The Nihau Incident

On December 7, 1941, Japanese forces, in a totally dick move, performed a surprise attack on the U.S. Navy at Pearl Harbor, sinking six ships and damaging another fourteen. It was the single greatest surprise attack in U.S. history.

One of the Japanese pilots was 22 year old Shigenori Nishikaichi, whose plane was too damaged to return to the carriers.  Instead he crash landed on the isolated Hawaiian island of Nihau, which lacking electricity and telephones, had not yet heard about the attack.  The first person to find the pilot was a Hawaiian dude named Hawila Kaelohano, who prudently took the pilot's papers and pistol while the young man was still dazed from the crash.  After these precautions were taken, the pilot was warmly welcomed by the locals, who even threw a party for him, because who doesn’t love a good party.  This whole situation was probably helped by the fact that the pilot couldn’t speak English, and few of the locals could speak Japanese, though there were a few Japanese people living on the island.  Two of these; first generation Ishimatsu Shintani and second generation Yoshio Harada, were eventually found to provide translation.  The pilot told the two men about the attack on Pearl Harbor and then demanded that his papers be returned, which included secret maps, radio codes, and attack plans.  The two men decided not to tell the Hawaiians about the attack, but did ask for the pilot’s things to be returned.  Kaelohano, not being a complete idiot, refused.  The Hawaiians decided that the best course of action would be to send the pilot to the more populous island of Kauai the next time the local supply boat visited.  Harada requested that the pilot stay with him, which seemed totally okay to the Hawaiians, but only if a guard was stationed outside Harada’s house.   

Unfortunately, the supply boat didn’t arrive as expected the next day, due to the U.S. Navy being all freaked out as hell.  The confused Hawaiians decided that the best course of action was to just wait out whatever the hell was happening.  This wasn’t good enough for the pilot, who convinced Shintani and Harada to help him out.  Five days after the pilot’s arrival, Shintani approached Kaelohano and offered him $200 for the pilot’s papers.  Kaelohano again refused, at which point Shintani made a weird veiled threat before leaving.  At the same time, Harada’s wife played her phonograph at full volume in order to hide the sounds of her husband and the pilot beating the shit out of the man guarding Harada’s house.  The pair then retrieved the pilot’s pistol and a shotgun, and went to Kaelohano’s house to recover the papers.  Luckily for Kaelohano, he was taking a shit in his outhouse when they arrived, so he managed to escape.  Harada and the pilot then went to the downed Japanese plane, tried contacting the Japanese military using a broken radio, took one of the plane’s machine guns, and then set the plane on fire.  While they were doing this, Kaelohano retrieved the papers from where he had stashed them at a friend’s house, suggested to all his neighbors that it would probably be best for them hide in the forest for awhile, and then set off with a few others in a lifeboat to make the ten hour paddle to Kauai. 

Things pretty much turned to total shit from there.  The pilot and Harada returned, pissed and armed to the teeth.  They burned down Kaelohano’s house and then took a woman hostage, demanding that Kaelohano be turned over, not knowing that he was already gone.  Several Hawaiians made a big show of looking for him to try and buy time, but the pilot and Harada quickly grew tired of the game.  They threatened to shoot everybody unless their demands were met, at which time the Hawaiians, deciding that they had dealt with enough horseshit for one day, attacked them.  In the resulting scuffle one Hawaiian was shot and the pilot had his head bashed in and his throat cut.  Harada responded to this by freaking the fuck out and shooting himself in the face with the shotgun. 

U.S. military authorities arrived the next day.  Both Sintani and Harada’s wife were taken into custody.  The Hawaiians were horrified at how quickly those they had considered friends for so long had turned against them.  What became known as the Nihau Incident, though it was the only incident of its kind, became the primary piece of evidence to support the idea that Japanese-Americans could not be trusted.  With the Japanese swiftly conquering their way across Southeast Asia and the Pacific, Americans freaked the fuck out.  Believing that an invasion of the West Coast may be imminent, trust in Japanese-Americans plummeted, and people began demanding that the government do something.  On February 19, 1942, President Franklin Roosevelt signed an executive order forcing the removal of anyone with Japanese ancestry from the West Coast.  Within months, over 110,000 Japanese-Americans, 62 percent of them U.S. citizens, were relocated to internment camps.  A similar order had already been made in Canada a month earlier.  The U.S. government did not officially apologize for the internment until 1991.   

