“Almost do we feel ourselves kamaaina, Mate Woman,” he would say, arm about my shoulders, while we greeted or sped Honolulu guests, or watched, beyond the Tyrian dyes of the reef, smoke of liners that brought to us visitors from the Coast. “Only, never forget—it is not for us to say.”
One thing that earned Jack London his kamaainaship was his activity for the Pan-Pacific Club, with its “Hands Around the Pacific” movement. Under the algarobas at Pearl Harbor, in 1907, one day he and Alexander Hume Ford had discussed socialism—upon Ford’s initiative. “Well,” the latter concluded, “I can’t ‘see’ your socialism. My idea is, to find out what people want, help them to it, then make them do what you wish them to do; and if it is right, they will do it—if you keep right after them!... Now, I’m soon leaving for Australia and around the Pacific at my own expense, to see if there is a way to get the peoples to work together for one another and for the Pacific.”
“That’s socialism—look out!” Jack contentedly blew rings into the still air.
“I don’t care if it is,” retorted his friend. “That won’t stop me. Walter Frear has just been appointed Governor of Hawaii, and I’ve interested him, and carry an official letter with me. Hawaii, with her mixture of Pacific races, yet with no race problems, should be the country to take the lead. I’m going to call a Pan-Pacific Convention here.”
“Go to it, Ford, and I’ll help all I can,” Jack approved.
“All right, then,” the other snapped him up. “Address the University Club next week!”
“Sure I will, and glad to, though you know how I despise public speaking.” And Jack kept his pledge, while Mr. Ford was presently off on his mission to Australasia.
On the day of our return from California to Honolulu in 1915, while helping us find a house at Waikiki, Ford recounted the expansion of his venture, which he declared needed only Jack’s further co-operation to carry it through to success. “It’s big, I tell you; it’s big!” Weekly dinners were given by Ford in the lanai of the Outrigger Club, at which occasion there were present a score of the leading Hawaiians, or Chinese, or Japanese, Koreans, Filipinos, or Portuguese, to exchange ideas with the leading white men who were behind the movement. The speeches and discussions were of vital interest, all bent toward bringing about a working in unison for the mutual benefit of Pacific nations.
Out of these affairs sprang up interesting friendships between ourselves and these foreigners and their families, resulting in social functions in our respective homes and at the foreign clubs, and also at the Japanese theaters. Would that all the international differences of the Union might be handled as harmoniously as they are in Hawaii. During that sojourn in Honolulu, more than one Japanese father assured us: “My sons were born under your flag. I should expect them to fight under your flag if need arose.”
One evening, at the Outrigger Club, Jack spoke the Pan-Pacific doctrine before the Congressional visitors and three hundred representatives of the various nationalities in Hawaii, all of whom responded enthusiastically through their orators. One of our friends, Mr. S. Sheba, of the Japanese paper, Hawaii Shimpo, and an early director in the Pan-Pacific Union, has since bought the Japan Times, an English daily in Tokyo, and placed in charge a former American editor of Honolulu. Another American editor of Hawaii is connected with the Transpacific Magazine in Tokyo, and is also on the staff of the Japan Advertiser. An ex-Honolulu newspaperman owns a daily in Manila, while in Shanghai several Hawaii-Americans do their bit for Pan-Pacific sentiment by their editorial writings.