 So, this is Carl Lackerman with the host of History is Here to Help with Scott Kikawa, who has written such a wonderful, well, he's written several books, but I just finished Kona Wins. And this is the topic of today, and we're going to focus primarily, but not exclusively, on the time period that Mr. Kikawa has chosen to write about because it is a wonderful time period, and he does a really splendid job of the history. So let me begin by just asking you to describe yourself, because you have sort of a law enforcement background, which is not the usual writer background, especially for Bamboo Ridge, I may add. Yep, that's right. I work for the federal government. I work for the Department of Homeland Security for U.S. Customs and Border Protection. I supervise an intelligence unit out at the airport, and I am a task force officer for another three-letter acronym federal agency, who I'm not going to name because I didn't run this by their press office, but they're located out in Kapolei. That's pretty clear. And you know, the big question is, you know, what cuts you into writing? You know, why did you become an author and something that you're really quite good at and, you know, an author of a particular time period? Well, thanks for saying that, Carl. This was really the result of a drunken dare. This was about 12 years ago. I was sitting in a bar in Kaimaki with a good friend of mine, Dr. Jason Chung, who is a professor at UH West O'Wabu. He teaches history and Asian pop culture. I've known Jason for years now, I think since we're both in middle school. And I was complaining to him over drinks about the lack of really good mystery fiction set in Hawaii, because we've got a ton of mysteries that are set here. But they're mostly written by people outside of Hawaii. And it really only uses this place. That I should add the people as a backdrop or standard cookie cutter plots that you could put another backdrop behind Paris, New York, wherever, and use the same story. And all you will be doing is changing the set dressing. I complained that there wasn't a book that was set in a period that I want. I know that Vicky Neubull has written some fantastic, what we call traditional mysteries, more of the vein of Agatha Christie. And she sets hers, I believe, in the 1930s, O'Wabu of the 1930s, up to the great books, and they follow that traditional pattern. What I wanted was to see something in noir, something that was hardboiled, something along the lines of the work that I really love, which is Raymond Chandler, which is Dashel Hammett. And we didn't have anything like that here. So Jason said, rather than complain about the lack of good crime fiction here, why don't you write something? And this was about 12 years ago. I hadn't written anything before them, besides reports for work and whatever I wrote in college for a grade. So I tried. And here we are. So that's kind of fast-forwarding it quite a bit, but that's how I got into it. Well, you know, on that theme, which is a great theme about setting it in Hawaii in post-World War II but before statehood, I want to go right into, I was going to ask you some other questions first, but because you mentioned this, your book mentions everything from lay to luau. When you mention regions like Papakalea, you discuss institutions like Queens Hospital. Your references to food runs the gamut of Hawaii food, and particularly with certain police officers eating things that aren't donuts in the station. And you know, my question to you is, why did you pick this? And how do you expect your local reader in Hawaii, and luckily I married my wife so I understand what Nishi Mei is. But how is someone, you know, if I were to give this book, which I promised you to my sister, how is she going to know in Berkeley what Nishi Mei is? Or do you just assume that people will look this up, or are you looking for a primary Hawaii audience? Well, you know, it was never my intention to write exclusively for a Hawaii audience. But at the same time, it was not my intention to make it more accessible for readers outside of Hawaii. That was a conscious choice, by the way. That was both me and my publisher, Bamboo Ridge Press, who decided, you know, we're not going to italicize or actually we do italicize some terms, but they are the medieval Italian terms, the Latin terms, the French terms that are in the book. We do not italicize Hawaiian words. We don't italicize Japanese words or Cantonese words or Ilocano words, because those aren't foreign languages here. The other languages are, and this was a conscious decision on our part. You'll find an editor's note at the very beginning near the prologue of the book, where it explains that we also do not use diacritical marks for the Hawaiian terms in the book, because this is not what they did in newspapers of the era. So we wanted to stay true to the era, and I did not want to make it anachronistically correct by adding diacritical marks. So that was a conscious choice. I think there's a movement afoot, too, with a lot of writers. Juno Diaz is one of the ones I think of with his Brief Life of Oscar WoW, where he uses a lot of Dominican Spanish, and he doesn't bother to explain the terms. He doesn't bother to italicize them or add a glossary. And he expects readers to find