Formation of the Hawaii Federation of Japanese Labor

Of the 43,618 workers in all the sugar plantations in Hawaii, 19,474, or almost half, were Japanese. Filipinos constituted the next largest

group, with 13,061 workers, and it was they who first rose to demand higher wages. On August 31, 1919, at a rally of the Filipino Labor Union of Hawaii (initially called the Filipino Labor Association) in Aala Park in Honolulu, the Filipino laborers elected Pablo Manlapit as their chairman. A graduate of a mainland college, Manlapit was hired in 1916 by the planters' association to take charge of relations with Filipinos. He was fired when he was found to be recruiting workers to go to the mainland. He soon became a well-known figure among the Filipino laborers. He organized a longshoremen's strike on Maui, eloquently arguing down strike breakers despite being injured, and helped out Filipinos as an interpreter for the Honolulu police department. With his dark complexion and taut physique, Manlapit was an imposing man. After becoming president of the Filipino Labor Union, he started making the rounds of Oahu's sugar plantations campaigning energetically for a wage increase. From newspaper photographs, it is clear that Manlapit emulated the style of the IWW's Wobblies by making his speeches on a soapbox.

As recent arrivals in Hawaii, the Filipinos did not yet have their own schools or theaters. Refused the use of plantation meeting halls, Manlapit spoke at train depots on the outskirts of town. When he made a speech in front of a Japanese store at Waimanalo Plantation, he was arrested and held overnight by the police for gathering people on a private road. Undaunted, he not only continued his speaking tour but also took and passed the bar examination.

On October 15 Juan Sarminento, editor-in-chief of the Filipino newspaper Ang Filipinos , called for the presentation of a wage increase demand in late November. If no reply was received within a week, he said, then the three thousand Filipino workers in Oahu should begin a strike on December 1. Sarminento was a leader of a faction within the Filipino community that did not entirely trust Manlapit because he had worked for the planters' association in the past.

The unification of the Philippines is said to have been delayed in part by the division of the islands among ethnic groups using different languages, such as Visayan, Tagalog, and Ilocano. Filipino workers who went to Hawaii took these divisions with them, and the Filipino Labor Union likewise suffered continual internal discord. Nevertheless, at the union delegates' meeting on October 20, Manlapit was chosen president and it was formally decided to submit wage increase demands by December 1. Manlapit immediately went on a speaking tour of the islands,

pointing out that the success of the wage increase movement depended on the solidarity of workers throughout Hawaii.

On November 18 Manlapit arrived on the Big Island, which had been shaken by earthquakes for nearly two months because of an eruption of the Mauna Loa volcano. But the fiery lava flow had headed in the direction of Kona, on the opposite side from Hilo, and residents breathed a sigh of relief. The rally for the Filipino workers, which was held in the Gaiety Theater in Hilo, drew Spanish and Portuguese workers as well. As Manlapit toured the plantations after the meeting, Noboru Tsutsumi was always at his side, proclaiming the need for Japanese workers to support Manlapit's campaign. A month and a half earlier Tsutsumi had organized the Federation of Japanese Labor on Hawaii, the only island to organize.

The center of the Hawaiian Islands, however, was Honolulu on Oahu. One-third of Hawaii's population, many of them Japanese, lived in Honolulu. The city was a microcosm of "the Japanese village" in the middle of the Pacific. The downtown area near Alala Park was dotted with Japanese shop signs, and only Japanese was heard on the streetcars. On the streets Japanese women wore cotton yukata and wooden geta clogs. Those in Western-style dresses were a rarity.

Members of the Japanese Association in Honolulu, which was dominated by upscale shop owners, school principals, religious leaders, newspapermen, and other professionals, thought of themselves as the elite within the Japanese community. Taking the lead, the association joined with other groups to form the Plantation Labor Supporters' Association in Honolulu. It was made up of representatives from various occupational groups, including the craftsmen's union, the automobile association union, the barbers' association, the fisheries association, the pawnshop, cleaner, and tailor industries, the young men's association, and various prefectural associations. Of the twenty officers of the supporters' association, nine were newspapermen working for Japanese-language papers.

On the U.S. mainland miners' strikes were spreading across the mid-western states. Despite the intervention of AFL President Gompers, no settlement had been reached. On November 7 Attorney General Mitchell Palmer issued a strict warning to end the strike. Two days later, on November 9 at 7:00 P.M. , a lecture meeting on current issues was held under the sponsorship of the Plantation Labor Supporters' Association at the Asahi Theater in Honolulu. (The resident Japanese had met here to

discuss the Japanese-language schools problem the previous March.) The meeting was attended by a crowd of some one thousand Japanese, far greater than the number of seats in the theater. Many were forced to sit in the aisles.

