MY GRANDFATHER had been one of the founding members of the Waialua Hongwanji Buddhist temple. My uncle, a general contractor, had a hand in building it. Constructed in one of the camps next to the sugar mill, it was a busy place, hosting weddings, funerals, memorial services, bon dances, Boy Scout Troop 144 and the dreaded Japanese language school.

While our non-Japanese friends enjoyed their after school hours, we were forced by our Nisei parents to receive Japanese language instruction from teachers who ran the school like a boot camp. We had to line up, each person behind another, in front of the main steps. Mr. Matsuda, a short man with round glasses and a mustache, stood on the steps like a drill sergeant.

“Stand like soljahs!” he would bark in what seemed to be the only sentence he knew in English. “Mae-narai!” We shot both hands straight out, touching the back of the shoulders of the person in front. Mr. Matsuda, whom we secretly called the Main Crook, our term for the bad guy in cowboy movies, strutted in front of every line, picking on slouches to straighten up before allowing us to drop our hands and enter the classrooms.

Most of the teachers were women, Main Crook being the exception. They were pleasant ladies, trying hard to be stern, and as we grew older, moving from elementary to junior high levels, we did everything we could to keep ourselves from learning Japanese. Our goal was not to learn, and we achieved it through the hard work of acting as badly as we dared. It was exciting. Rubber-band slingshots, spitballs, an occasional but always mysterious firecracker, jumping out the windows while the teacher wrote on the blackboard—we excelled at disruption. On good days—and we had many of them—the teacher would break down and cry in frustration.

“You’ll regret it if you don’t learn Japanese,” my mother always said after denying my annual request for permission to quit Japanese language school. “Never,” I insisted. “I’m American, not Japanese.” In the ninth grade, I finally prevailed, after Francis and I, the only two boys left in the class, conspired to tell our parents that the other was being allowed to quit.