An Explosion in the Night

On April 15, 1920, on a street in South Braintree, Massachusetts, the paymaster of a shoe factory and his security guard were assaulted at midday while delivering the employees' payroll. The guard died instantly, the paymaster the next day. Three weeks later, on May 5, the shoemaker Nicola Sacco and the fishmonger Bartolomeo Vanzetti were arrested on suspicion of robbery and murder. Both men were Italian immigrants known to be anarchists. Thus began the "Sacco and Vanzetti Case," notorious in American labor history.

Less well known is an incident that began six weeks later, on June 3, 1920, at Olaa Plantation on the island of Hawaii, five thousand miles and five time zones from South Braintree. The journey by train across the continent and then by ship from the West Coast took half a month. To mainland Americans, Hawaii seemed closer to East Asia than to America, and the islands were still a territory, not yet recognized as a state.

A small item in the June 4 Honolulu Star Bulletin noted, "The home of a Japanese eight miles from Olaa was blown up with giant powder last night." The newspaper did not give the name of the victim, but it reported that the man was in a back bedroom at the time and was not killed, even though the front of the house was destroyed.

It is not surprising that no name was mentioned. Laborers who worked in the sugarcane fields, the main industry in Hawaii, were anonymous to the companies that employed them. Because their names

sounded unfamiliar to their haole bosses, they were forced to wear aluminum neck tags engraved with numbers. It was by these "bango" numbers that they were recognized when they received their semimonthly pay, charged items at the company store, or were punished for violating regulations.

The man unnamed in this incident, however, was not a mere laborer. He was Juzaburo^[*] Sakamaki, the interpreter for the Olaa Sugar Company, who was paid a salary under his own name just as the haole employees were. At the time the forty-nine-year-old Sakamaki was known to the haoles as Frank Sakamaki.

During the trial over the incident, Sakamaki recalled the explosion. "It was about eleven o'clock P.M . that night of the third of June; maybe a little before or maybe ten or fifteen minutes," he said. "I didn't take a look at the clock that time; the clock was fallen down. I was awokened by sound and, of course, didn't realize that it was an explosion; first thought it was water-tank fell or something; anyway, I was awokened by the sound, and my wife was in another room and she called me, 'What was that sound? What was that noise?' Then a little later my boy said he smelled powder; then I realized it was an explosion."^[1]

The Star Bulletin was wrong when it reported that Sakamaki was in a back bedroom. All of the bedrooms in the Sakamaki house were on the second floor; none were at the rear of the house. According to Sakamaki's testimony, after he heard the blast, he jumped out of bed and rushed downstairs with a flashlight. When he reached the first floor, it was so full of smoke he could not see clearly. Somehow he made his way outside and ran to the house of the inspector (the security guard hired directly by the plantation). Even running through the field of sugarcane taller than a man so fast that he got out of breath, it took him five or six minutes to get there. The inspector's wife, wearing a muumuu as a nightgown, came to the door. The inspector himself had just dashed out of his house, thinking that something had occurred at the mill.

Instead of following the inspector to the mill, Sakamaki ran to the Olaa Sugar Company office, grabbed the wall telephone, and called Charles F. Eckart, the manager of Olaa Plantation, at his home. After Sakamaki apologized for waking him in the middle of the night, Eckart calmly responded that he would contact the local police and then go to the Sakamaki house right away. Approximately twenty minutes later, Henry Martin, deputy sheriff of the Olaa district police station, arrived there by car.

In the meantime Sakamaki had run home and found that the smoke

had cleared considerably, revealing what had happened inside. In the parlor, the table was overturned, and legless chairs were strewn all over the room. It looked as if a toy chest had been dumped onto the floor. In the living room next to the parlor, shards from vases and other objects were scattered everywhere. Then Sakamaki noticed for the first time that the side of the house had been blown off.

In the seventy years since the explosion, Hawaiian society has undergone great changes, but today the only way to reach the Olaa Sugar Company from the city of Hilo is by following the old road. About eight miles from Hilo, Volcano Road, the route taken by tourist buses going to Mount Kilauea, crosses a road so narrow that one could easily miss it. The road curves gently for a mile or so toward the ocean. Since it was a private company road, it is not named on the map, but the local people still call it Plantation Road. Unlike the paved Volcano Road, it remains a gravel road just as it was in 1920. According to the confession of the perpetrator, it was the road he used to flee after setting the explosives.

