Harry Turtledove - Days of Infamy

The fishing lines followed the bait. To Jiro’s eyes, those big, barbless hooks didn’t look much like minnows. Tuna, fortunately, were less discriminating.

As soon as he and the boys started hauling in the lines, he knew it would be a good day. Fat aku and bigger ahi hung from the hooks like ripe fruit from a branch. Take them off, gut them, store them, throw more minnows in the water to lure more tuna to their doom…

Noon came and passed, and the fishermen hardly even noticed. Most days, Jiro and his sons would break for lunch no matter how things were going. Not today. Today the younger men seemed as much machines as their father. Jiro began to think the weight of fish they were taking might swamp the Oshima Maru. He shrugged broad shoulders. There were worse ways to go.

Kenzo broke the spell about one o’clock, again by pointing north towards Oahu. He said not a word this time, nor did he need to. Those great black greasy clouds spoke for themselves. Even from here, miles away, they boiled high into the sky, swelling and swelling.

Hiroshi whistled softly. “That is something really, really big,” he said. “I wonder if one of the battleships blew up, or if they have a fire in their storage tanks.”

“ I wonder how many people are hurt,” Kenzo said. “Something that big, they’re not going to get off for free.”

Jiro Takahashi didn’t say anything. He just eyed the smoke. When the Oshima Maru couldn’t hold another aku, he started the motor and steered the sampan back toward Kewalo Basin. He was not a man to go guessing wildly when he didn’t know. But he wondered whether any accident, no matter how spectacular, could have caused that kind of conflagration. He also wondered what had, what could have, if an accident hadn’t.

Hiroshi pointed east across the water. “There’s another sampan coming in. Maybe they’ll know what’s going on. Will you steer toward them, Father?”

Most of the time, Jiro would have gruffly shaken his head and kept on toward Honolulu. The ever-swelling black clouds to the north, though, were too big and too threatening to ignore. Without a word, he swung the Oshima Maru to starboard.

The other skipper steered his disreputable, blue-painted fishing boat to port. He waved a dirty white cap in the direction of the Oshima Maru and shouted something across the water. Jiro couldn’t make out the words. He cupped a hand behind his ear. The other skipper shouted again. Jiro snorted in disgust. No wonder he couldn’t understand-the other man was speaking English.

“He says, what’s going on at Pearl Harbor?” Kenzo reported.

Hiroshi didn’t hide his disappointment. “I was hoping he’d be able to tell us,” he said in Japanese, then switched to English to yell back at the other sampan. The men on board pantomimed annoyance. They’d wanted to find out what was going on from the Takahashis.

Kenzo called in English toward the other sampan, too. Then he return to Japanese: “We’ll run into more boats when we get closer to the basin.”

“ Hai. Honto,” Jiro said. And it was true. Somehow, though, his younger son contrived to speak Japanese with English intonations. It wasn’t Kenzo’s accent; the teachers at the Japanese school had made sure he spoke better than Jiro, who was a peasant from a long line of peasants. But anyone with an ear to hear had to notice the influence of the other language on he way he put his sentences together. They weren’t exactly wrong, but they were… different. Jiro didn’t know what to do about it. Hiroshi had the same problem, but not so badly.

Both sampans skimmed north over the waves. Sure enough, other Maru s were also making their way back to Kewalo Basin. (To the Japanese, anything that floated was a Maru.Haoles got a laugh out of their calling sampans ships rather than boats.) On one of them, the crew were all but jumping out of their dungarees.

Hiroshi pointed to the excited men. “They’ll know.”

“Yes.” Jiro swung the rudder. The Oshima Maru wasn’t the only sampan making for that one, either. Now Jiro raised his voice. “What is it?” he yelled, and waved northwest, in the direction of Pearl Harbor.

The four fishermen on the sampan had a radio. News tumbled out of them, some of it in English, some in Japanese. Jiro didn’t get all of it. But he understood enough: the Empire of Japan had attacked the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, and had struck a devastating blow.

His first reaction was pride. “This is how Admiral Togo hit the Russians in Manchuria when I was young,” he said.

Hiroshi and Kenzo didn’t say anything for a little while. Then, gently, his older son answered, “But, Father, you weren’t living in Manchuria when they attacked it.”

“A surprise attack is a dirty way to start a war,” Kenzo added, not gently at all. “That’s how Hitler does things.”

Jiro blinked. In the Nippon jiji and Jitsugyo no Hawaii and other local Japanese-language papers-the ones he paid attention to-Hitler got pretty good press. The writers worried more about Communists. Wasn’t it the same in English?

He pointed out what was obvious to him: “This isn’t Hitler. This is Japan.”

His sons looked at each other. Neither of them seemed to want to say anything. At last, Hiroshi did: “Father, we’re Americans.” Kenzo nodded.

I’m not! The words leaped into Jiro’s mouth. They were true. Both his sons had to know it. Even so, he didn’t say them. If he had, something would have broken forever between the two boys and him. Sensing that, he kept quiet. Reiko would have understood, but she was of his generation, not his sons’.

Hiroshi went on speaking carefully: “This attack is going to be bad for all the Japanese in Hawaii-all the Japanese on the mainland, too. The fat cats will think we wanted it. They’ll think we were all for it. And they’ll make us pay.” His brother nodded again, nothing but gloom on his face.

“When have things been good for the Japanese in Hawaii?” Jiro asked. “When have the big shots not made us pay? And things would have been even worse if the Japanese government hadn’t complained and made the planters live up to their contracts. All that was before you were born, so you don’t remember. But it happened.”

“Don’t you see, Father? That doesn’t matter now,” Kenzo said. “We’re at war with Japan.”

We’re at war with Japan. The words stabbed Jiro like a dagger. They put him and his sons on opposite sides of a chasm. What he hadn’t said, Kenzo had. He wasn’t at war with Japan. Japan was his country. It always had been, even if he hadn’t lived there since he was young. The haoles who ran Hawaii had made it very plain that they didn’t believe he was an American, or that he could turn into one.

His sons might think themselves Americans. The haoles who ran the islands didn’t think they were. There weren’t enough jobs for Japanese who had the education to fill them. They couldn’t move up in society. They couldn’t join the Army, either. No Japanese were allowed in the Twenty-fourth or Twenty-fifth Divisions, though every other group in Hawaii had members there. Kenzo and Hiroshi had to know that. But they didn’t want to think about it.

And Jiro didn’t want to think about what the attack on Pearl Harbor might mean, or about what might happen in its aftermath. Because he didn’t, he steered the Oshima Maru back toward Kewalo Basin without another word. The time for a real quarrel might come later. He didn’t want it now, out on the open sea.

The other sampans hurried north along with his. The one with the radio was a bigger boat, with a bigger engine. Minute by minute, it pulled away. That proved its undoing. A buzz in the sky swelled into a roar. A dark green fighter with unmistakable U.S. stars on wings and fuselage swooped down on the lead sampan. Machine guns roared. The fighter streaked away.