 This is Think Tech Hawaii. Community matters here. Aloha. My name is Roger Jelenek. I'm the host of Book World on Think Tech Hawaii. And my guest today is Mike Malhan, the author of the novel Picture Bride, which tells the epic story of the Japanese in Hawaii. Welcome to the program, Mike. Thank you, Roger. Glad to be here. Let's start by telling us where you come from. You live in two states at least. Right. I live in Georgia part of the year. I used to live in Florida. And I'm the little boy that never grew up. I've always was a Braves fan since 1953 in Milwaukee, and they moved to Atlanta. And I always said, some day I'm going to go to all the games. And my wife says, you know, Mike, you're running out of some days. So we moved in our apartment right next to the baseball stadium. So I float between there and Hawaii. So before you moved to Florida and Atlanta, you had a really interesting career. Yes. Start with where you were brought up and then when you went to the preschool. Yeah. Well, thank you. I was born in Wisconsin where you played baseball during this summer and hockey in the winter. And when I was a kid, my family moved to Florida. So I became a Gator, if you will, University of Florida, Gainesville. And it was during the Kennedy years. And I heard the call when he talked about the Peace Corps. And I said, that's for me. And so I spent three years in Nigeria. You remember reading a couple years ago, were those girls for kidnapped? Yes. You know, that's where I was. Wow. And in those days you couldn't imagine something back that could happen. I was one of four white people that lived in a town of 150,000 black people. Never locked my door. My motorcycle was never compromised. I could walk up and have a beer at the local pub. It was a great place to be for a young person, little idealistic at the time. What were you doing there? I was very lucky. I had a real job. I was at the Ford Foundation and the Ministry of Trading Industry, the Nigerian Trading Industry. And they had a small loan scheme. And for, you know, I think it was like $15,000 or less. And I would go out and visit small businesses, look at their loan applications, and, you know, give my appraisal and so forth. So I was a, you know, a small loan officer. So were you a business major in college? I was. I was one of the few Peace Corps volunteers that actually had a job associated with my career. And so I was very lucky. And I had a job with structure. So I was very lucky to do that. And were you able to do that with English? Or did you have to learn local language? Well, I spoke Hausa, but only enough to order beer, water, and maybe find out where I was. So I had, seriously, I'd have an interpreter. You know, English was the official language of Nigeria because of the British heritage. Then they had the tribal languages. So I learned to speak one of the tribal languages for small talk. Well, when I was in college, my college master had been an official in Nigeria. Oh, okay. And he said that the local name for the jail was the King George Fifth Hotel. Yes, I could see that. Anyway, so you spent three years there? Three years there. And that got me a taste for overseas travel. And I didn't realize it at the time. I remember talking to Brits there that had been overseas for years. And I said, well, how can you live like that overseas? Never go back. And 40 years of my life, I've spent outside the continental United States. And when I got back from the Peace Corps, I lived in the Caribbean. Got British, you know, I used to travel to Jamaica and all those places. What were you doing in the Caribbean? I had an overseas manufacturers representative. I represented different companies as their manufacturers rep. And I would travel all the different islands. And did that for seven years. Wow. And a good friend of mine was knocking him out the whole morning, as you might say, in Japan. And he was doing so well. I said, you know, if you've got a place for somebody to carry your bag, let me know. And so in 1978, I moved to Japan, not realizing how that was going to affect my life. And how did it affect your life? Well, I lived in Asia for over 20 years. I mean, really live. I still go back and forth, you know, a month or two of the year. But I worked with a company that had a license of the Walt Disney Company called Disney's World of English. And I had been in direct sales most of my life in Cyclopedia Britannica. You remember them? Yeah. And so we used the same type of technique where people get leads. Salesmen are in commission. And at one time, when I was CEO, we were the second largest licensee in Asia except for Tokyo Disneyland. So we had a pretty big operation. 