When I visited Olaa in 1987, the road was overgrown on either side with sugarcane gone wild. After turning onto it, I saw in the distance beyond the golden cane the tall smokestack of the mill. As the mill was to be closed two months later after eighty-five years of operation, no smoke rose from it. The mill consisted of several dilapidated tin-sided structures. The suffocatingly sweet smell so peculiar to sugar refineries, produced by the filtering of the boiled juice pressed from the cane, was long gone. Next to a huge concrete water tank was a tall water tower. It was not the same one there at the time of the incident, but the location and height were similar. When Sakamaki and the inspector heard the blast of the explosion, both had mistakenly thought that the water tower had fallen down.

The Olaa Sugar Company building, referred to by the local people simply as the "Office," is four times larger than it was at the time of the incident. It is a very long single-story wooden structure with peeling white paint and a deep eave along the front to offer protection from the heavy rainfall throughout the year. The distance between the Office and the mill is about one hundred fifty meters across the sugarcane fields. Looking diagonally right behind the Office, the roof and smokestack of the mill are visible and the water tower tank seems to be floating on a sea of sugarcane.

The Sakamaki house was in the middle of the cane field, on the border of north district fields 390 and 370, near Olaa Eight Mile Station on

the rail line from Hilo. Hiroshi Baba, a trucking company owner in Hilo who formerly worked on the administrative staff at Olaa Sugar Company, lived in the former Sakamaki house until he retired. "It was a large house," he recalled, "just like one for the haoles." It stood by itself at a distance behind the company buildings. There were only three other houses nearby—company houses for haole technicians and a Portuguese engineer—but they were still at some distance across the cane fields. The camps where plantation laborers lived, grouped by their countries of origin, were even farther away. The closest, Eight Mile Camp, was half a mile away. The inspector's house at Eight Mile Camp, where about forty skilled mill workers lived, was about four hundred meters from the Sakamaki house.

The plantation workday started before sunup. The plantation laborers awakened at 4:30 A.M . and were in the fields by 6:00. The administration staff were at the Office by 7:00. Because they started so early in the morning, workers went to bed soon after sundown, and the lamps in their houses were turned off early in the evening. Sunset in Hawaii on the day of the incident was 6:38 P.M . When Sakamaki had run along the paths through the sugarcane fields on the night of the explosion, the moon was two-thirds full.

Houses on Hawaii, where the climate is always warm and humid, are set above the ground. The floor of the Sakamaki house was raised about 70 centimeters above ground level on the Hilo side but as high as 160 centimeters on the volcano, or mauka , side. The dynamite had been set under the floor between the parlor and the dining room on the mauka side. The impact of the explosion can be seen vividly in the photographs taken for the police by a Japanese photographer from Olaa on the morning after the incident. The outside of the house was faced with vertical boards. In the section with the worst damage, sixteen of these boards had been blown off, leaving a large hole that looked as if a cannon shell had hit. In other sections, the boards were cracked up to the roofline or were nearly falling off. The window glass had splintered, and the second floor window frame was twisted and dangling. Strewn on the ground were jagged fragments of wood, their ends seemingly sharpened, and scattered about were pieces of what looked like steel pipe. A kerosene tank under the floor had once piped in the oil for the lamps inside the house, but at the time of the explosion it was not being used. If this tank had been full of kerosene, the dynamite blast would have been considerably more destructive.

Plantation workers' living quarters in the camps were mostly row houses, and families even lived in one room, sleeping on mats on the wooden floor. By contrast the Sakamaki family lived in luxury. The house had running water. On the ground floor were a parlor, living room, and dining room across the hall from a kitchen, bath, and storage room. On the second floor were Mrs. Sakamaki's sewing room and four bedrooms. At the time of the blast, Sakamaki had six children. His eldest son, Paul (Tokuo), a seventeen-year-old junior in high school who had smelled the gunpowder right away, was the only one with his own bedroom. On the other side of the sewing room Sakamaki's wife, Haru (36), slept with their sixth son, Noboru (3), their oldest daughter, Masa (8), and their fifth son, Charles (Yuroku^[*] , 5). (Their fourth son had died in infancy.) Across the hallway was the room where their second son, George (Joji^[*] , 15), and third son, Shunzo (Shunzo^[*] , 13), slept, and next to it was Sakamaki's bedroom. At the trial, Sakamaki recalled seeing cracks in his oldest boy's bedroom. "It was a narrow escape for us," he said. "We all think ourselves very fortunate we escape this."

The only Sakamaki children still living are Masa and Ben, a seventh son born ten months after the incident. Masa is the only witness who can describe the dynamiting incident as she saw it, but even now she does not wish to speak of her memories. Ben told me that at the time the Sakamaki garden was full of hibiscus and other colorful plants. "On the banana tree, which was the tallest tree by far," he said, "one of the fragments of wood was stuck like a knife into the trunk."