu snack foods, I can tell you all the best places,” Margaret said.

“Please do,” I said, wondering how, if the food was take-out, it was so very hot and crisp. The answer came when I glanced at the stove and saw a deep pan of oil. The snacks had been refried at home, making them even unhealthier.

“Eat more!” Margaret urged. “I’m sorry to say that I don’t do much around the house, ever since the kids got big and I started working.”

“Ah! Do you work nearby?” Uncle Hiroshi asked, smiling.

“Quite near. I’m director of housekeeping at the hotel.”

The smile on Uncle Hiroshi’s face froze, and I imagined the calculator in his banker’s brain had made a judgment on the family. And I too was recalling all the Japanese maids in the old novels I was reading about Hawaii, and how in the newspaper article I’d read, activists had rued that the proposed new jobs in the area would be mostly in the service industry.

“I’m too tired after work to do much cleaning around here—and I have to admit that I’m not much of a cook, especially of complicated Japanese dishes. I’m not full Japanese like you; I’m hapa, mixed with Hawaiian. Edwin calls me mixed plate.”

“I guess Rei is mixed plate, too. Her mother is American,” Tom volunteered.

“Never would have guessed it! Toshiro, did you marry a haole girl?” Uncle Edwin asked in a tone that I wasn’t entirely sure was friendly teasing.

My father looked blank, and I quietly said that yes, my mother was Caucasian. Haole was a Hawaiian term that originally referred to anything foreign, one example being a tree, the koa haole, which resembled a native koa, but was widely regarded as an invasive pest.

Great-Uncle Yoshitsune joined us wearing a short-sleeved blue aloha shirt, his face and hands freshly scrubbed. Even in proper dress, he still resembled a garden gnome.

“Oto-chan used to do a lot of cooking when he was a young man,” Margaret said, nodding her head at Uncle Yosh. “For a while he lived in Honolulu, so he knew the best butchers and fishmongers. He used to take my mother-in-law until she passed away ten years ago, may she rest in peace. Now the only one likely to do any cooking is Courtney, and that’s just because she so obsessed with planning her own bridal reception.”

“Are you?” I asked, smiling at her with curiosity.

“Am not! I just like the pictures, the clothes, the…stuff,” Courtney said with a sigh.

“Between Harry Potter and those bridal magazines, my kid lives in a fantasy world,” Edwin said. “Thank goodness you gotta be twenty-one to get married here—otherwise, she’d be picking out a husband when she start her senior year!”

“Daddy, please!” Courtney was bright red by now, tears starting in her eyes.

“Tell me about where to shop for fish, Uncle Yosh,” I said quickly, to change the subject.

“Tamashiro’s on North King Street, in Palama. I don’t drive no more so Margaret, you should go there,” Uncle Yoshitsune chided. “I hear they sometimes still get opihi.”

“Too far, too much trouble,” Margaret said, smiling easily.

“What are opihi?” I asked.

“A small type of shellfish that clings to rocks. Harvesting it is quite dangerous,” Margaret said. “What they call it in English, Edwin?”

“Limpet,” Edwin said. “It’s scarce, but it sure makes tasty poke.”

Poke, pronounced po-kay, was Hawaii’s version of ceviche; I’d had it with tuna or octopus many times. Suddenly I had a yearning for it. This trip still had potential, at least from a gastronomic perspective.

“We have some things for you.” My father gestured toward the dozen or so gift bags we had brought with us. According to Japanese tradition, I had carefully wrapped each gift, and then put each box in an individual shopping bag.

“Oh, I don’t need nothing,” Uncle Yosh said.

“Presents? Thanks!” Courtney seemed to waken up as she reached for a bag containing her gift certificate to Delia’s, and her parents eagerly leafed through the bags, looking for the ones labeled with their names. Aunt Norie had bought Margaret a beautiful silk scarf, and I’d found a book on new uses for green tea for Edwin.

“Where’s Braden? We have something for him,” I said. Tom had chosen the gift, the very latest Nintendo game from Tokyo’s Akihabara electronics district.

“The boy suppose to be here, but running late. We should go ahead,” Edwin said.

Everyone seemed pleased with the gifts my father and I had chosen, and Norie had sent over with Tom and Uncle Hiroshi. The reaction I cared about was Uncle Yosh’s to the album I’d made. He himself on the sofa, turning pages slowly as I stayed nearby, ready to answer questions. A strange expression came over his face after a few minutes of studying the album.

At last he spoke. “I heard a lot about these people. But why don’t you have any pictures of Kaa-chan?”

I felt bad about Harue having been disowned. “It was the turn of the century, and perhaps any family pictures of her didn’t survive, or if they did, weren’t recognized as such by us. I’m so sorry; I want to go back and look again…”

“I have an idea,” Tom said brightly. “Perhaps we shall learn the name of her old schools in Japan, and get childhood photographs that way. We were able to find such photographs for the males in the family.”

“She didn’t go to school.”

“What?” I exclaimed, shocked. The Shimuras were an intellectual family.

