Shimura Trouble

10

AFTER PHONING UNCLE Yosh to set up our next-day shopping trip, my father and I set off for Honolulu. It was midday, so there was little traffic, and I had a chance to enjoy the massive mountains on the north side of the highway, and the sparkling sea on the south, although I knew I should ban those words from my vocabulary; in Hawaii, north and south were replaced by mauka, meaning ‘mountainside’, and makai, which meant ‘toward the sea’.

That morning at the coffee shop, I’d learned the terms while reading both the Advertiser and Star-Bulletin newspapers. There had been articles about a series of fires on the Leeward Side. The scrubby, dry fields and mountains were perfect fodder for errant fireworks and sparks coming from electrical lines-and the region was also full of arsonists. Adding to the situation was the scarcity of roads on the Leeward Side, and the challenge of fighting fires that often started high in the mountains. As I drove, I saw the same blackened field that I’d noticed when we’d driven in from the airport. The field had burned all the way up to the edge of Farrington Highway, making me realize that the highway had another role: firebreak.

I was starting to spook myself, so it was a relief to see regular, paved roads spreading out on either side of the freeway as we neared Honolulu. After we passed the exits for Pearl Harbor, it was time to jump on to Nimitz Highway. The route was straightforward but tedious, full of trucks, buses and traffic lights, and it was only when we finally turned right on King Street and began to see shop signs in Chinese that I relaxed. This was Chinatown on a small scale, graceful early twentieth-century buildings with curved facades and faded business names like Liang and Sons and Kowloon Traders. Mahogany-colored ducks hung in windows, and storefronts were cluttered with bins of glorious tropical fruit and vegetables.

I was excited about the shopping, and also wondered if Liang and Sons might be connected to the Liangs who’d taken over the Shimura family house. Perhaps, but I wasn’t about to stop in and ask, as the building appeared vacant.

My father raised a hand in triumph as he spotted Little Village Noodle House, the restaurant. We were seated just before a deluge of office workers snapped up all the remaining tables, and were soon feasting on tofu-scallion potstickers, spicy stir-fried green beans and slow-cooked eggplant. This was the best Chinatown food I’d had since Yokohama.

“How did you ever hear about this place?” I asked my father between bites, as I inspected the packed, clearly local crowd.

“I was given the suggestion by one of the Chinese groundskeepers at Kainani. He also told me where to find property records, in an office called the Bureau of Conveyances, which is on Punchbowl, practically across the street from Queen’s.”

“Judging from this restaurant, your friend is a good source. And speaking of property, I saw the name Liang on a building around the corner from where we parked. I wonder if it’s the same family.”

“I saw it too,” my father said, “but Liang is a common enough name. You need to look for a Winston Liang when you’re checking records at the Bureau of Conveyances.”

My father had a lot of expectations, I thought, watching him pay the bill a few minutes later.

We still had time before my father’s appointment, so we walked a few blocks to Chinatown’s food market area. Unable to resist the boxes piled up outside the stores, I filled a shopping basket with crisp mustard greens, two-foot long scallions, pale pink ginger, and heavenly-smelling golden mangoes. Then my eye was caught by a fish market, and before I knew it I’d purchased a five-pound local ahi tuna. It would make a fantastic dinner for our family tonight. I convinced the fish market to give me a bag of ice, and I bought a cheap Styrofoam cooler from a souvenir shop at the fronted of the shopping plaza.

After I’d loaded the car up, the parking attendant at the municipal garage gave us directions for the short trip to the medical center. There, I parked in the covered hospital garage, deciding it would help keep the food cool. I saw my father to the neurology clinic and left the building to walk along Punchbowl Street, a grand boulevard lined with palm and rainbow shower trees. The buildings I passed were imposing; some made of an older, pale yellow rock, and some in sherbet-colored stucco. The Kalanimoku Building, which housed the Bureau of Conveyances, was right in between eras: the long gray rectangular office building had a mid-century modern sensibility that stood out from the other, mostly twenties and thirties buildings nearby.

Inside, I followed a narrow corridor to a dreary records room packed with industrial gray file cabinets and bookcases. Straight away I went to the clerk’s desk, and asked the fifty-ish Asian man sitting there how I could find records pertaining to the old Shimura address.

“I haven’t heard of any Kalama Street in Leeward Oahu. Even if it exists, finding records isn’t that straightforward.” He studied me with something of a challenge behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “You see, our records are organized by the date of transaction, not address. Do you have that information?”

“I don’t know the exact date, but the house I’m interested in may have been sold or rented in the 1930s,” I said.

“You have nothing more than that?” He sounded incredulous. “I suggest you go ahead and search the ledgers each year, then, looking for that address and the buyer’s name…which is?”

“Shimura.” I decided not to bring up the Pierce name, lest he ask me more about my interest in them.

“Ah, that’s your family name?” He looked at me searchingly, and I nodded. “It’s not a common name on the island. That will make it easier for you.”

A real-estate agent needed assistance, so I moved off and picked out two heavy books, one which included the end of 1929 and part of 1930. It was not going to be remotely easy, especially since I doubted Harue Shimura’s name was going to be found anywhere. The things I do to please my father, I thought as unloaded a heavy book bound in worn green cotton. I scrutinized the old typewritten ledger, trying to see any mention of names like Shimura, Liang and Pierce.

Pierce came up numerous times, and I made a careful record of each transaction’s date, buyer, price, and address. I had reached the early 1940s, and my eyes were very tired, when my cell phone vibrated. As expected, it was my father. He’d passed his appointment with flying colors, and wanted to hear what I’d learned.

“Nothing so far,” I said. “It’s a lot of work, going through these books. Shall I put the search aside and just return to the hospital to take you home?”

“Actually, I hope to join you.”

I acquiesced, and a few minutes later my father walked in the door. Surprisingly, with my father around, the clerk became more interested and even went so far as to carry a few books to the table for him. Respect for the aged seemed to be as alive and well in Hawaii as it was in Japan, I thought, nodding my thanks at the clerk. Although my father was a pretty youthful sixty-three; he had sharp eyes, and seemed to be making faster work of the books than I had.

“Look at this,” my father said to me after forty-five minutes or so.

I was seated on the opposite side of the table, so I came around to look at the page he was studying. He pointed his finger to a line recording a sale of a building on Smith Street owned by Josiah Pierce to Clara Liang in 1945. It was not a fee-simple sale, but a sale with terms of seventy-five years, the kind of deal that Kainoa’s family and neighbors had received.

“So now we know that the Liangs have a continuing business relationship with the Pierces,” my father said.

“I’ve been looking at other Pierce transactions. They sold land to many people.” I pointed my father to the handwritten accounting I’d done of twenty-five transactions, dating from the thirties to the early sixties. I’d come across plenty of names, mostly Anglo-Saxon but also a sprinkling of Chinese, Japanese and Filipino. The amounts paid for properties ranged from figures as low as four thousand dollars to as high as twenty-five thousand, in the early sixties.

“Ah so desu ka,” my father said after a minute. “There are many names, with many different national origins. It’s like a microcosm of the old plantation populations.”

I’d been studying the names my father had pulled out, and the ones I’d come across. Then I saw something that made my skin prickle.

“Otoosan, all the Asian buyers have something in common. Do you see?”

My father looked at the names, and then at me. “I’m afraid I don’t. What is it?”

“Look at the names again-the first names. It looks as if all the Asians to whom Josiah Pierce was selling, during this pre-war period, were women.”