Japanese Immigration to Hawaii

The first Japanese immigrants to Hawaii, known as the gannen mono (first-year arrivals), arrived in 1868. The Hawaiian Kingdom's Board of Immigration had asked Eugene Van Reed, an American merchant who had served as the Hawaiian consul in Japan, to recruit contract laborers to work in the cane fields. Van Reed recommended the Japanese as excellent laborers and spoke in the highest terms of their industry and docility, their cleanliness and honesty, and their adaptability.

It proved difficult to gather the anticipated number of 350 immigrants, and in the end only 148 (of these 6 were women) were actually recruited. Their pay was to be $4 per month with room and board provided for a three-year period, and Hawaii covered their round-trip ship passage. Many of the gannen mono were gamblers and idlers recruited from the streets of Yokohama who knew nothing about farming and were ill-suited for hard work in the sugarcane fields. When misunderstandings arose about their pay, this first effort at bringing in Japanese labor ended in failure. No additional contract workers came from Japan for another decade and a half.

By that time sugar had become king in Hawaii. In the late eighteenth century James Cook, the first Caucasian to set foot on Hawaiian soil, had noted in his ship journal that he had seen sugarcane. Half a century later, in the 1820s, missionaries arrived by sailing ship from New England, not only to convert the natives to Christianity, but also to teach them how to write and farm. It was the Hawaiian-born descendants of

these missionaries, called kamaaina , who saw the potential for sugarcane production in Hawaii. In 1848 foreigners, who had previously leased cane fields from the Hawaiian kings and chieftains, were allowed to buy land. Haole ownership of land increased rapidly. Not only did the scale of the sugar industry change suddenly, the social structure of Hawaii was transformed as well. The power of the Hawaiian royal dynasty, established by King Kamehameha I ten years before the missionaries' arrival, began to decline.

From the beginning the greatest problem for the Hawaiian sugar industry was the lack of a labor force. Native Hawaiians worked only when they felt like it—a custom they called kanaka —and were not inclined toward heavy labor in the fields all day long. Their numbers were also rapidly reduced by epidemic disease brought by foreign whaling ships. In 1850 a labor contract law was enacted to increase the labor supply. Workers from China were the first outsiders to be sought out as cheap labor. Docile and hardworking, they gradually constituted the majority of cane field laborers. But after working diligently and saving money, these Chinese workers would leave the fields when their contracts were up (five years initially, three years from 1870 on) to open up businesses. Some also went to the American mainland.

From early on Chinese laborers had gone to California to work on building the continental railroad. The Taiping rebellion and other disturbances that wreaked havoc in China produced a continuous stream of immigrants seeking work in America. But the Chinese newcomers were soon perceived as a threat by Caucasian laborers. Not only did they put up with exploitation and work hard for low pay, they held fast to their own ways of life. They still wore their pigtails, they lived in their own separate Chinatowns, and they continued to gamble and smoke opium. Seeing the Chinese as immigrants who could not be assimilated, the Caucasians began to demand that the Chinese must go. When a recession in the 1870s led to severe unemployment, Caucasian labor unions took the lead in the movement opposing Chinese immigration to the United States. Gradually the quota for Chinese immigrants was decreased, and in 1882 Congress passed the Chinese Exclusion Act.

By this time only a quarter of Chinese laborers who had migrated to Hawaii were left in the cane fields, and the sugar planters of Hawaii had already begun to seek other cheap labor to take their place. The Japanese government signed a formal immigration agreement with the kingdom of Hawaii in 1885. During the next nine years, nearly thirty thousand Japanese crossed the ocean to work under three-year contracts for

wages of $12.50 per month. Most were poor tenant farmers from the bottom economic strata in Japan. Unlike the gannen mono, these Japanese contract workers were accustomed to working in the fields. Seeing that the Japanese worked as strenuously as the Chinese, the plantation owners soon competed to hire them. (Plantation managers ordered the procurement of "Japs" in the same memoranda in which they ordered macaroni, rice, horses, and mules.)

The Japanese government backed the contract labor system as a way of earning foreign exchange. It declared, "If we send 3 million workers out into the world and each one of them sends back to Japan $6 per year, the country will benefit." In fact, money remitted by the immigrants to Japan during the Meiji period amounted to more than 2 million yen annually. For a Japan struggling under foreign debts incurred to procure military equipment and other foreign goods, the foreign currency sent home by the immigrants, who hoped to return home "clad in brocade" after enduring hard labor under the broiling Hawaiian sun, was not an insignificant sum.

The United States was in a period of rapid industrial growth after the end of the Civil War. A great wave of European immigrants were pouring into the East Coast as unskilled factory workers, just as the Japanese were pouring into Hawaii, still an independent kingdom. There was a significant difference, however, between the Japanese and the European immigrants. The Europeans had forsaken their homelands and had placed their hopes in the New World, where they intended to stay permanently. By contrast, the Japanese immigrants to Hawaii expected to return home. In fact, they were indentured as contract immigrants, a practice forbidden by law in the United States. Japanese Foreign Ministry documents referred to the immigrants as "officially contracted overseas laborers" (kanyaku dekaseginin ), and they were admitted into Hawaii solely to work in the sugarcane fields.

