Closing Arguments

On Friday, March 3, closing arguments were presented. It was to turn out to be a long day for all in the courtroom. The prosecution's arguments were opened by Harold Stafford, whom Judge Banks referred to in court as "Captain." An infantry captain in World War I, Harold Stafford had been a central figure in the American Legion in Hawaii. When the legion had presented the Hawaiian legislature with a bill to regulate the foreign-language press, it was Stafford who had drafted it. Although his closing argument and that of the defense do not exist in the trial transcript, the Honolulu Advertiser reported them in detail.

According to the newspaper, although Stafford's argument consumed the entire morning session and stretched well into the afternoon, "it can be truthfully said that there was 'not a dull moment' during the time he was addressing the jury. Even while the prosecutor painted prosaic word pictures of the less dramatic situations of the alleged conspiracy, he commanded the close attention of every person in the courtroom. On the oc-

casions when he rose to oratorical flights, the entire assemblage was, figuratively speaking, on its tip toes."^[32]

"Gentlemen of the jury," Stafford began, "the Territory was in no way concerned with the strike itself—whether or not it was justified, or even properly conducted. Every man has a right to a fair return for the labor and a right to strike in order to get it. Show me a man who is ashamed of a hard spot on his hand put there by honest labor and I will show you a man who has a soft spot in his head." But, he continued, the Japanese Federation of Labor needed money to carry on the strike.

Any man who stood in the way of their raising that money might well have been considered an enemy, and his eliminating a blessing. . . .

Even though [the defendants] had no intention of ordering the three alleged dynamiters to commit an unlawful act when they dispatched them from Honolulu to Hilo with the instructions to see the officials of the Hawaii Union for further details, the mere facts that they were thus dispatched and that they did subsequently dynamite Sakamaki's house, if proven, bound the defendants to pay the penalty in company with the actual perpetrators of the atrocity.

After designating the key prosecution witnesses, Matsumoto, Saito^[*] , and Murakami, as "perpetrators," Stafford said that he did not claim that all defendants had knowledge that the three men were promised rewards: "In our opinion, the offer was probably made by Miyamura without authority. It was a big 'sack of oats' held out to Matsumoto, Saito and Murakami after Yoshimura (who was to have aided in the Sakamaki bombing) had vanished. However these defendants did not dare repudiate the offers because they knew what the three men had done. Consequently, they passed the buck from one to the other until the men got tired and told their story."

In commenting on the defendants who claimed to have alibis for May 22, when the order was said to have been issued, Stafford said, "If the defense had been at all satisfied with any of these alibis, . . . I defy them to say that what they have proves that they had no faith in any of them, nor have we." For example, Stafford termed Hiroshi Miyazawa a liar for claiming that he was a pastor when he had no such qualifications at all. Indeed, Stafford attempted to give the impression that all of those with firm alibis were also suspect. By contrast, Stafford praised prosecution witnesses Matsumoto and Saito, whom he had called "perpetrators": "They could not have stood the long grilling of Judge Lymar, in cross-examination for the defense, had they not been telling the truth." Concluding his lengthy closing argument, he urged that "for the sake of

the peaceful and law abiding citizens of the Territory, no matter what their nationality," a guilty verdict be returned.

After an hour's recess for lunch, defense attorney Brooks spoke first for the defense. "His remarks," the Honolulu Advertiser reported, "were surcharged with forensic vitriol." He characterized Matsumoto and Saito^[*] "as conscienceless rogues and bastards, cold-blooded as snakes, who would just as soon blow up women and little children as eat their dinner." He continued, "The Territory has known for months just who dynamited Sakamaki's house, but they don't care about that. They have deliberately stepped aside, and allowed private interest to intervene. They have dismissed the case against Matsumoto and Saito in order that private interests might break up the Japanese Federation of Labor."