2000 salespeople, Japan, Taiwan, Hong Kong. So it was a very exciting time of my life. But in the back of my mind, I always thought I was a writer. But you know, you work with a lot of writers. How many millionaire writers do you know? You know, Tom Clancy, of course, he's dead. But you know, you can name a few of them. So I realized that going into writing full-time was not a financially secure. And so I did all right in business. I was pretty good at it. But in my heart, I was a writer. Well, I first met you at the Maori Writers Conference. That's right. And you actually made yourself learn to write. I did. And you had a... I don't think I've met anyone who was so assiduous about doing just that and so methodical about it. Yes. You remember, I think I attended six or seven years consecutively at the Maori Writers Conference. I met you the second year. The first year, I tried to learn, you know, what's this stuff about writing a book? And I had a book in sales management because that's what I did. And that was relatively easier than a novel. Because in a way, I've been writing that book all my life. But still, it was a different set of skills. And you know, you got me a deal with McGraw-Hill. You and I are still getting royalties. Can't believe it. Fifteen years later. Not enough to buy a new house, but still. How do you jump from that into fiction? Well, like I said, in my heart, I've always was a... You know, like most writers, you're readers first, right? And I wanted to write a story. And I wrote a couple, what do you call it? A starter novel, as your wife once very kindly says, well, Mike, now you've got your starter novel out of the way. But I went to a movie presentation, a documentary presentation, called The First Battle. It was about why the Japanese in Hawaii didn't go into the camps. I said, wow, that's interesting. There's a novel in there. And then I learned more about the 442, the legendary guys that fought. I said, boy, that's a story. There are lots of non-fiction books, but there's no novel. Well, why not me? And by this time you settled in Hawaii part-time? Yeah, I was living in Hawaii for four or six months of the year. And of course, I got caught up into the Hawaiian 442. I had friends. My wife is Japanese, so that kind of got me into the Japanese. And if you're here, you get Japanese friends. And you met people who actually some of them were in the 442. Some of them have passed away. One of them became my surrogate father, so close to me. And so it changed my, enriched my life. So I started writing a book about the 442. And then I was thinking, these guys, they didn't just drop out of the sky December 7th, 1941. They must have had a back story. So I thought I'll write a little something about their parents. So I said, wow, this is really interesting. And it got so big, I realized I had two books. So Picture Bride starts in a little island off of Kyushu called Amakusa. And ends in Hawaii the night before Pearl Harbor. None of the people in the book know there's going to be Pearl Harbor, of course all the readers do. And Book Two, which I'm working on now, call it the War Book, or A Question of Loyalty, starts with Pearl Harbor and ends up with the Italian campaign. Oh, wow. Well, on the first book, how far back do you go? I go back to 1905. And the first chapter actually gives a... Why 1905? Because I wanted the girl to be young enough to be a picture bride. And there were 21,000 picture brides. It stopped in 1924. Maybe you should explain what a picture bride is. Oh, yeah, that's a good thing. What is a picture bride? A picture bride, you know, in the beginning, the Japanese men came over here for work five years, get a lot of money, go back home. It didn't work out. And then on the weekends, they would gamble, drink, mendu. And you had a Catholic, I mean, a Christian priest and a Buddhist priest came over here about the same time. And they looked at these guys running around and said, they need to be civilized. We need to get them some wives. And so they would go back and go to the homes, these hometowns, and with an Omiai, which is like a person who arranges marriage, or people in the family in the church. And the girls would send in a picture. And the guy would write back with his picture. And from that correspondence, maybe just one or two letters, they would exchange pictures and they would get married. The girl would go through a marriage ceremony in Japan and register the marriage to be technically legal. Somebody would stand in for the husband. She'd get over here off the boat, walk around the immigration with a picture. And then they would get a Christian marriage locally. The funny part is, once in a while, the girl wasn't the best-looking one if you catch the drift, and she gave a picture of her good-looking girlfriend. Of course, some of the guys did that too. And every once in a while, after everybody is matched up, there'd be one or two people wandering around, each of them, with a bogus picture. And you know, if the girl saw this guy, you know, she's 19 years old, he's 44, his teeth are falling out, skinny, doesn't look like the successful person, she's got 90 seconds to make up her mind to get back on the ship or marry the guy. Most of them married. Did some literally went back? Few went back. Most did not. Most did. Because they really couldn't go back. The only ones that had to go back is if you had pink eye or some type of a thing, they had to go through a health inspection. In the beginning, it was very odious. The girls were forced to strip very, very odious. Eventually, they eliminated that part of it. So back to your story. So we have a picture bride who comes to Hawaii. Yes. And what happened to her then. Well, let me go back. The book is really a hint to the eyes of this 12-year-old to 17-year-old what's