“She had a governess, she told me. Learned all these fancy ways of talking—guess it was good over there, but hard here. People laughed at her Japanese,” Uncle Yosh said, shaking his head. “Sorry to say, I was embarrassed many times.”

“Really,” I said. This corroborated everything I knew about the folkways of the Shimura family. I wanted to continue, but Edwin cut in.

“It’s time for eat. Our dining table isn’t so big, so we serving food in the kitchen, and you can bring it out here. Please, come try.”

My father had been ushered to the front of the buffet line, so he was well away from my gaze. I couldn’t possibly cut in front of everyone to supervise his food choices. I could only worry.

An hour later, I realized that my father’s decision to eat barbecued pork, sticky rice and deep-fried vegetable tempura was the least of my problems. As Margaret sliced a coconut cake, Edwin opened his agenda, and pretty much everything I had feared about this trip came to pass.

“L
ET’S TALK ABOUT
the meaning of family.” Edwin canvassed the table. “Jii-chan, tell everybody how it feels to suddenly realize you have two nephews and their families to celebrate your birthday? Good feeling, yah?”

There were polite murmurings from everyone.

“I got a whole lot of family history to teach you guys.” Edwin seemed to be pointing his chopstick directly at me. “Things that happened here to us—to this family—you need to know!”

I sat numbly as Edwin narrated the story I’d gleaned from internet news sites: that in the 1930s Harue Shimura owned a small house on one and a half acres of land near Barbers Point, the old naval station. Harue had lived there after she’d retired from work on the plantation, around the time Yosh was starting his first job with the post office in Honolulu. Then, after Pearl Harbor was bombed and Yoshitsune was sent to an internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Idaho, Harue died of a stroke. When Yoshitsune returned in late 1946, the land and cottage had been taken over.

I interrupted, because Uncle Edwin had casually dropped in some information I hadn’t heard before. “Uncle Yosh, you were interned in a camp for Japanese-Americans?”

Yoshitsune only nodded, and I looked expectantly at him, wanting more. This was a stunning bit of family history, because very few Japanese born in Hawaii had been interned. The plantation owners had convinced the US government that their workers were loyal, and that the sugar industry would collapse if Japanese in Hawaii were taken away.

“I heard some first generation and nisei Japanese from Hawaii were sent to the camps on the mainland, but they were rare cases, weren’t they?” I said, choosing my words carefully. “How unlucky that you were among the few taken away.”

“Jii-chan worked at the post office.” Courtney spoke up, surprising me. “The boss thought he was trying to look into military mail.”

“Yes, a complete set-up, if you ask me. They just wanted him to be gone.” Edwin sounded bitter. “And we had the waterfront property, which they thought would allow him or my grandmother to send signals to the enemy.”

My father, Tom and Uncle Hiroshi had grown as still and quiet as Yoshitsune. I imagined our group was contemplating our own family history: how Harue Shimura’s older brother became a right-wing historian who’d tutored the emperor, and the other brother had been an officer in the Imperial Army. We were the enemy, as far as anyone outside of Japan was concerned.

“Please, will you tell us about the internment? If it’s not too difficult,” my father said after a pause.

“It was called Minidoka, in Idaho. A small place, with barbed-wire fence and around that, mountains,” Uncle Yoshitsune answered in a flat voice. “We had no idea how long we’d be there. I felt I had to escape.”

“Jii-chan was smart. He found the way,” Courtney said. I smiled at my young cousin, thinking that her interest in family history reminded me of my own, when I was her age.

“One day some army officers came to visit,” Yoshitsune said, interrupting my thoughts. “They were recruiting guys who could speak and read Japanese to work in intelligence. I volunteered. I did interrogations for the American and British military.”

“It’s a great story, Dad. You some hero!” Edwin’s words were quick; clearly, he wanted to return to his agenda.

Yoshitsune seemed to shrink into himself then. While I longed to keep the conversation going about intelligence, I knew it was probably better to do it later, when fewer people were around.

Edwin took over again. “You heard the terrible thing that happened to my Dad? Think of how it was for him, when he came home, a free man who served this country in the war. He find his mama gone forever, and all of a sudden Chinese people living on the land who say the Pierces leased it to them.”

“Ah, yes, Rei told us about that already,” my father said, nodding.

“Internet search engines are useful, aren’t they?” I said, in response to Edwin’s injured look.

“The papers don’t tell the real story. My father tried to ask Mrs. Pierce what happened to our house, because the old man was dead. She said there was never a fee-simple sale to my mother—always just leasehold, and that had expired. That Pierce woman said the land couldn’t remain idle, so she rented it to Winston Liang and his wife.”

“Well, since you don’t have a deed of sale, do you think it’s possible that your mother might have actually had a lease?” I turned to Yoshitsune, because I wanted to hear the story from him directly.

“I once saw a letter,” Yoshitsune said in a low voice. “I found it sometime, must have been the mid-thirties, in her bedroom dresser. The letter said that Harue Shimura was granted this land in exchange for faithful service. It was signed by Josiah Pierce.”

“A paper,” I repeated, thinking that it didn’t sound anything like an official, legal deed at all—but who knew how things operated in prewar Hawaii?