The first to take the stage was Takeshi Haga, a nineteen-year-old youth from the Palama area youth association. Brought over to Hawaii from Yamanashi by his father two years earlier, he spoke about his experience working on Waipahu Plantation:

This is no time to put up with being treated like livestock. Merchants in Honolulu who sell the sugar plantation laborers rice and miso they import from Japan are making a big profit. At a difficult time like this, when our blood compatriots on the islands are sweating away at hard labor day after day under the scorching sun, we must as a body censure those who ignore their plight. I respectfully urge you to contribute all forms of aid, material and spiritual, to encourage the sugar plantation laborers.^[3]

Haga spoke passionately, even referring to the Russian revolution. (In preparing for his speech, Haga had wondered whether he should speak in the style of Seigo^[*] Nakano or Yukio Ozaki, two prominent orators of the day, and he had practiced repeatedly, like Demosthenes, projecting his voice over the crash of the waves on Ala Moana beach.

In 1919 many prominent Japanese stopped over in Honolulu on their way to the Paris Peace Conference. Although their ships were in port for less than a day, they were invited to speak at lecture meetings sponsored by the newspapers. It was a rare chance for the Japanese in Honolulu to listen directly to Japanese leaders from various circles, and often the speakers inflamed the audience's patriotism from the stage. For example, Seigo Nakano, editor-in-chief of Toho^[*] jiron , declaimed that "a clash between Japan and America" over the future of Japanese interests in China would be "difficult to avoid." Calling the white man a villain and waving the rising sun flag were dangerous in a society dominated by Caucasians, but the Japanese audience greeted Nakano's speech with applause and cheers. The Japanese newspapers, reporting these events in florid language, made them the topic of the day at barber shops and public baths or at lunchtime in fields of the sugar plantations.

But many visitors urged prudence. Baron Shinpei Goto^[*] , one of the country's most prominent officials, who stopped on his return trip from the Paris Peace Conference a week before the meeting on current issues, told his audience to tread softly on the Japanese-language schools problem and labor problem: "The fortunate Japanese here in Hawaii must

adopt the standards and ideals of the American nation. They must realize that they are part and parcel of the body politic of the United States and not of the body politic of Japan." The Honolulu Advertiser reported his speech on November 4, 1919, under the headline "'Become American' word of Goto to Japanese, Says 'English Education is best.'"

As the former head of civil administration in Taiwan, Goto^[*] had promoted sugar production. Given this background, it is likely that he better understood the feelings of the Hawaiian Sugar Planters' Association (HSPA)—those with the ruling power—than the feelings of the Japanese immigrants. His remarks were made at a welcoming reception held at former Governor Walter F. Frear's residence and attended by fifty prominent citizens of Hawaii. A skilled diplomat, in supporting the assimilation of immigrants, Goto was not speaking directly to the immigrants themselves but making a gesture to please his American hosts.

Several Japanese leaders had stopped in Hawaii on their way to the first International Labor Conference convened in Washington, D.C., in October and November 1919. As labor problems were troubling the whole world, President Wilson proposed a conference aimed at easing labor-management relations. Chaired by Samuel Gompers of the AFL, it was attended by representatives from forty-one countries who discussed the freedom to unionize, the minimum wage system, the eight-hour workday, and other issues making up the nine principles of the Labor Bill of Rights. The eight-hour workday, adopted five years before by the Ford Motor Company to shut out the IWW, had gradually taken hold in the United States, and nearly half the workers had secured this right. The government and industry representatives from Japan, opposing the eight-hour workday, pressed the other nations' representatives to give Japan "special treatment." Just before departing from Honolulu, Shinpei Goto explained, "Since the Japanese have long torsos and short legs in comparison to Caucasians who have short torsos and long legs, the Japanese tire more easily and are inferior in their working power. Shortening working hours to eight hours is suitable for the Caucasians, but we must look at the Japanese in light of their physiology. This is why under the current labor system in Japan hours are somewhat longer but include many breaks."^[4] In the sugarcane fields of Hawaii, the ten-hour workday was normal.