happening in Japan. And we can see this is going to have a very bad ending. We see the militarization. You have two governments in Japan. They had just won a war against Russia. Russia. They had beaten the Chinese. They fought on the allied side in World War I. But all this here, the military is getting stronger and stronger. The Japanese constitution at the time had the military reporting directly to the emperor and everybody else to the civilian. A strong emperor dies. Now you have a weak emperor. So the military begins a government by itself. And you see this through the eyes of this girl. She doesn't know what she's seeing. But we as a reader can say, oh my god. And this recitation that they recite, like we do the Pledge of Allegiance, this loyalty pledge to the emperor. It's very scary. It really goes into the details. I'll do anything for it. So you can see, no wonder we had a war. And then we had the 1924 immigration. You know, right now we have a lot of upsetness about people immigration. Well, in 1924, the problem was Jewish people and Italians flooding America. So they wanted to have a law to cut it down. And then the people in the west coast said, you think you've got a problem with Italians and the Jewish people? What about our problem? It was Japanese. So they stopped all Japanese immigration. And in Japan, in Tokyo in 1924, Yamuri Shinbu says America declares war in Japan. So of course it wasn't a literal war. But after that, the army could say, listen, we've tried diplomacy to treat, so Japan can be treated as equal. And this is what we get. What was the Japanese attitude to their immigrants, to the people who had left Japan? They were very protective. They promoted the immigration. That's really interesting. Because they needed a foreign exchange. And it was a poor country. And they were forcing people off the land into the factories. It's hard to imagine Japan being poor. Because today the idea of Japan wanting to immigrate, they really don't, unless they marry. There's not a huge immigration. The Chinese Indians love to come here. But in those days, Japan was poor. So the Japanese government kind of fostered the idea of immigration. And the idea was a permanent immigration or they were going to return? No. They all thought, after five or seven years, they're going to go back to their hometown and buy land. And they just stayed longer and longer. And pretty soon they realized. And the white landowners, the big five that had these plantations, all of a sudden realized they're going to have a problem. Because although the Japanese the first generation could never vote, all of their children could. And that's when they started realizing, boy, they got this problem. And they really didn't want Japanese to go to school. The next generation, keep them on the plantations. But the parents, of course, are totally different. And thank goodness, most of the teachers, the Holly teachers at the time were a lot different from the plantation owners. And they encouraged the education. And by the 1930s, over 40% of the University of Hawaii were Japanese. Japanese Americans. Okay, right. Thank you. This is Think Tech Hawaii, raising public awareness. Foundation for a Better Life. Hello, everyone. I'm DeSoto Brown, the co-host of Human Humane Architecture, which is seen on Think Tech Hawaii every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. And with the show's host, Martin Desbang, we discuss architecture here in the Hawaiian Islands and how it not only affects the way we live, but other aspects of our life, not only here in Hawaii, but internationally as well. So join us for Human Humane Architecture every other Tuesday at 4 p.m. on Think Tech Hawaii. I'm here again with Mike Malham, the author of Picture Bride, a novel, the epic story of Japanese in Hawaii. Okay, so, you know, Heron has arrived in Hawaii as a picture bride. Where in Hawaii did she go? Well, you know, that's interesting. What did she do with my picture bride? And most picture brides ended up in a plantation. And there's a very good book about that story, a movie about it. But then you're stuck with that plantation. And I wanted to let the reader see the entire perspective of the immigrant. So I had her marry a Buddhist priest. Now, she is educated. She's a strong woman. So if we've got, you know, because I have a Japanese wife, and I always thought, you know, they're very compliant. Ho, ho, ho. But that's another story for another day. So Haro is a very strong young teenager, lady. And there were young, strong, strong people. But because as a wife of a priest, we can move around. So I have her spend the first ten years in Waimea over in the Big Island, right next to the Parker Ranch. So we get to see the Parker Ranch with Japanese cowboys at the time. One of her other best friends is in the Kona Plantation. So we learn how coffee, not the Filipinos or the Chinese doing it. Only the Japanese had the culture to make Kona coffee. And I try, I explain that to the eyes of another picture brother. Oh, that's fascinating. Yes, it is. So she's on the Big Island, and then how? Well, something happens, and he gets called in during the sugar strike, and it's very ugly. And Haro turns her Buddhist temple into a refugee camp. Spanish