Authors reinvent Hawai'i history
By John Griffin
The new book "Red Sun," which centers on a Japanese occupation of Hawai'i after the 1941 attack on Pearl Harbor, is best seen as an "alternative history." It should stimulate other "what ifs," especially about Hawaiian sovereignty.
As the authors, Honolulu Community College professors Richard Ziegler and Patrick Patterson, note, alternative history, sometimes called counter-history, has become popular for occasional forays by some renowned historians.
It's not an intellectual game. A legitimate goal is to stimulate thought in young and old readers on the happenings — sometimes just small accidents — which make history.
In this case, we see what might have been had Japan prevailed in the early 1942 Battle of Midway and carried out invasion ideas it had drawn up for Hawai'i (actual plans previously detailed in a good book by UH-Manoa historian John Stephan).
In "Red Sun" (from Honolulu's Bess Press), the authors take the genre a step further and create fictional characters to dramatize history's impact on ordinary people.
In the end, the book works better as fictional history, as it's labeled, than as the traditional historical fiction which some readers might expect.
It's sobering, of course, to think what might have happened in a Hawai'i torn by a Japanese invasion and controversial occupation and then by an American liberation that could have rivaled the carnage on Okinawa and the destruction of Manila.
Still, I was most impressed by the last part of the book, about what happens after U.S. forces retake Hawai'i.
For the returning Americans reverse two popular steps that had been taken by the occupying Japanese. The Japanese had restored the Hawaiian monarchy and redistributed vast tracts of plantation and other land owned by the dominating Big Five firms that ran pre-war Hawai'i.
The American counteractions spark a multiracial civil disobedience campaign led by a Hawaiian woman. That, in turn, brings the king back to power and leads to restored Hawai'i independence in 1954.
Later, in 1968, we see a Hawaiian kingdom dominated by a Marxist union and nicknamed "The Cuba of the Pacific," complete with political prisoners kept at a Sand Island internment camp.
U.S. Navy photo
"Poor but proud" is a slogan of this low-rise, green-oriented socialist state that has kept out foreign capital, big tourism and military bases. It remains part of the unaligned nations, despite machinations of the CIA.
Hawai'i's history might have been significantly different had the Islands fallen under Japanese rule after the attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941. A new book explores the possible "what ifs."
This "history" may seem provocative, not to mention unlikely, considering the big-power pressures of the Cold War and pro-American inclinations of Hawai'i's people in the mid-1900s.
But it is not completely off the wall to think how a few different events and influences, large and small, could have given Hawai'i a different history — and how others might do so in the future.
So reading "Red Sun" I got to thinking how in the current uncertainty and seeming lull in the Hawaiian sovereignty movement we might benefit by an alternative history of the 1893 overthrow of the monarchy.
No doubt many people have speculated, in poetic laments or otherwise, on some of the "what ifs" in Hawaiian history.
For example, what if the haole-American overthrow had failed but the monarchy later fell to a Hawaiian coup? What if Hawai'i was "colonized by invitation," as Fiji was when its native leader brought in the British, who kept Fijian chiefs and land tenure? What if Hawai'i and its monarchy were kept under a colonial protectorate, as happened with the British in Tonga?
What if the French, Germans or Japanese somehow took over here, or even divided up these islands, as happened in some other places during the imperialist age in the late 1800s and beyond?
Just as there were many possible scenarios in Hawai'i's past, so there can be others about the future in this age when the world is struggling to find a balance between galloping globalism and the often insular yet still desired traditions of cultural localism.
In Hawai'i, many supported statehood and most of us are glad to be Americans. Yet in the past I have also suggested that a day may come later this century when the United States (and its Pacific Islands) may tend toward a confederation of cooperating but more autonomous states or regions. Even in that modest context, a more "independent" Hawai'i may be possible.
In any event, the challenge is to fit Hawai'i — and some form of Hawaiian sovereignty — into a changing nation and world.
In that context, maybe we're too fond of saying that Hawai'i has always been a creature of outside forces, that we can't control our destiny, a self-fulfilling statement. That's what the colonials said about Singapore when I worked there in the 1950s. Now it's an Asia economic leader (although not in political freedoms for its people, alas).
In "Red Sun," the authors discuss the "hinges of history," sometimes just small things that influence momentous events. The Pearl Harbor attack (which could have proved worse except for some weather and other factors) and World War II were an obvious major hinge.
But in other so-far less violent ways — the technology revolution, events in China, etc. — we in Hawai'i and elsewhere in the Pacific may be living on another hinge of history where smaller things now contribute to greater events later.
I know you can't predict the future or very often determine it. But the "Red Sun" authors are right in saying we need to be more aware of cause-and-effect relationships in the past and now.
For, as they say at the end: "History can play strange tricks. ... There is no inevitability."
That's part of Hawai'i's hope.
John Griffin, former editorial page editor of The Advertiser, writes regularly for these pages.