out by context. And that's kind of like the decision that I made. There's a wonderful prime fiction writer, Henry Chang, who wrote a series of detective novels set in New York City, I think in the 1980s or something like that, with Chinese American protagonists. He uses a lot of Cantonese terms, but he italicizes them. And I found it a little annoying that he puts a comma after each of those terms, and then puts the kind of the English or common definition right after them, while they'll come out white devil period, where that's where the benefit of the reader, I guess, was outside of that culture or outside of that community. And while it was probably a necessary thing, or maybe his editor insisted on it at the time, I find it distracting. So by removing all that, I saw it not to exclude folks that are outside of Hawaii or folks that might not have a context, but to give a more authentic experience to the reader. I think that's a narrative that the protagonist would naturally have, or present to somebody without explanation, without footnotes, and without definition somewhere. So, you know, I think, you know, that your novels, and I'm only read one, and I just so enjoyed it, and we'll come back to that in just a minute. You know, I read the complete, I don't think he's written anything that I haven't read, but Tony Hillerman, who, you know, focuses on New Mexico and the Navajo Nation. And I think I learned a lot about the Navajo Nation. I'm from Tony Hillerman, and I happened to be in Phoenix recently, and I was there was a guy who actually lived on the Navajo Nation, it was Navajo himself. And I said, you know, did he get it right as a holy guy, as a white guy? And the guy said, yeah, he did. And you learned a lot by reading his books. And I think that, you know, for me, a lot of these things are having lived in Hawaii and married into a local family, or quite interesting. But you know, I know them, and because of that, you know, there's a lot of adherence. So, which brings up the other point, your historical knowledge has to be great because you mentioned things like the HUAC committee, you mentioned things like Roosevelt being, you know, an English standard school, you talk about the rivalry between, you know, Punahou, Roosevelt McKinley, you know, your chief protagonist is a, you know, a former McKinley football player. And so how did you, and you even mentioned things that are fairly obscure, at least in the contemporary period, not for me, because I, you know, I'm a student of that history, but, you know, I mentioned people like Jack Hall, you know, the communist leader who was instrumental in leading the long-sherman and stevedores, as you say. And I, well, you know, I expected, but I did not see Harry Bridges come up, you know, but I kind of expected him, because you mentioned Jack Hall. But anyway, how do you, how do you prepare for this kind of, you know, really in-depth, thorough, and meticulous mentioning of historical names? I mean, do you read all about the era, or is that just something that you grew up with, or what? Oh yeah, well, you know, ironically, I didn't really grow up with it, though my parents lived through the era as younger people, I think as teenagers. But they have a teenager's or child's perspective of the period, which is they were untouched in a way by current events, the way children or young people often are. So what they remember, and this was valuable, too, in my anecdotal research by interviewing my mother and people in her generation, to get a feel for the popular culture back then. And that was extremely important, but a lot of my research was reading a lot, and I had a lot of help, maybe not for Kono Wins, but for Red Dirt, the second book, which really looks at the HUAC's investigations here. And this was around the time of John Wayne's big Jim McClain movie, which was set here, where he plays a HUAC investigator. You know, UH West O'ahu, they're my friend Jason, he introduced me to Dr. Bill Pughett, who runs the CLEAR at UH West O'ahu, the Center for Labor Education and Research. And Bill was really generous in opening up CLEAR's collection to me. I went in there at the UH West O'ahu library, they have a closed-off room. And I got to handle primary source materials. So when I say primary source material, I'm talking about things like John Reineke's legal pad with his handwritten notes on them, ILWU minutes from their meetings, you know, Jack Hall was present at a lot of those meetings. And really, that's history in documentary form. I feel bad, I didn't take white gloves in there, I should have handled them with a lot more care. But those things were made available to me. And I've been really fortunate that organizations like the CLEAR, like the Japanese Cultural Center for Hawaii, like the Nisei Veterans Memorial Center in Waibuku, or I'm sorry, Kawaluwe, Kawaluwe and Waibuku, they're kind of on the cusp of the two places, have opened up their doors to me and have allowed me to look at their archives to peruse their oral history, the transcripts and a lot of their material. And it's hours of research, but you know, I love it. I was history major in college. And I know that many writers detest that part of writing where they have to do research. In fact, I know that many higher