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Chapter 6 The ESC and the Modern Democratic Party While the nisei soldier has become a staple of Hawai‘i’s story, the overall pattern of self-imposed AJA restraint has obscured the extent to which the contemporary state of Hawai‘i grew out of the effort to get Hawai‘i’s Japanese community through World War II. The first recorded vignette of a heightened nisei determination to pursue social and economic change through the democratic process was in the training camp of the 100th Battalion, where a group of young nisei officers stayed back from weekend passes to discuss, over and over, how Hawai‘i must be transformed after the war.1 The debate centered on whether priority should be placed on economic or political means. Sakae Takahashi, who was to be a pathfinder in both realms, carried the day by arguing that AJA could achieve across-the-board change rapidly by participating in the political process. Young Oak Kim, unique as a Korean American in the 100th (and also a mainlander), participated in these discussions, which he described as occurring over a period of five or six weekends and involving close to a dozen individuals. Kim believed that the determination to change Hawai‘i in the postwar period became firmly held as a result of these discussions and eventually was disseminated throughout the ranks.2 In later years Takahashi would modestly downplay the significance of this event by saying that everyone he knew felt the same way he did. A more systematic discussion grew out of the ESC in Honolulu. As the war progressed, ESC affairs were increasingly managed by its full-time staff, former teacher Mitsuyuki Kido. The ESC was housed at the Nu‘uanu YMCA, which had been organized as the first racially integrated YMCA in 1917.3 The ESC was never a mass organization but a coordinating committee, usually made up of fourteen members, as previously described. All were of Japanese ancestry, although John A. Burns not only attended ESC meetings, but 103 during a given week would drop by the ESC office to drink coffee. At first Kido thought of Burns as curt and unsmiling, but by working with Burns on the recruitment of volunteers to the 442nd he began to see Burns in a new light.4 As part of its morale effort, the ESC corresponded with the nisei overseas , and Kido began to receive letters from soldiers asking how they were to be recognized as first-class Americans. Kido particularly remembered a letter from Jack Mizuha, also an officer in the 100th, who asked, “How long are we going to be second-class citizens?” Kido recalled saying to Burns, “Here we’ve got these boys to volunteer to serve, and they’re coming back, some of them broken in spirit and body. What the hell are we going to do?” Burns replied that they must get involved in politics and, in the process, “change some of the rules.” Although Burns would come to be credited with the visionary quality of their subsequent effort, both the scale and the specifics of it were generated by the ESC, which is to say they were generated by the AJA community . The political conversation quickly included Dr. Murai, a key man on the ESC board, and Jack Kawano, who had been included in the ESC because of his ties to labor.5 Seeking political expertise, they eventually added a Democratic member of the Honolulu Board of Supervisors, the Chinese American Chuck Mau. MITSUYUKI KIDO Kido was the fifth of nine children born to a plantation family on Maui in 1906. A disability reduced his father to running a Japanese furo (bath) for the plantation workers, and as a boy Kido washed the furo, gathered wood, and stoked the fire. From that he learned, “It’s pretty hard to be poor.”6 Despite the family’s poverty, Kido went to Honolulu to study at the University of Hawai‘i. He first lived in a tenement, then a Young Buddhist Association dormitory. He paid ten dollars a month for room and board and did yard work, graduating in four years with a degree in political science . Having no money for law school, he began teaching. He began to question why Hawai‘i was controlled by such a small group of people, and he began to think that the structure of Hawai‘i conflicted with a truly free, democratic society. He had an impressive list of students at Farrington...

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