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Anything That Comes To Mind
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 Bill Hosokawa |
As some readers of this column (there are a few, I’m told) know, the conductor a few weeks ago changed his return address from Colorado to a rural part of the State of Washington. This, among other important matters, involved the necessity of finding a new barber before many weeks had elapsed. My friend Mas Nonaka has been trimming the thinning topside thatch for many years in Denver, but now that era has ended. How to find a worthy successor?
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My guide and landlord located a little two-chair barbershop just off the main street of Sequim, the closest town, and I decided to give it a try. It was clean, newly painted, and quite presentable. The boss, a white-haired gentleman, said he had a regular customer due in 15 minutes so I settled for the other fellow, an elderly, fairly tall old man with rimless glasses. He didn’t talk much, and neither did I. He did a workmanlike job of trimming my hair. Before long he had finished the job. As I prepared to leave my chair, I noticed a yellowed newspaper clipping stuck to the mirrored wall behind me. It was far enough away so that I could read only the headline and I made out enough to learn that it was a story about a local fellow who remembered his experiences as a boy at Pearl Harbor back on that fateful day in 1941. Ooops. Undoubtedly the newspaper story was an anniversary feature about my barber’s recollections published many years after Pearl Harbor. But this old fellow had just shaved the back of my neck, the neck of a Japanese-looking stranger, with a newly sharpened straightedge razor. And wasn’t it a wounded young Army hero named Dan Inouye who had been refused a haircut in San Francisco on his way home to Hawaii after World War II? Well, yeah. That was a long time ago. But a lot of thoughts ran through my mind as I paid the barber, including a generous tip, and left the shop. I asked myself some unanswerable questions. Did the barber notice that I was an Asian American in this virtually all-white town? Did he even think about Pearl Harbor as he cut my hair? Was I just another customer in a small town where strangers, especially Asian-looking strangers, are a rarity? Was I being overly sensitive about something that didn’t matter much any more? Would I go back to his chair the next time I need a trim and how would I feel then? We’ll see.
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