researchers, the more successful ones to do it for them, I would never do such a thing because it gives me pleasure to dive right into those sources. So that's what it was. And I'm amassed my own personal library of Hawaii Territorial History because I reference those works all the time. Well, you know, your protagonist is, you know, the nickname is Sheik. And he goes into some reference rooms. And, you know, I was wondering if that was based on your own research because, you know, he's going in there and he's sweating and dry. And it's, you know, it's, you know, he goes in towards the end of your novel. He go in mystery. He goes into a one that's, you know, air conditioned, you know, or at least has some things. And I was wondering, is that based on your own, you know, archival work at things like this? Because it kind of reminds me of our archival work back in the day. Oh, absolutely. And yeah, this is personal experience and really, you know, the irony struck me that the experience of moving from climate control to not climate control and back in has not changed all that much over the years. You know, back then there was air conditioning by 1950s, maybe about the 30s, kind of regularly here. But research is made up of those going into those spaces where documents did not necessarily receive the archival treatment. They were in warehouse-like spaces, which are hideously hot. And anybody who professionally has to look at those materials has to experience that real, that really uncomfortable climate situation. So yeah, and I've done this in my own job. So it's personal experience, but it's also doing the research and finding out that things were not much different back then. And that it's one of those things where if you're an investigator, you're going to spend most of your time doing that kind of research. You know, very, very little of an investigator's job is actually interviewing live people. A lot of it is what they used to call footwork. Today we do it from a computer at your desk, mostly. But back then you had to like drive to the Hall of Records and bribe, flirt, threaten people in order to get access to those materials and then spend hours with them. And that's kind of what I wanted to convey. And you do so really well. And I wanted to, and you know, do you also, out of your protagonist's mouth, that you say exactly that, that most of detective work is sort of like the kind of people would think of as boring and you don't get the people who are crying at the very end. They're generally just kind of sullen and looking down. And I thought those were great, great, great references. In addition, you make your main character a Columbia scholar. I mean, you know, he, this is a guy who's well educated. And I thought it was also interesting that you use the divine comedy. And bless you for that, as someone who was trained classically in history, you know, I thought to myself, as soon as I saw that, I went, oh, I'm going to like this novel. But you interject, you know, the divine comedy into different parts of your book. And this is a book, you know, set in Hawaii. And I just thought, how did he come up with this? So I'm going to ask you that. How did you come up with that? Well, this is a couple of things. This is both research and personal experience. I myself went to school in New York City. I didn't, I didn't go to school, Columbia. I got waitlisted there or something, but NYU picked me up. So I went to school several blocks downtown from Columbia. And I was a medieval Renaissance studies major at NYU, which happened kind of by accident, because my major was actually Islamic studies. And I figured out that a lot of the odd courses I had taken, I could cobble together a major. It was kind of multidisciplinary where it was literature and it was history. And it was art history and architecture history, all put together. Medieval mysticism is the class that we covered the Divina Comedia in. And one thing that I that struck me about, about the divine comedy is that it is not a work of devotion. Like most people think it is. If they're not familiar with it, it's satire. Dante wrote the divine comedy as a satire. And he lampoons a lot of the political figures of the day actually roast them outright in all throughout the inferno and purgatorio. Like they're all like on display with his commentary. And I thought, what could be more noir than putting references into a book on crime fiction, which references a satire from a different age? But it's also a commentary that law enforcement and the laws back then were really kind of medieval in a sense where we were authorities kind of picked into and chose what they would enforce and how they would enforce it. We're in an age before those key Supreme Court cases like Miranda versus Arizona. That's where the right reading the rights comes from. Or Gideon versus Wainwright. Those things happened in the 60s where it became very progressive and a changed law enforcement. But before that, it was it was pretty much open season. And that that's one reason I brought in the other reason I chose to make this particular character, a Columbia graduate and and and a medieval and Renaissance literature scholar is because it's somewhat historically accurate that a lot of these Nisei soldiers took advantage