Although many Japanese attended the November 9 meeting in Honolulu, the movement for wage increases on Oahu's sugar plantations did

not easily fall in step with the movement on the Big Island. The memory of the 1909 strike ten years before, when only the Japanese workers on Oahu had struck and then been miserably defeated, was a stumbling block. Finally, however, a branch of the Federation of Japanese Labor was organized on Waialua Plantation.

On December 1, 1919, under the sponsorship of the Honolulu Plantation Labor Supporters' Association, worker delegates met to organize the Japanese laborers on all the islands. The meeting, held in the Honolulu Club, whose entrance was decorated with Japanese and American flags, was attended by two delegates from each of the six major plantations on Oahu, eight delegates from Hawaii, three from Kauai, five from Maui, and thirty from the Honolulu Plantation Labor Supporters' Association.^[5]

From the start there were disputes about voting rights. In fact, the night before the meeting began delegates from Hawaii, Maui, and Kauai had gathered at the Kyorakukan^[*] restaurant on Nuuanu Avenue to hold a three-island council. Ostensibly it was a social gathering, but its real purpose was to discuss how to rein in the Honolulu Plantation Labor Supporters' Association, which tended to plunge ahead without consulting the laborers themselves. To be sure, without the supporters' association, the meeting in Honolulu would not have been funded or even held, but the laborers' delegates were extremely wary of the participation of all the Honolulu Japanese newspapers. At the November 9 meeting, for example, five of the nine speakers had been newspapermen. As the Hawaii hochi^[*] asserted on December 1, the newspapermen believed that "making changes in society depends on the organs of public opinion." The newspapermen took the attitude that the workers could not do much without the "intelligentsia." And their attitude suggested that their involvement might reflect a struggle for leadership among the newspapers.

The English-language press saw the wage increase movement not as one arising from among the laborers but as an affair stirred up by the Japanese-language newspapers. The labor delegates feared that if the Japanese-language newspaper reporters led the attack at the meeting, it would only reinforce the views of the English papers and play into the hands of the planters' association. "This is our movement," they felt, "so we will carry it ourselves. We appreciate sympathy and understanding, but we reject any interference."

In the end, the question of voting rights was resolved by allocating

votes on the basis of the number of laborers, with eight votes going to Hawaii and six votes to each of the other islands. As this was a workers' struggle, the supporters' association had the right to speak out but did not participate in the votes. One newspaperman, disgruntled at this resolution of the voting rights issue, immediately challenged the qualifications of Noboru Tsutsumi, the delegate from Hawaii.

The Honolulu newspapermen found it difficult to deal with Tsutsumi, a man whose education was superior to their own. Tsutsumi had never made the round of greetings to the Japanese-language newspapers, considered customary for anyone seeking to do anything in Honolulu. It was Tsutsumi, moreover, who had warned against the involvement of the Japanese newspapermen in the wage increase movement and insisted that it should be a labor movement with "true laborers" as its members. Irritated that "peasants" had arrived in Honolulu to dominate the movement while they were forced to the sidelines, the newspapermen made Tsutsumi the object of their attack.

Tsutsumi had already resigned from the Hawaii mainichi , but there was certainly a problem with his qualifications as a "true laborer." Among delegates from the other islands were newspaper reporters or schoolteachers, but all of them had had experience working in the cane fields. Nevertheless, the labor delegates from the islands, brushing aside interruptions by the supporters' association, resolved, "It is not essential that those entrusted by laborers to be their delegates be laborers."

On the third day of the meeting, the delegate from Ewa on Oahu directly criticized Haga (nicknamed "Fighter Haga"), editor-in-chief of Hawaii hochi^[*] , who had strenuously criticized the 1909 strike in a newspaper bought out by the planters. He continued to publish vehement views on the labor movement, incurring the anger of the Japanese laborers. The consulate in Honolulu still has in its archives a threatening letter, with a photograph of Haga showing in red ink blood flowing down from the tip of a Japanese sword stuck in his throat.

Despite such disputes the delegates finally managed to debate the main issue: how much of a wage increase to demand. On December 5 they issued a declaration announcing the formation of the Federation of Japanese Labor in Hawaii (also called the Japanese Labor Federation by English newspapers). President Manlapit of the Filipino Labor Union, who attended that day, stressed the importance of cooperation between the Japanese organization and the Filipino workers. In response, the Japanese promised solidarity. But when the Japanese delegates met that

evening to decide on the details of the wage increase agenda, the main topic was put aside as discussion shifted to warnings about the Filipinos until late into the night.