The Spanish Influenza Strikes
As he had done in the case of the Filipino workers, Acting Governor Iaukea asked the HSPA to postpone evicting striking Japanese workers from the plantations until the influenza epidemic was contained, and once again the planters refused. On February 18 the HSPA ordered that the striking workers be removed from plantation housing within forty-eight hours. At some plantations, such as Aiea, several dozen temporarily hired plantation police went from house to house throwing household goods on the street and nailing shut doors. The only workers permitted to stay at Ewa Plantation were two disabled men, who had lost limbs in accidents with cane knives and who were not participating in the strike. Even the sick, who had taken to bed heavily wrapped in clothes to ward off the chills of high fever, were mercilessly evicted. Children as well as adults, packing blankets, pots, pans, and basins on their backs, left their humble but comfortably familiar homes. The Japanese camps in all the plantations became ghost towns, where the voices of playing children and the cries of babies could no longer be heard.
"Striking Japanese were chased out of their houses," recalled Antone Camacho, a Portuguese luna at Kahuku Plantation who was twenty-six years old at the time. "Other people came to take chickens and other things which were left behind."[11] Some have testified, however, that it was not the plantation companies but the local Federation of Japanese Labor that forced the evictions. According to Seiichi Miyasaki, a junior in high school at Waialua at the time, "My father was head carpenter, earning $2 a day, he did not want to strike because I was little, and he thought I'd be in a bad situation thereafter. . . . [M]ore or less he was forced to go on strike. My father did not want to strike, but I distinctly remember four men came with the truck to load our stuff in the car."[12]
Though Hawaii is a land of eternal summer, February is the coolest month of the year, and on rainy evenings it can become quite chilly. The
total number of workers and their families evicted was 13,393 (some 4,000 children among them). Many were forced to sleep outdoors near the railroad stations for several weeks after their expulsion. At Waipahu and Waialua plantations most evicted families took shelter in local Japanese-language schools and temples. But the majority of those at Aiea and Kahuku plantations headed for Honolulu in small trucks and rail cars arranged by the federation. Immediately after the expulsion order, 7,000 went to Honolulu, and the number continued to increase. This forced the federation to expend a vast sum of money. For the month of February lodging costs for evicted workers rose to $18,000 and transportation costs to $6,000.
Evacuation to Honolulu was only possible with the total cooperation of the supporters' association, which the federation had tried to keep at a distance. Since space was running out at all available inns, rental houses, churches, temples, shrines, and Japanese-language schools, the federation had to ask members of the Japanese community to open their warehouses for people to sleep in. It was only because the highly respected leaders of the supporters' association went around Honolulu with federation secretary Ichiji Goto[*] and others that the community agreed to help out.
At the newly rebuilt Honganji mission in Hawaii on Foat Street, supported by large donations from the worshipers, evacuees from Kahuku slept on bedding spread on the concrete floor of the great hall. Flush toilets had been installed a few months before, but children, familiar only with the more primitive nonflush public latrines on the plantation, kept throwing things into them even after being told not to do so many times. The plumbers' bills were sent to the federation.
Workers from Aiea Plantation were sheltered in a church on King Street. "We put wicker boxes and trunks in the wide hallway of the basement as partitions between families," recalled Violet Fujinaka. "Quite a few people were coughing and needed bed rest. I had come to Hawaii when I was one year old, and I was 22 years old at the time. I was working as a maid in a white military man's house, and I would go on my day off once a week to see my mother at that church."[13]
The Filipinos suffered much more than the Japanese after being evicted from the plantations. The Izumo Taisha shrine was the only place that took them in, and it was clearly not large enough. Hiroshi Miyazawa, the overworked federation staff member in charge of the Filipinos, finally arranged to use an abandoned sake brewery storehouse. The Filipinos slept on beds made from soap boxes placed on a dirt floor reek-
ing of sour sake, and they had to dig holes in the dirt to use as latrines. Married and single workers were thrown in together, causing a great many problems.
The staff of the Honolulu Board of Health, on edge about the influenza epidemic, investigated conditions in each of the shelters. If they judged a place to be unclean, they ordered it to be closed immediately. For this reason, the presence of Filipinos in the sake storehouse was kept secret. Buying some time in this way, the federation started building shacks for the Filipinos on land it bought for $4,000.
The number of deaths attributed to the Spanish influenza in the United States from 1918 to 1921 was higher than all the American dead in World War I. In Japan there were some 130,000 deaths during the twelve months ending July 1920. The speedy imposition of a strict quarantine on ships arriving in Hawaiian ports kept down the number of flu patients, but even so the numbers were gradually rising. As Acting Governor Iaukea and the Board of Health had feared, with the migration of evicted workers from the plantations the numbers of patients rose dramatically.
