Novel explores what could have happened after Pearl Harbor

By Mike Leidemann
Advertiser Staff Writer

Richard Ziegler and Patrick Patterson, both of whom teach history at Honolulu Community College, wrote "Red Sun." Deborah Booker • The Honolulu Advertiser

Now, Richard Ziegler and Patrick Patterson are trying something new. Their book, "Red Sun," tells an imaginary story of a Hawai'i occupied by Japan during World War II. They call it "fictional history."

"What we have written, we believe, is not just plausible but probable," the authors say in their introduction.

Ziegler and Patterson, both of whom teach history at Honolulu Community College, are riding the wave of a new literary form that goes by many names: alternate history, what ifs, virtual history, counterfactuals, negative histories, uchronias.

"Whatever you call it, it's a new way to get into the vagueries of history, to show how things can change on a dime," said Ziegler, a former Peace Corps volunteer in Micronesia and HCC professor since 1975.

Telling their story from multiple perspectives, Ziegler and Patterson paint a picture of Hawai'i under the Rising Sun: Diamond Head crater a prison camp, the white elite of O'ahu in internment camps, the Hawaiian monarchy restored, local "comfort women" for Japanese soldiers, different generations of Japanese Americans struggling with their loyalties in brand-new ways.

Sound incredible?

"Not at all," Ziegler said. "These are all things that could have happened if just a few things had gone differently." In fact, many of them did happen in other areas where Japanese forces successfully occupied hostile territory: Okinawa, Manchuria and some Pacific islands.

You don't have to know the real history to enjoy the book, but it helps. The authors changed just two key events — sinking an aircraft carrier in the Pearl Harbor entrance and blowing up large fuel tanks nearby. "Everything else flows from there," Ziegler said.

In reality, the Japanese bombs missed the fuel tanks and the aircraft carrier, which was supposed to be arriving in the harbor on the morning of Dec. 7, 1941, was delayed by a storm in the Pacific.

"If the fuel tanks had been destroyed and the harbor blocked, the whole war would have been lengthened by at least two years," Ziegler said.

And that's just what happens in "Red Sun."

Originally, Ziegler and Patterson set out to write a Tom Clancy-like story that focused on battles and military strategy. They soon realized, though, that they needed personal story lines and fictional vignettes to slow the pace down. The two split the writing of different voices in the book — historical and fictional — then got together to "make sure the edges touched and there were no discrepancies."

Through alternating vignettes of small historical events, sweeping historical narratives and personal, fictional voices, the two paint a picture of occupied Hawai'i.

In the end, though, the Americans win out, Japan is defeated, and Hawai'i liberated. "We're still historians," Ziegler said. "There's a line that we couldn't cross. We couldn't venture beyond the possible. In reality, Japan couldn't have won the war. That would be beyond the historical pale."