Hawaii

Hawaii is a brief but pivotal stop in Sayuri’s first journey to the United States with the Chairman in 1952. There, wearing a bathing suit for the first time and sitting on a beach with her hair loose at her shoulders, she finds an unexpected resemblance to Amami; the island becomes a threshold between the Japan she has known and the world she is beginning to imagine.

The Journey from Japan

The Chairman permits Sayuri to accompany him on his second American trip. She travels alone by rail to Tokyo, then flies with him to Hawaii, where they spend several days before continuing to Los Angeles and New York. The journey follows the Chairman’s earlier visit, which had impressed on him the scale of American prosperity: he had compared its round-the-clock city lights, marble station floors, and widely available refrigerators with the more limited conditions in Japan.

A First Encounter with the Beach

Hawaii gives Sayuri her first bathing suit. She sits on the beach wearing it, her hair arranged neatly at her shoulders like the hair of the other women around her. The scene marks a small but tangible change in her experience: she is no longer only observing America through the images she had seen in films, but inhabiting an unfamiliar setting with her own body.

The island also calls up Amami in her mind. Sayuri worries that the Chairman might make the same association, but he says nothing about it. The resemblance is therefore present as her private perception rather than a shared conversation, placing a remembered Japanese island beside the American destination without making them identical.

Threshold to a Wider World

From Hawaii, Sayuri and the Chairman continue to Los Angeles and then New York. At the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel, the city’s towering buildings and clean streets give her the impression of a world where anything might be possible. Hawaii belongs to the transition into that new horizon: it offers a moment of familiarity through Amami, even as the trip carries Sayuri far beyond Japan for the first time.

In the years that follow, she travels with the Chairman to the United States twice more. On those visits, while he conducts business, she and her maid explore museums and restaurants and attend a ballet. Hawaii’s place in the first trip thus precedes a broader life of repeated travel, in which foreign cities become settings she can encounter rather than merely imagine.