Book Review
Hawaii
James Michener
5/5 stars
"The amalgamation of different races of people to create a New Man."

This book was brilliant and hard to put down. (Just "a few more pages" and "a few more pages" and next thing you know you've been reading for 4 hours.)

It happens all the time that trade crashes together a bunch of unrelated people in order to create a new society/country (Do you ever get the feeling that life is a gigantic accident? Not for no reason did Milan Kundera explore the expression "ess konte auch andersein"/ "it could well have been otherwise.")

In this case we have an explanation of the origin of various ethnic groups that exist in Hawaii as they do today. (Mostly whites, with larger numbers of Chinese and Japanese and a very few Native Hawaiians. Filipinos came later and were not covered in this book in a significant way.)

The book was finished shortly before Hawaii joined The Union, and so that process is not part of  story. Nor are Filipinos, though they did start to come in larger numbers later on--and are in fact 25% of the island population at the time of this review, having surpassed the Japanese.

Verdict: I have to say that I strongly recommend this book.

********

Interesting new tidbits of information:

1. Native Hawaiians have been living on the Hawaiian islands for a very short time, not even 11 centuries. (Apparently, the land is very grudgingly arable.) And, also, they have some sense of being originally from Bora Bora 1,000 years ago.

2. Ancient Bora Bora/Early Hawaii was an extremely brutal/barbaric place: slavery and human sacrifice all over the place.

3. It was also very collective. You got four men and two women? Okay, then that means that each wife has two husbands. (No one was worried about paternity.) You think that this child you gave birth to is too young to survive a voyage? No problem. Just swap him out for another child from a different family that is older.

4. The first step to the conquest of Hawaii was missionaries. Michener characterizes them as extremely dour and puritanical (but determined) people. The easiest way to convert some country is to convert the leadership first, although there are plenty of people who work on the bottom end of the market.

5. Like with many other colonizations, the seafarers and traders came first, the missionaries second, and the government last. (It might please the libertarians to know that history has many examples of people voluntarily getting along without the help of the government.)

6. I did know that the Hakka existed in China, but I never had a clear picture of their origins until now, nor did I know how much they and the local Cantonese hated each other. (1,000,000+ dead in clan wars, and not a single mixed marriage over a period of 1,000 years--in spite of living right next door to each other.)

7. Ancient Chinese enemies (some Hakka; mostly Cantonese) were the first Chinese to come to Hawaii as indentured servants. Most of the men became Christians as a condition of marrying a Hawaiian wife (most of whom had been christianized earlier).

8. They were 400,000 native Hawaiians in 1778; decreased to 44,000 by 1878. (An 89% decrease in just a century.) There are *very few* full-blooded Hawaiians left in Hawaii these days, and most of them have Chinese blood. (The indentured servants were 99% male, and they just married local women.)

9. (p.618): both Chinese and Japanese had the same quirky idea that the Emperor was divine, and that idea did continue all the way until about 1911 for China and 1945 for Japan.

10. In spite of the overlap in that way aforementioned, the Japanese and Chinese on Hawaii took very different paths. The former started out as laborers (mostly illiterate) and got involved in union activism/ labor movements while the latter started business and relied on economic muscle to achieve political equality.

10. Pearl Harbor was an avoidable disaster. The government had intelligence of the attack, but "the information arrived 10 hours late, delivered on a bicycle by Japanese messenger boy." (p.737)

11. Japanese people living abroad actually financed a significant chunk of the Japanese war effort. Lots of people were never able to save money to return home because the Japanese consulate kept begging them for it.

12. At one point, France and Germany were the cultural centers for Japan to emulate.


Second order thoughts:

1. (p.257) Then, as now, people who are extremists can go from being a small minority to a majority by sheer intransigence. These missionaries had some extremely stupid / quirky ideas: Obsession with predestination, refusal to learn to eat the local food, refusal to dress comfortably or take advantage of the acquired wisdom of the locals (especially with respect to useful things such as midwifery).

2. In a lot of ways, the fate of Native Hawaiians was similar to that of Native Americans: Western disease wiped out a significant fraction of them, and because they did not have their own clergy / men of words to form a protective barrier, they were easy fodder for ignorant missionaries. (In current times, native Hawaiians only make up 10% of the islands.)

3. The missionaries as shown in this book loved abstract converts, but despised the specific Hawaiian people. (Lots of resonances to White do gooders a century later on the Mainland:  They love the idea of the Abstract Negro but despise the ones that they see everyday.)

4. (p.320) "Powerful half-caste politicians who organized the islands" is a theme that repeated itself many times in many places. Pardos in Brazil and Mestizos of South America. And Haitian Grimeaux and South African Coloureds. And Singapore Eurasians. Macanese in Chinese Macau..... Seems like white ancestry (even in small fractions) is a guarantee of higher caste status for centuries, and the obverse is the black ancestor that everyone wants to forget about.