After 1893, when the Japanese government entrusted the immigration business to private immigration companies, the number of privately contracted overseas laborers increased. The following year the Hawaiian monarchy was overthrown with the help of American marines supporting the haole sugar planters. Hawaii became a "republic." Four years later, in 1898, the republic was annexed by the United States. For the sugar planters, who engineered the whole process, joining the United States was a long-cherished goal. Annexation meant an end to tariffs, enabling Hawaiian sugar to compete better with Cuban sugar or beet sugar from the U.S. mainland.

Nearly all the sugar plantations in Hawaii were under the control of five major sugar factoring companies organized by the powerful and unified kamaaina elite. Dominating all aspects of sugar marketing and management, as well as procurement of the labor force and seeds, these companies gradually absorbed small-scale growers with meager capital. Known as the Big Five, they became the new royalty of Hawaii and exercised enormous influence over the Hawaiian territorial government.

The annexation of Hawaii coincided with the extension of American sovereignty over the territories of the Philippines, Guam, and Puerto Rico, acquired as a result of the Spanish-American War, and with the enunciation of the Open Door policy in China. These developments marked a full-fledged American advance into the Asia-Pacific region, just at a time when Japan was expanding its power on the Asian continent after its military victory over China in 1895. In a clear display of its national strength, almost annually Japan had already been sending its imperial fleet, with rising sun flag unfurled, to Hawaii, a strategic spot in the Pacific Ocean.

Olaa Plantation, where Juzaburo^[*] Sakamaki was hired as an interpreter, was established as a corporation capitalized at $5 million in May 1899, a year after annexation. Anticipating capital infusion from the U.S. mainland, much new plantation land was opened up after annexation. The development of Olaa was unprecedented in scale. An enormous land reclamation project opened some 20,000 acres (8,093 hectares) of cane fields extending from a point eight miles from Hilo to the Kilauea volcano. Originally owned by the Hawaiian royal family, the Olaa area was a jungle thick with ohia trees, ferns, and shrubs. The land had been sold to private individuals, and coffee cultivation had been attempted some ten years before but had ended in failure because of too much rainfall. The climate, however, was very suitable for sugarcane cultivation.

The first person to be hired for the Olaa reclamation project was the labor contractor Jirokichi Iwasaki. Gathering about fifty Japanese laborers and with the help of three horses, Iwasaki cleared 40 acres (about 16 hectares). He was the first contractor to undertake not only clearing the land but also the entire process of sugarcane cultivation, from kanakou (planting of cane), hanawae (irrigation of planted cane), hole-hole (cutting of dried grass), and kachiken (harvesting the cane) to furubi (transporting the cane by waterways) and hapai ko (loading). And it was Juzaburo Sakamaki's job not merely to act as interpreter but to enable the Japanese laborers and the company to understand each other.

Within six months of the opening of the plantation, the number of laborers at Olaa swelled to 1,829. The vast majority were Japanese (1,268 were Japanese, 132 were Chinese, and 429 were Hawaiian). Still there were not enough. Workers were needed not only to grow sugar cane but also to lay a railroad line to carry the cane to the port at Hilo.

Annexation advanced the interests of the sugar industry, but it was not all to the producers' advantage. When Hawaii came under American law, contract labor immigration ended immediately. Finding themselves unexpectedly free, many Japanese workers left Hawaii in search of "gold-bearing trees" on the American mainland, where working conditions were vastly better. The Hawaiian sugar producers, who had expected that American law would not apply in Hawaii for three years, grew alarmed. To deal with the exodus of Japanese laborers, the Hawaiian legislature enacted a high business tax on the go-betweens who supplied laborers to the mainland, but even this did not halt the flow of workers out of Hawaii.

In the meantime anti-Japanese movements gained momentum on the West Coast. The California Japanese Exclusion League circulated pamphlets alleging that Japanese immigrants "don't mind low pay and long hours of work"; that they "have a strong sense of patriotism, and send money to their homeland without contributing to the American economy"; that they "do not make efforts to learn English"; that they "do not throw off their own culture, and refuse to assimilate"; and that they "engage in public urination, gamble with hanafuda cards, and, even on Sunday, get drunk and buy women." When there was an economic downturn, Caucasian workers targeted Japanese immigrants just as earlier they had worked to exclude Chinese low-wage workers.

Against this background, in 1907 President Theodore Roosevelt issued an executive order on termination of labor migration from Hawaii. Since Japan showed its ambition to dominate East Asia with its victory in the Russo-Japanese War two years earlier, American wariness toward Japan was rapidly on the rise. In 1906 the San Francisco School Board had resolved to segregate Japanese pupils in the public schools. When the Japanese government objected, the federal government in Washington, D.C., forced the city of San Francisco to rescind its resolution. But at the same time Roosevelt issued his executive order preventing Japanese immigrants from going to the mainland from Hawaii.

In 1908 the so-called Gentlemen's Agreement was reached to appease anti-Japanese feelings. The Japanese government agreed to voluntarily restrict emigration to the United States to reentering immigrants and

their parents, wives, or children. Until the Gentlemen's Agreement the majority of Japanese immigrants had been single men, and with so few women, relations between the sexes in the Japanese immigrant community provided one source of anti-Japanese feelings among the Caucasians. To put an end to this situation "picture bride" marriages—marriages of convenience contracted by prospective partners who exchanged photographs—were encouraged.