Image: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Nishikaichi%27s_Zero_BII-120.jpg   

A Far Far Away Land Called Hollywood

It isn't that hard to find someone out there willing to tell you that Thomas Edison was a real jerk, a huge asshole, a piece of work.  However, it isn't totally fair to the guy.  Edison was less of an inventor, and more of a business man.  His gift was not in creation, but in finding widespread use for inventions, turning them into things people wanted, thus giving him piles of cold hard cash.  Edison’s company was one of the first businesses to hire inventors specifically just to invent things.  He gave them a steady salary, laboratories to tinker in, funding, and assistants; and all it cost them was Edison having control of all their patents.  While it might seem like some straight up assholery, this method has led to the majority of inventions over the past hundred years, including everything that has to do with motion pictures.    

The first true modern movie projecting system, the Kinetoscope, was invented in 1893 after four years of work by a team of brainiacs led by a shutterbug enthusiast named William Dickson, who could best be described as just some guy.  Dickson did the lion's share of the work, and Edison got all of the credit, though to be fair, Edison also fronted all of the money.  It should be noted that the Kinetoscope wasn't the first device to show moving pictures, it was just the first one to do it in such a way that it looked better than those flipbooks you used to make in the margins of your textbook.  All together, the Kinetoscope was the combination of numerous other ideas and inventions from across the United States and Europe.  Dickson and his team just put them together into a single machine.  While Edison bashers might call it stealing, everyone else calls it exactly how science works.

When the Kinetoscope was unveiled to the world, people went crazy as fucking shit over it, which is kind of surprising given that most of the first movies were just short snippets dealing with things like a man sneezing.  It didn’t matter, before too long viewing parlors were built across the country and entrepreneurs began sprouting up everywhere to take advantage of the new craze.  Over time the films gradually got longer, and started to include more interesting subjects, such as boxing and sexy women dancing.  Within a few years, people started also using the technology to make straight up pornography.  The original Kinetoscopes were simple cabinets which one person at a time could watch.  These soon gave way to projectors which could display the films on screens and walls.  This in turn led to the first full length feature film, The Great Train Robbery, in 1903.  It was twelve minutes long.  Edison was raking in the dough. 

It didn’t take long for rivals to start appearing on the scene.  Making films was rather easy.  However, the difficult part was getting the equipment.  Edison’s company controlled all the patents for the machines needed to make and distribute films, and you can bet your sweet ass that he wasn’t going to let anyone beat him at his own game.  While other filmmakers started making movies, mostly in the New York and Chicago areas, they had to pay exorbitant fees for the use of Edison’s equipment, thus ensuring that Edison’s films would always be the cheapest on the market.  Now of course this didn’t sit well with the new up and coming studio executives, so they collectively decided to tell Edison to fuck off and started making movies without paying the fees.  Edison responded by sending out teams of lawyers to sue the ever living shit out of those defying him.  He also sent out teams of goons tasked with finding, seizing, and/or smashing any black market cameras.   

Such shenanigans proved too much for one filmmaker, a man by the name of D.W. Griffith.  Not willing to back down, but also not wanting to get his ass sued and/or beat, Griffith instead headed west, arriving in California in 1910.  Since at the time the fastest way to travel was by train, Griffith figured that he would have ample warning if Edison sent any goons all the way from New York.  California also had the benefit of favorable year round weather, a warm climate, and reliable sunlight.  Factors which made it the perfect place to make movies. 

D.W. Griffith set up shop in a small town called Hollywood and quickly found great success with his films.  Seeing this success, and being just like the movie producers of today, other filmmakers quickly flocked westward to copy him.  The best actors and actresses soon after followed.  The west coast filmmakers were innovative and artistic.  Edison quickly fell behind the curve, and within a few years the center of the film industry shifted westward to its new home.  The final nail in the coffin was Griffith’s 1915 epic, The Birth of a Nation, the grandest film ever made up until that point.  However, while it was the first film to establish the norms of what we think a movie is today, it was also super racist, which led to the re-establishment of the Ku Klux Klan.  The world has never been the same.  