5. It seems like the people don't have some other local race of people to hate, then they will invent them. Hakka are actually a subgroup of Han Chinese and yet they and their Punti neighbors hated each other and fought for centuries. I don't think there's anybody in the world outside of Japan who can tell you who are Eta-Hinin/Burakumin. (Kitchener was married to a Japanese woman, and has a fairly fancy understanding of Japanese culture. He's the first I've ever heard to mention the Ainu.)

6. As always, people with nothing to lose in their societies at home are the ones who go elsewhere and build a new society. (Religious outcasts / unlanded sons/ losers have always been the fodder for social mass movements and mass emigration.)

7. These days, Japanese and Chinese would be considered the same race. But it is instructive to see that the Chinese chose opening businesses and financing trade in order to become equal and Japanese were more concerned with politics. And we see how that worked out.

8. The lesson to learn from the Pearl Harbor debacle is that government is *extremely slow* to receive/understand/transmit information.

9. Hawaii turned out pretty well (although not perfect), with no significant separatist movement and relatively less racial animosity. But, it could well have been different: Author takes the trouble to briefly show us three comparative societies of American Samoa / Fiji/ Bora Bora.

10. It's just SO EASY for the white guys--then as now. (p.754): "We are not afraid of white babies. The island likes them." This, after a group of men came to Bora Bora to scout out new air strips, and the locals gave them a bunch of fresh 15 and 16 year old girls to have raw sex with/bust in *multiple times* for the duration of their trip-with the hope that they would impregnate some of them. (p.759- "I hope when you fly away tomorrow you leave a baby in here for me.")

11. (p.870) It's SO ubiquitous that when people come from one country to another, they remain a snapshot of the country that they left. Japanese are in Hawaii speaking Japanese the way people did a hundred years ago, and are still enmeshed in regional conflicts that have long since died out.

12. When enough time passes, a completely fictional person can be created. (p 877- I can almost hear Mitchell laughing as he wrote about "Rafer Hoxworth, the courtly and gracious Sea Captain.") Later generations will never know what somebody was like, or if he even existed. (Nobody knows whether or not Confucius was a single human being with a digestive tract. And it doesn't matter much.)

13. (p.834) People who have been conquered many generations ago and settle into a modus vivendi and their descendants don't seem to realize that they're angry until they come in contact with white people at universities. (I have a grandmother who lived through Jim Crow, and the only time I've ever met any angry black people was on a college campus.)
*******

Acquired vocabulary:

Tapa
Frangipani
Pandanus
Frigate
Promontory
Tridacna
Spume
Combers
Portent
Auguries
Ti (leaves)
Strake
Prow
Ulua
Breadfruit
Pandanus drupes
Havaiki=Owhyhee=Hawaii
Fo'c'sle
Cleat (verb)
Claw hammer coat
Calash
Hingham box
Andirons
Hermaphrodite brig
Blackbirder
biliousness
(in)temperance
Hove
breast (v., sailing usage)
Points system (shipping)
popish/popery
Busk(clothing article)
Mana
Poi
Lanai
Lomilomi
Alii
Kapu
Hewa
Kahuna (this is a Hawaiian word as well as a Hebrew one that refers to the same thing)
Breechclouts
Olona
Maile (branches)
wahine
Russet (color)
Lehua (plant)
Hau
Cannonade
pilikia
squill
Kapena
basque (clothing article)
kukui
gores (clothing article)
Punti
Belaying pin
Gimcrack
CorM
Haole
Kanaka
"Pendennis"
Barkentine
Cochinese (Kerala)
Mai paike (leprosy)
Kokua
Lazaretto
Lunas (Hawaiian meaning of the word)
gig (carriage or boat)
doughty
shoji
caparison
plug hat
Hiroshima courtship
zori
spavined
ironwood tree/causarina
banzai
okolehau
sorosis
dipsomaniac
(Chinese) sateen suit
tocsin
calabash cousin
chivvy
puka
ohia
jute bug
skylark (verb)
dilatory
mufti (military sense of term)
geta
WAVED (Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service)
lava lava (men's sarong)
taire (flowers)
sennit
pareu
beldame
poisson cru/ota ika
PBY
gamine
zaibatsu
cadge
fee simple
Gresham's Law
shantung (fabric)
chanbara (film type)
Japanese hillbilly songs (p.872)
malihini
delirium tremens
frieze
slack-key (tuning)
temporize


Other note: These names.

"Rafer Hoxworth"?
"Whipple Hoxworth"?
"Uliassutai Karakoram Blake"?