The Honolulu Japanese Physicians' Association donated one thousand free consultation tickets to treat the evicted workers. The Japanese-language school, which became a temporary hospital for the striking workers, soon looked like a field hospital on a battlefront. Several young nisei women who worked as volunteer nurses at the public health section set up in the federation headquarters died from the disease. In February 1920 the causes of deaths recorded for Honolulu numbered 179 from influenza and 42 from pneumonia. But it is difficult to obtain an accurate count of Spanish influenza deaths. Doctors also listed acute pneumonia, respiratory infection, heart damage, and whooping cough on the death certificates.
Among the evicted Waialua Plantation worker families, forty-three people died just in the ten days after eviction. Many later recalled the epidemic in oral histories:
I remember lot of Japanese died on that strike. And I had lot of school friends, too. Like, Nakatsu, Kamiyama and all that. I don't know whether they had some place down Haleiwa there, some church or something tha. . . . the place was so crowded. . . . [T]hat was a pretty bad strike influenza came in.[14]
No doctor, doctor cannot. Everyday, so many guys are dying, so, you know, what they had to do was get a plantation truck and just dump the body. Put 'em in the graveyard. That's all. They cannot make a decent funeral. I notice
a place where mother and a son died together. They had to bury 'em together. So that epidemic was terrific.[15]
A person could get pains in the morning and be dead in the afternoon. My sister died too.[16]
(I went to Jodo[*] mission temple with my parents after eviction.) (There were) many people, I don't know how many, well, they all develop flu and original minister's wife passed away from the flu. Caught from the people. (Because of the strike), their sanitation was not as good as it should be then.[17]
Etsuta Inoue, the federation director from Maui, was one of those who died in the epidemic. Inoue had been trained as a Zen Buddhist priest and had also worked as a newspaper reporter. He was known to be passionate about his job with the federation. When he delivered a speech, using the strength of his entire body and his face flushing with emotion, it was like a "burst of flame."[18] He had returned from Maui on February 14 to make a report to the federation office, but for someone who was normally able to push himself hard, he seemed unusually lethargic. Another director, who had thought something might be wrong as he watched Inoue go off to the Kobayashi Inn, later found him shaking on his futon. He was immediately taken to the emergency hospital at the Japanese-language school.
The Japanese Hospital, originally called the Japanese Charity Hospital but renamed the Kuwakini Hospital during the Second World War, had been rebuilt two years before. It was a modern facility, but there were so many influenza patients that it was unable to handle them all. By the time Inoue was transferred to the Japanese Hospital from the dirt floor of the temporary ward two days later, he had contracted pneumonia and become delirious. A week later, half an hour after he was visited by the three federation secretaries, Tsutsumi, Miyazawa, and Goto[*] , and six directors, the thirty-two-year-old Inoue died. His last feverish words were, "Have the Filipinos gone back to work? Let's get all the islands. Oh, is that so? It's all right . . ."[19]
On Saturday, February 22, the day Inoue died, a grand Washington's Birthday parade was held in Honolulu. Marching schoolchildren were followed by members of the newly formed Hawaiian Post of the American Legion. A few days before, the local Legionnaires, following the policy of Americanism touted by the American Legion headquarters on the mainland, had issued a resolution stating that the Japanese-language schools and newspapers represented extreme anti-Americanism.
Determined to not let the death of Etsuta Inoue be futile, the federation turned his funeral at the Hawaii Honganji mission two days later into a major demonstration showing the renewed solidarity and determination of the striking workers. The funeral procession wound through the main streets of Honolulu, following Inoue's body from the Hosoi Funeral Home to the Honganji. First came a small marching band from the Waipahu Plantation youth group, quietly playing a song. Federation leaders walked on either side of the hearse, carrying a wreath of white and yellow flowers and a funerary banner of light yellow with the words "Mourning the spirit of Etsuta Inoue, director of the Federation" in black. The striking workers followed, grouped according to their plantations and walking in a silent, solemn procession. It was a clear day with blue skies. Along the funeral procession route, Japanese merchants pressed their palms together in prayer as they watched the coffin go by, and the large Hawaiian policeman who was directing traffic quietly gave a respectful salute.[20]
The mayor of Honolulu, Joseph James Fern, age forty-eight, who was already a patient in Queens Hospital, died two weeks later. Fern was of mixed white and Hawaiian parentage with the Hawaiian name Keo Kimo Pana. He had started out as a horse wagon driver at Kohala Plantation on Hawaii. From the start he had been sympathetic to the plantation workers. Indeed, he had declared that the success of the sugar industry in Hawaii was "due to the efforts of the Japanese workers,"[21] and like Curtis Iaukea, he had viewed the federation's actions with warmth. His lavish funeral was held in Hawaiian style, with colorful orchids.