The Japanese Community in Hawaii

The Shunyo-maru docked in Honolulu on Thursday, February 28, 1918. The disembarking passengers were hurried into an immigration office surrounded by a wire fence. Along with the immigrant laborers, Noboru Tsutsumi had to submit to a literacy screening, a stool test for hook-worm, inspection for trachoma, and checks for other diseases. But the Hawaiian Islands had become a comfortable place for newcomers from Japan. As Saikin Hawaii annai , a guidebook published in Hawaii for newly arrived Japanese noted, "Of the 240,000 population of Hawaii, Japanese residents form a majority; as a crossroads of the Pacific, the arrival and departure of Japanese is daily increasing in frequency."

According to the guidebook, Hawaii, "the paradise of the Pacific," had an average annual temperature of 75°F. In the torrid summer months of August and September the temperature rose into the nineties, but in February, when Tsutsumi arrived, temperatures could dip lower than 60°. "Men can wear Western clothes with melton lining the year around," the guidebook noted, "and women can go through the entire year with a cotton yukata and haori half coat." Hawaii was also a place where Japanese travelers could take care of their daily affairs without using English. Once safely through the immigration office, newly arrived Japanese found that not only the coachmen in the carriages taking passengers from the Honolulu piers to the inns but also the drivers of the streetcars crisscrossing the city were mostly Japanese. Lining the streets of Honolulu were inns and shops displaying signs written in Japanese characters. According to a Consulate General survey, the number of Japanese in Hawaii in the year Tsutsumi arrived was 102,479. As Saikin Hawaii annai noted, Hawaii was truly "a Japanese village in the middle of the Pacific."

At Honolulu Noboru Tsutsumi boarded a small ship of the Inter-Island Navigation Company headed for the largest of the islands, Hawaii, nicknamed "the Big Island." It left Honolulu in the evening and arrived at Hilo the following morning, usually after a rough crossing. The port of Hilo was frequented not only by ships plying the waters between the islands but also by merchant ships from the American mainland, Yokohama, and South America. With a population of more than ten thousand, more than half of them Japanese, Hilo was the second-largest town in the Hawaiian Islands.

In Honolulu the business district was dominated by Caucasians, whose imposing brick or stone buildings symbolized their economic and social power, but most of the three hundred or so shops in Hilo were single-story wooden structures, nearly all of them displaying Japanese signs. On Front Street, the town's main street, which the Japanese called Motomachi, more than a few shops were owned by Japanese. Among them were rice, noodle, and soy sauce makers, but most were fish stores. The wholesale fish market was run by Japanese.

Disembarking at Hilo, travelers headed for one of the Japanese inns, such as the Okino, Matano, Yamato, or Koizumi. Among the restaurants in downtown Hilo were Okino, Baigetsu, Anegawa, Nomuratei, Daikokutei, and Seaside Club. There were even half a dozen women who made a living as geisha—professional entertainers. Most likely the welcoming party for Noboru Tsutsumi, the new principal of the high school, was

held at one of these restaurants. Among the theaters in Hilo were the Yurakukan^[*] (considered larger than any in Honolulu), the Yamatoza^[*] , the Kaisui-za, the Teikoku Gekijo^[*] (Imperial Theater), the Moheau-za, and the Kilauea-za. Religious establishments included the Yamato Shrine, the Honganji mission, the Jodo^[*] sect's Meishoin^[*] , the Shingon sect's mission, and a Christian church.

Newspapers and magazines from all over Japan arrived in Honolulu. The local Japanese-language newspapers carried articles from Tokyo, and international telegrams were received twice a day. Even in Hilo there were three daily Japanese-language newspapers, the Hilo mainichi , the Hilo asahi , and the Hilo shinpo^[*] , and a weekly, Kazan (Volcano). From these papers Tsutsumi would have learned the peculiar words the Japanese used daily in Hawaii: "plantation camp" (kochi^[*] kyanpu ), "(Buddhist) missionary" (kaikyoshi^[*] ), "Japanese clothes" (Nihongi ), "arrival in Hawaii" (rai-Fu ), "return to Hawaii" (ki-Fu ). And although Hawaii was an American territory, the local Japanese immigrants called the Americans "foreigners" (gaijin ), the Hawaiians "natives" (dojin ), and the Hawaiian-born Japanese "second generation" (nisei ).

In addition to the local English-language public school, there were seven Japanese-language schools in and around Hilo: the Honganji-affiliated middle school, girls' school, and elementary school; the Jodo sect-affiliated girls' school; and three independent elementary schools unaffiliated with any religious institutions. Only a few pupils, however, went on to high school.

The first appearance of Noboru Tsutsumi, the Hilo Japanese school principal, in materials related to Japanese in Hawaii is on July 22, 1918, when as the representative of the Hawaii Island Education Research Group he attended the Third Hawaii Educational Representatives' Meeting held by Japanese-language educators. It was a mere five months after his arrival in Hawaii.

In a keynote speech to the meeting, Consul General Rokuro^[*] Moroi cautioned his audience,

The many problems brought about by the state of current affairs are now weighing on the shoulders of educators. Especially since entry of the United States into the Great War in Europe, a variety of new issues have been raised, which put the close relations between Japan and the U.S. in an entirely different light from before the war. Now is a time when you should do more than devote yourselves to furthering Japanese-language education. You must realize that you have the power to deal with other grave and momentous matters as well.

A month before the meeting Secretary of the Interior Franklin N. Lane had arrived in Hawaii on an observation visit. On the surface his visit was to look into Hawaiian land problems, but when he stopped off in Los Angeles on his return trip he announced, "It is extremely important to Americanize the foreigners who were born in Hawaii and the resident aliens too."^[6] His strong tone focused attention on the foreign-language schools.

The "foreign-language schools problem" had already emerged as a major social issue in Hawaii. At its core was concern over how to educate second-generation Japanese. In effect, what was at stake was the way Japanese immigrants should live in the American territory of Hawaii. Tsutsumi, who decided so lightly to cross the Pacific in the hope of being reunited with his brother in New York, unexpectedly found himself in the eye of the storm over these issues.