flu, people are dying. New marriages, you know, she dies, he dies, you've got to bring people together. And then the bishop says, I really need you to come over to the Big Island. And he then takes over the mission that's next to the university. So now we get to meet the university. But there's children growing up. So about this time, we start to meet the children. And then we see the big, there's two parts of the story here that are very interesting. One is assimilation. And there's a lot of talk, could they assimilate? Could they not be? So again to the... But they really wanted to? That's the question. Some really wanted to, some wanted to maintain their culture. And they weren't allowed to become citizens, but the children could. The younger children grew up speaking Japanese, but the older children, the older children could speak Japanese, the younger ones couldn't. Sometimes the older children had to interpret and talk to the parents. But the... One story is the assimilation story in the prejudice and the way the military and people treated the Japanese. I have a reporter called Annie Pafkel and some of the things I have him say, people are going to say, that's horrible. How could Mike write about that? He didn't write about it. I copied it. The other big story is the Massey trial. This is this girl. That's a horrible thing. She was raping her. It never happened. But she came home with her tattered dress and she had to give her husband a story. Not realizing, he would go to the police to actually arrest people. There are people killed, murdered. Lawrence Daryl, the famous attorney comes out here for his last hurrah and it splits the community right down. The white, brown, Hawaiian, Japanese, it was just terrible things to society. It eventually healed. It said that it postponed statehood for quite a long time. I'm sure it did. I have a client who is a treasury agent who specializes in narcotics and he has a good story about the Massey case and his mentor when he first came here told him that she was actually a drug addict and she was beaten up by her pusher. And to me it sounds like it's plausible. Yes, in the book I have it, she just had a dalliance. But yeah, it could be a drug. She was definitely a goofy lady. She was 19, 20 years old. Her parents tried to have her move up and move an officer in the military and she was a nutcase. Eventually committed suicide. It's not in the book, because you know, bookstops later on she committed suicide. Your heroine comes to Honolulu? Yeah, she'll come to Honolulu about 1921, 1922 after 10 years in the Big Island. And then the rest of the time we're going to watch her and the children see what's happening in Honolulu. I can see the Massey trial and other types of things with the children and what's going on in Hawaii at that time. And always most of the Japanese Issei although they were always loyal to there and they were filled in up as Americans and they always told them America first. Did they still go to Japanese school? Yeah, in fact, oh, I'm glad you brought that up. Yes, thank you. They had the extra school. They had the language schools. And so the Japanese kids after the regular school they would go to their language school. And the language school taught them not just the Japanese language, but also the culture. And it bothered a lot of the Hollies because you go into the school and there'd be pictures of the Tena Heika, the Admiral who won the Russian war. And so people thought they would never assimilate. And the Japanese were assimilating. The same values that make good citizens of Japan make good citizens anywhere. But I can see in the in the book I have a conflict where even Harle, our hero in here has an understanding of empathy for the Hollies perspective. And she and her husband have some dilly-dally's arguments about his school. There should be pictures of the American president up there. And there's a huge fight. I want to get into it, but one more dramatic scene is when she says we can't keep doing this because look what the Hollies think of us. And we've got our children to think about. But I can understand why some people would be anti-school and had a lot to do with people not trusting the Japanese because of these schools. And as World War II approaches what's going on there? Is she aware of that? They are very much aware. General George Patton we know he was Colonel Patton. He came over to Japan to Hawaii in the mid-30s around 36 or 37. He wrote a whole thing about the so-called what happens if there's a war with the orange country and what do you do with the orange people? And his program or what he said in 1936 and 37 was exactly what the FBI did in 1941. Round up the priest, round up the people. Everybody was very much aware of Patton's, the upper echelon so they knew about Patton and Harold learns about it also. So they were aware that there was going to be a war with Japan and when there was going to be a war the only question in Hawaii is how many people would be arrested? And so her son becomes the secretary of a group and this is a real story a group of people organized a rally committee and they wanted to counteract what is called the California disease. California was eager to put people in camps here not so much