“The paper’s gone,” Yoshitsune said, dashing my hopes. “Everything was gone when I came back from the mainland.”

As if to put an exclamation mark on the disappointment, there was a bang at the front door, and after a moment, a teenage boy stuck his head around the corner of the dining room. He had the same attractively tilted dark brown eyes as his sister, but wore his black hair shaved close to his head. A Hawaiian skinhead, I thought, taking in the ripped T-shirt with its Quiksilver logo and way-too-long board shorts.

“Braden, you get your sorry self in here!” Edwin roared. “Where you been so long?”

“Nowhere you need to know about.” Braden scraped his chair loudly as he sat down with a plate containing nothing but pork.

“Braden, please. It’s Jii-chan’s belated birthday celebration,” Margaret said. “Your cousins have been waiting to meet you!”

The boy glanced at each of us as his mother made the introductions. Tom and Hiroshi made slight bows from their positions at the table, but I didn’t bother. I had a feeling that Braden would mock anything Japanese about us. His sister was watching him too, as if she expected something to happen.

Edwin picked up the conversation we’d been having before the sullen teenager’s arrival. “Now, like I was saying, this land, it was very nice because it’s waterfront. Even on the Leeward Side of Oahu, waterfront property is worth a lot of money. The Japanese developer who built Kainani wants to buy twenty acres, of which our land is a small part—but probably worth five or six million.”

“Are you talking about the developer called Mitsuo Kikuchi?” I asked, glad for something to distract me from Braden. He was chewing with his mouth slightly open, a disgusting sight.

“Yes indeed,” Edwin answered me. “Mitsuo Kikuchi wants to buy all that land from the Pierces to make a restaurant development.”

“That’s a tough situation for you, isn’t it?” My father said. “If you want to get the land back, for nostalgic and emotional reasons.”

Edwin looked as if he thought my father was deranged. “Of course I want to sell to him. I want to get the property, and then sell it. I mean, that’s what my fadduh wants to do. Right?” He shot a look at Uncle Yoshitsune, who only raised his white eyebrows.

“It would be good for your whole family, economically,” Uncle Hiroshi pronounced. Money was the one thing he understood.

“Uncle Edwin, how will it be possible to sell the land if your father doesn’t have a title?”

“We can prove it other ways. The evidence is all around.” Edwin waved his hand around as if the proof was floating somewhere above the dining table. “You see that I’m a simple working man. I never had the funds to hire a lawyer. A good lawyer would have won the case.” Edwin looked at me again. “Your ex-fiancé, he went and helped complete strangers for free! He could still help us. “

“I don’t think it’s appropriate,” I said tightly, and noticed both my father and Aunt Margaret look at me with concern.

“We must bring out the truth, quick as possible. And I’m willing to make it worth everyone’s while,” Edwin rasped. “Since Hugh apparently isn’t an option, we’ll have to hire a real-estate lawyer from one of the good Queen Street firms. Somebody better than the last guy, Bobby Yamaguchi. I’ll need you guys to help me with the retainer; they charge you thousands, just to get started. Whaddya think, Hiroshi? You a money guy, right?”

Uncle Hiroshi nodded, and after looking at him, I saw my own father and Tom nod as well. The family wouldn’t let each other down, even if it was heading straight for disaster.

Taking a deep breath, I spoke. “Uncle Edwin, I’m deeply sympathetic, but I’m concerned that this might actually be a personal matter handled better by you and your father.”

“I give you this promise.” Edwin was looking at the men in my family, as if I hadn’t even spoken. “You get me the legal help to fix this situation and then I’ll flip that land to Mitsuo Kikuchi for a price even more than it’s worth—you know me, I can be persuasive. And we’ll split the proceeds three ways—my family, yours—’ he nodded at my father—‘And yours.” A final nod to Hiroshi and Tom.

“This could be a lot of effort and expenditure for…” I cut myself off, not wanting to be rude enough to say ‘nothing’. Instead I continued, “How do you know the property’s value?”

“I ordered a commercial appraisal earlier this year. You can see the paperwork, if you like.”

“Yes, please,” Tom and Uncle Hiroshi said, almost in unison. Margaret jumped up and hurried into another room, coming back with a small sheaf of papers. After Tom and Uncle Hiroshi studied it, they passed it to my father, and then it was mine.

I scanned the appraisal. 1 Kalama Street was a ratty-looking shack in the midst of weeds, and a line of type below listed it as a rental property owned by Pierce Holdings. The appraised value was five million dollars, which the appraiser had calculated based on the prospect of selling the cottage as a teardown property.

“You can go out there, see it yourself. Me, I got a court order to stay away from the place, so I can’t go there anymore.” Edwin turned to look directly at the men at the table. “So how about it? Do you want to help us? If I’m being too pushy, let me know. We’re family.”

To my surprise my father said, “I think we’d like to think about this…challenge you have presented. May we give you our answer in a few days?”

“Of course!” Edwin sounded aggressively jovial. “I didn’t mean to surprise you with too much news at one time, but you are just here for just a month. We got to use our time well.

No, I thought to myself. It’s not about using our time well. It’s about using us, period.