When Brooks finished, the chief defense attorney, Lymar, began his closing argument with the observation that never before in his experience as an attorney had he listened to "a supposed argument of facts in which had crept so much intolerance and prejudice as had characterized the attitude of the prosecution in this case." For the next two hours, he stoutly proclaimed the innocence of the defendants. The prosecution's charges, he said were like "the tale of a thousand and one Arabian nights." As for the key prosecution witnesses, he characterized Matsumoto as "a desperado and a crook"; Saito as "the wrestler who tells anything for money"; and Suzuki as a "fire brand 'fitted in every way for desperate business'—a man who should by all rights be deported." The prosecution, he suggested, had suborned the three witnesses and had fabricated evidence to fit the objective of the investigation. Heen and his colleagues, he said, had mounted "one of the flimsiest cases ever presented by a group of public prosecutors in the Territory."

In concluding, Lymar pleaded with the jury to disregard the nationality of the accused men. Because they were not familiar with the English language, he said, they should be given the same benefit of the doubt that the jurors would give any "underdog" in the interests of the American ideal of fair play.

At 8:15 P.M ., Judge Banks addressed the jury, "If you have any feelings in this case, any prejudice either for the defendants or against them, you must subordinate that to the one great purpose of arriving at a just verdict which, in all the future years, will meet the approval of your conscience." It was after 9:10 P.M . when the twelve members of the jury

withdrew from the courtroom to begin deliberations on the case. They no doubt looked very tired after the long day in court. Two hours later, at 11:21 P.M ., they announced their inability to arrive at a decision and repaired to a nearby hotel for the night.

In selecting the jury, both the prosecution and the defense attorneys challenged everyone with names sounding like those of people of color. The twelve jurors had Anglo-Saxon names. If any were of partly Hawaiian heritage, given the Hawaiian social structure, they would have been close to the white governing class. And one must wonder how many of the jurors would have been able to connect the names and faces of the fifteen Japanese defendants as they deliberated on the verdict.

All of the witnesses had been Japanese, and most of the names mentioned in their testimony were Japanese. Throughout the trial the jury complained that they were confused about the names and that it was difficult for them to grasp the gist of the testimony. The judge and the prosecutors had raised similar questions. Even the trial transcript often erred in reporting names. It referred to Sutsumi (for Tsutsumi), Konda (for Kondo^[*] ), Mujazawa (for Miyazawa), Hashino (for Hoshino), making it seem as if they were entirely different people. Since laborers on the plantations were identified with numbers, it is perhaps understandable that haoles had trouble remembering Japanese names, no matter how many times they heard them. One cannot help but be disturbed at the thought that this linguistic barrier may have affected the verdict.

Indifference to getting Japanese names right was echoed in the failure of either the prosection or the defense to address witnesses with the normal courtesies. Juzaburo^[*] Sakamaki was the only one who both the prosecution and the defense addressed as "Mister."

With the exception of Sakamaki's testimony and part of Miyazawa's, the jury heard the Japanese witnesses only through the filter of the court interpreter, Kin'ichiro^[*] Maruyama. But the crux of the problem may have been the way that Japanese was spoken at the trial. Even in spoken English the meaning is unclear unless a subject is named. By contrast, in spoken Japanese it is easier and smoother to omit the subject. Even if a Japanese speaker does not use the first-person singular or the first-person plural, or even the second- and third-person, his meaning can be discerned from the context.

In English, it is also necessary always to clarify the affirmative or the negative. But in Japanese, the conversation often proceeds by using ex-

pressions that can be taken as either affirmative or negative, and there is a tendency to use very few words in expectation that the listener will divine the meaning. If Japanese spoken in this way is converted directly into English, a language that stresses clarity, then the result may be not only misunderstandings but also even a reversal of the nuances of the words used.

Naturally, this characteristic of the Japanese language reflects the psychological structure of a homogeneous society. To outsiders, tacit understanding among those sharing the same history, customs, and traditions as an ethnic group can appear as mutual indulgence, and avoiding verbal confrontations can be seen as evading responsibility. By contrast, in the United States, a heterogeneous nation made up of immigrants from very different cultures, people face many internal social boundaries, so perhaps it is natural that they expect clarity in daily conversational exchanges.

In any case, Maruyama's job at the trial was not easy. That said, however, the English interpretation appearing in the trial transcript raises doubts about how much of the testimony the jurors, who were ignorant of Japanese culture and customs, really understood.