and they knew there was a war and they did not want the Japanese community to be incarcerated in mass and they weren't. How do they prevent that? Well, they prevented it very clever but most important thing is we're going to have to be the sacrificial lambs. The FBI never wanted to incarcerate people. Hoover was always against it and so when the war broke out the FBI within a day or two rested almost a thousand later it would be 2000 priests, business people, journalists and so forth they hadn't done anything but by arresting them the FBI locally here could say we've solved the problem. Economically the Japanese were very important here. Military said we're going to take 140,000 people. I'm fighting a war. Where am I going to find ships and military to build up whole new cities and the famous scene in the book is the Admiral Nimitz goes out there and he shows the FBI guy take a look at my ships that are being resuscitated from the attack the Japanese do and there's Japanese welders and Japanese longshoremen they're not all of them so you had the local military much different than this General DeWitt in California who was eager to put those people in camps he didn't think any Japanese could be trusted here you had a totally different society. People got along with each other even though there was a Caucasian community that was on top the antipathy, the feeling of treating people bad like it was in the States and even today, we talk about Hawaii today is much different than Hawaii then. There definitely was prejudice and there were definitely them and us but it wasn't with the same daily vitriol that you saw among the races in the States. How did your heron and her family deal with that period in the beginning of the war or with Pearl Harbor itself? Well, that's in the second book but give us a preview. One of the most famous things in the second book is that when the war breaks out they take the ROTC unit and the ROTC then starts guarding the different installation of telephone utilities most of the ROTC were Japanese Americans and so they're guarding in the meantime these generals are coming over from the west coast so near the jokers gee, did we lose the war? Ha ha ha because all these Japanese guys with guns so there's a famous scene that's in the book, it's riveting they take all the Hawaiian Japanese there's about a couple hundred of them they take them to a school early in the morning and they're thinking they're going to get an award they've been digging ditches they've been putting barbed wire they've been actually cabitzing with the governor because they're at Washington house they've got a little tent in Washington house instead they say, guys turn in your guns you're out, take off your uniform you go home, turn on your uniforms you're not in anymore and some of the guys were pretty upset there's a Chinese man, very famous guy Hang Wai Ching and he talks to the boys outside because he knows this is happening he says what are you guys going to do, you're mad and some of them signed up, it was called the varsity victory volunteers and they signed a petition to the military governor he says we will do anything give us a something to dig a ditch we will do that and they did, there's about a hundred of them that signed up, they got military uniforms a small salary, lived at school field air books at school field barracks and they helped build roads and things like that and as a consequence of that, eventually Roosevelt had second thoughts they said maybe we should let these guys fight for America and that's the next book that's the next book, how they fight for America so how do you feel the book is done here in Hawaii it's been out a little while now yeah, you know, like, no matter how well you did I wish it had done better it's in all the bookstores I love getting the reviews once in a while I get a note from somebody who had an uncle or somebody and they know their story about their grandmother and so forth, so it's been very satisfactory for me, has it made friends for you it's made a lot of friends I mentioned one of my veterans who passed away, he was a artillery spotter in fact in the second book I have him as one of my main characters because artillery spotters go anywhere in the battlefield where a rifleman, he's kind of stuck so the same idea I wanted to have a movie around but in his real life, the guy was Kat Smitho and he and I would meet often, talk about his days in the military he could relive those days and we got so close when I had my 20th wedding anniversary some years ago 30th now he officiated at the renewal of the valves is this the famous Kat's I don't know if he's famous or not, to me he was famous and he was friends of Senator Inouye, I remember at Senator Inouye visited him at the hospital, which I thought was very nice of the senator, a busy guy dropped by and talked to him for 30 minutes because he's one of the old gang and he said, you know, from those days I met a lot of as a consequence of writing the book I met a lot of interesting people one of them was you well the first book, yeah Mike, all best wishes for this book and I'm really looking forward to the next not as much as me thank you very much thank you Roger and thank you everybody for tuning in today