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hollywood_Sign_(Zuschnitt).jpg

Scarface’s Demise

Al Capone is a name pretty much everybody knows given that he was the most famous prohibition gangster of them all.  Booze, brothels, gambling, and racketeering; Scarface had a hand in everything.  We all know the story.  A nobody who rose up to become the most powerful man in Chicago, wielding power through intimidation, bribes, and straight up charm.  Thanks to his numerous donations and charities, he was considered by many as a modern day Robin Hood, at least until he had the balls to have seven of his rivals murdered in broad daylight in what became known as the St. Valentine’s Day Massacre.  However, even then it was widely thought that no police or federal officer could take him down.  Which was technically true, since it was the IRS that finally busted him for the less than sexy crime of not paying his taxes.  Important lesson everybody, the IRS doesn't care how you make your money, just as long you pay your taxes.  After seven years on top of the world, old Al was convicted and sent to prison.  That's the story we all know, but what happened to him after that?

Capone was only 33 years old when he went to prison in 1931.  The first jail he was sent to was the U.S. penitentiary in Atlanta.  It was there that doctors discovered Capone’s little secret.  No, not that you pervert, though close.  Capone had syphilis.  He also had gonorrhea and a cocaine addiction, but the syphilis is really the one to concentrate on.  So what you might say, I've had syphilis five times and all you need is a little shot.  Well guess what bucko, the antibiotics that so easily cure syphilis today weren't around back then.  About the only treatment modern medical science could offer was taking pills made of mercury or arsenic, both of which had severe side effects and did little to impede the overall progress of the disease.  Al had gotten syphilis at age 18 after sleeping with a hooker.  The Atlanta jail offered to treat him, but Capone refused.

Jail was not an easy time for Capone.  He was given a job stitching soles on shoes, which he was rather good at, but faced almost constant attack by petty thugs looking to make a name for themselves.  Outside, Al was a powerful crime boss.  Inside, he was a weak willed nearly illiterate man who was the perfect target for bullies.  Several men on the inside worked to protect him, likely due to pay outs from his outside associates, but this just caused further problems as members of the public began to complain that the crime boss was getting special treatment.  To combat these rumors, Capone was sent to a brand new state of the art prison in 1934, a little place known as Alcatraz.

Alcatraz was built to provide the hardest prison time imaginable.  Everything was kept to a regimented routine, no talking was allowed, and any infraction resulted in time in solitary confinement.  In Alcatraz, Capone was bullied even more, and rigid rules wore him down.  In 1936, another inmate stabbed him.  After that Capone wouldn't even go out into the yard, preferring to stay inside where he spent his time learning the banjo.

As syphilis rotted away his brain, the world's greatest crime boss began to go downhill fairly quickly.  Sometimes Al would refuse to leave his cell, even to eat, passing the time by making and unmaking his bed.  Other times he would spend hours crouched in a corner like an animal, mumbling in baby talk.  The warden and guards thought Capone was just being an asshole, so they sent him to solitary confinement over and over.  This did little to help the situation.  Capone began spending long periods of time just staring at the wall, drooling, and grinning like an idiot.  While at times he was completely lucid, such moments happened less and less.  Eventually he could do little on his own beyond strumming a few tunes on the banjo.

Finally taking pity on what was left of Capone, the federal government transferred him to an easier prison in 1939, and then granted him early release due to his failing health in 1941.  Capone’s family and friends took him in and did their best to hide the truth.  His old associates gave him a secluded house in Miami, where they kept a close eye on him in case in his foggy state he started spouting off any secrets.  Al spent the remainder of his days in that house, sitting by the pool in his pajamas, smoking cigars, with a useless fishing pole in his hands.  Sometimes he’d try to play rummy.  His friends always let him win.  Eventually he began having tremors and seizures.  He became paranoid that the mob was going to kill him.  Doctor’s declared he had the mental faculties of a dimwitted twelve year old boy.  Al Capone died in 1947, he was 48 years old.    

Image: https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Al_Capone_in_1930.jpg