of the G.I. Bill and some went to some very prominent universities that it was not uncommon to see Ivy League graduates come out of this G.I. Bill program. And this was one of those things. He's an individual, this protagonist. So he did not study what his parents would have asked him to study. Business administration, for instance, or or something that would have gotten him a better paying job. He chose to go against the grain study literature, came home and found out that one of the only jobs to get if you didn't want to teach high school was to be a cop. And and this is kind of real life. Professional of choices that are that are made not just by people that era, but by people today. And and I thought this was this was unusual, but it was also historically accurate. So that was another reason for choosing. Well, you know, I mean, this is an interesting point being going back to history, because if you think about, you know, how many people of different ethnicities went into the Department of Education, it was the only job open for them. Like in the period that you were talking about, the medievalist for, you know, Jews couldn't go into a lot of professions, couldn't own land. So what were they supposed to do when they went into finance? Not that all Jews are involved in finance, but it was an open opportunity for them. That's the only thing they could do to make a living. So that's a that's a critically important point. And I did not know that many of the people who, you know, who were like in the 442nd or the 100th battalion came back and, you know, some of them went to the Ivy League. I do know one uncle-in-law who graduated from Berkeley, which is I've always considered sort of a public Ivy League. But there we go. Scott, if you don't mind, there's what I'd like to do now is I'm gonna have to turn on a light here so that I can read is that I want to read a description you gave because what's so wonderful about your book is your writing. And I want to give our viewers a sample of that. So, you know, in chapter four, you describe the Honolulu police station. And this is where your history matters comes into play. So this is the paragraph. The Honolulu police department station in downtown Honolulu, the Walter Murray Gibson building stood at the corner of Merchant and Bethel streets and was done in a Spanish art deco style so prevalent in Honolulu buildings erected in the 1920s and early 1930s. The corner entrance with this huge doors was framed in redstone quarried in Waianae and looked like the entry to some conquistadors manner. The stairs in the foyer were inlaid with hand glazed ceramic tile with the receiving desk covered with it. The roof was exposed mahogany timber from the Philippines painted with geometric designs and there was French marble everywhere in the interior. You know, you don't get many descriptions like that of in any novel these days. And so I wanted to ask you about this, but before you do, there's another one letter. By the way, I read both of these things to my wife. If you're a local guy or you spend many years in Hawaii, which is the case of this historian, you're talking about another quote as you're talking about a waitress and you're talking about a waitress in a way that goes like this. And it's a one sentence. It's one sentence. And you're describing her and you say she was acute in a Demure Japanese Makiki church bake sale way and it's hyphenated. So there are four words involved in that description. You know, how do you do this as a writer? I mean, it's just masterful. So I'm gonna stop there and let you talk. Well, thank you. Thank you so much, Carl. You know, they're just images that come in my head and a lot of my research is visual. I love looking at photographs, period photographs. I love looking at people's own personal photographs that they'll share them with me from the era and these images just, they come up and it would be a shame not to use them descriptively. The Walter Murray Gibson building is now a city and county. I think it's a part of the tax office these days, but it was the police station at one point. I did enter the building and tour the building on my own. The folks that worked there were extremely generous and helpful and let me wander about a bit and I did some research on where the materials came from. But it's a wonderful building and it's a shame that they had to move from that building. They moved into the Sears building on Baratanya in which they stayed there for a few decades until they moved into the present station. But a lot of these images come to me because I got to look at photographs because I got to tour these places. You know, the Alexander Baldwin building was also one of those places where they were also extremely generous and let me like wander around and take photographs. But that's part of the fun of the research and so our field trips. In your research, I was wondering how heavily do you rely on newspapers as a source? Oh, very much so. The Honolulu Record, which was the kind of the counterbalance weekly to the star bulletin and advertiser of the time. It was a weekly founded by Koji Ariyoshi. It's really prominent in Redbird, my second book. But man, this is where Ellen Park, the reporter works. The Clear, Bill Pughet has told me Clear has all of them digitized, like all the issues digitized. So I got to get in there and look at actual issues of the Honolulu Record from the period. And as you can imagine, the most fascinating things about them are not the headlines. They're the ads and they're the little side pieces. The sports page, you know, because these things give you a sense of the era and what folks consider to be important. In looking at the newspapers and things like that, were there things that you came across as an author that just really shocked you, that surprised you? For example, most people know about the Massey case, but things like that that just came up, you said, wow, I didn't know about this. Or I came across a book about an African-American cowboy who grew up in Hawaii. And that surprised me. I just didn't know that history. Well, many things. One thing that I saw on the Honolulu Record especially, where there were a lot of advertisements in the Honolulu Record, a paper for ostensibly a waku, but many, many ads for Japanese-owned florists in Hilo, which really, you know, it gave us a sense that at one point, all the other, the neighbor islands were kind of on equal economic and political footing with a waku. I think that changed forever with the World War II and the war effort, making a waku kind of center of everything. But it gave me a real sense that before a waku became economically dominant, there was a sense that the other islands also were part of that, the major power structure and schematic. So that was something I was very surprised in. You know what? When I've come across local authors, they refer, of course, in the contemporary period, they want me to say, use the word continent, which I've done. And then they don't want me to say outer islands, but neighbor islands. And then I thought that was really great. So tell us about your next novel a little bit as a way to, if you're so willing to sequence into our next talk, because, and I want to recommend to all our readers, Kona Wins, if I can get it straight in, there we go. This is, and what's nice is also the cover is so apt for what the book is talking about. It is, that's always true. You have your lead detective and his girlfriend with the front bay on the front part and they kind of look like what you imagined. So that's really good. But tell us a little bit about Red Derpy before we go today. Okay, Red Derpy picks up maybe a couple of weeks after the events of Kona Wins, same detective protagonist and a lot of the, there are a lot of characters from Kona Wins and Red Derpy, but it's against the backdrop of the House Un-American Activities Committees, Hawaii investigations and particularly the Smith Act trials of the Hawaii Seven. So this was Jack Hall, a Koji Ariyoshi and company and brings to the forefront the Communist Party's activities here and murder together. So that's kind of what it's about. Well, thank you. I'm gonna leave you, we've run out of time here, but I'm gonna leave you with a final word about anything you'd like to say about your writing, about the books that you've written or any kind of advice you'd like to give perhaps to local writers who are thinking about doing it but maybe don't think that they've got the capacity because of their work schedule, et cetera. It's important for all to know that you work 24 hours. I mean, 24 hours, you work a full week. Yeah, a full weekend, you're in law enforcement. So that's a hefty lift. Well, I'd like to tell any writer here that if you can tell the story that only you can tell, do it. I would buy the book about a Micronesian detective or in Ilocano detective out of Waipahu in a heartbeat because that book hasn't been written yet. To my shock, my books are picked up because nobody had written them yet. I thought that somebody had done this ages ago, but the territorial period, especially that post-war period and before state, that 15-year period we're talking about, roughly speaking, was, it's part of a neglected history here in Hawaii. After the annexation, the overthrow of the monarchy, the annexation and today, all those years really get glossed over. There's a mention of Pearl Harbor being attacked, usually because in popular culture, that's the imagination of America, but a lot of this stuff gets swept under the rug and the people who live through this don't generally talk about it. This is why I thought this was rich materials and it's really noir too because it has all the trappings of noir. It's an engineer of respectability over a lot of bad behavior and that's the type of stuff that really fascinates me, but anybody who wants to exploit something in writing, in literature that hasn't been touched yet and there's a lot here, believe me, please, please do it because we need those books. And thank you, Scott Cowell. Once again, his book is Kona Wynne, so first he has described Red Dirt also, but I'm gonna wait till I finish Red Dirt before I interview again and I hope you will have time to do this, Scott. Absolutely, absolutely, it's a lot of fun. Thank you, Carl. Thank you very much. Thank you so much for watching Think Tech Hawaii. If you like what we do, please click the like and subscribe button on YouTube. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn. Check out our website, thinktechawaii.com. Mahalo.