PROGRAM THREERaising Cane

BILLBOARD

ANNOUNCER: Major Funding for this series is provided by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, with support from PRI – Public Radio International.

HOST: This is Crossing East… Our stories, our history, our America.

SOUND COLLAGE

RONALD TAKAKI: In Hawaii you had a diversity of workers from all over the world.

BILL PUETTE: There’s plenty of examples of workers who were beaten.

ALMA OGATA: And all we got paid was $2. That was slavery.

GEORGE FUJIWARA: My dad came to Hawaii And then when he was about 28 years old he got a picture bride

RICHARD NAGAME: Before the union you can’t do anything. No safety things. Not until after the union came into the picture.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: The way we agitated was go slow time, don’t go double time, work slowly. Secondly arson, burn the cane fields.

AH QUON MCELRATH: It didn’t make a difference whether you were Filipino, Japanese, Chinese or whatever it is, they gave their all in order to win the strike.

HOST: I’m George Takei… The story of “Raising Cane”…after this…

(NEWS BREAK)

SEGMENT A

MUSIC – SLACK KEY GUITAR FADES UNDER

HOST: I’m your host, George Takei and this is Crossing East… Our stories, our history, our America…

MUSIC – SLACK KEY GUITAR FADES UNDER

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HOST: This music by Slack Key Guitarist Led Ka’apana is like much of Hawaii, infused with the rich history of intermixing cultures and traditions.

When Mexican vaqueros introduced the guitar to Hawaiians in the mid 1850’s, the instrument became part of and was transformed by Hawaiian culture. The mixing of cultures is what makes Hawaii unique and vibrant. But the road to becoming the most multicultural society in America was arduous and often bitter…

Crossing East presents…

“Raising Cane” by Robynn Takayama and Dmae Roberts

Chapter One. The beginning…

SOUND: OCEAN WAVES

HOST: The year was 1778. An English explorer named Captain James Cook stepped onto the soil of Hawaii. He and his sailors found a land with a King. A land with its own laws and society. The Hawaiians farmed and fished and prayed together. King Kamehameha befriended the white Captain.

SOUND: SAILORS

At first the Europeans bought fur and sandalwood. Gradually, Hawaiians stopped growing their crops and focused on selling to the foreign ships. But the sailors brought disease and death. Within one hundred years, the Hawaiian population went from an estimated 300,000 to less than 50,000.

SOUND: MISSIONARIES SINGING

Then came the missionaries. They brought their own religion and their own laws. With businessmen and government leaders, they formed a haole or Caucasian monarchy and began to take the land. They created plantations to farm sugar cane and pineapple to ship to America. Sons of missionaries formed the “Big Five” companies. They owned almost half of Hawaii.

SOUND: PICKS IN SOIL, CUTTING CANE

First they used Hawaiian labor on the plantations. But it was Hawaiian tradition to work only to meet immediate needs. So there was no year-round workforce.

By 1850, the sugar industry exploded. Plantations needed cheap labor. Fast. The first workers came from China. Then Japan, Korea, the Philippines… The laborers had hopes of making money quickly and returning home.

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SOUND: WORK HORN

Raising Cane was backbreaking work and the pay was meager. Men who came to Hawaii had big dreams. They thought they would strike it rich. But the reality of plantation life was so different from what they were told by recruiters…

Chapter Two: “Hard Labor”

FLUTE

ACTOR: Times was real hard in Japan. Country folks like us never get money. crops no grow. And the emperor was spending money making Japan modern. Not helping the poor people. Plenty people move to the city. Somebody tell me I make good money in Hawaii. So I sign one three-year contract. I say goodbye to Hiroshima and promise my family to send money home. I told my mother I come back one rich man.

SOUND: DIGGING

ACTOR: But this no paradise. I know about hard work. But working on one small farm in Hiroshima nothing like plantation work in Hawaii.

Barbara Kawakami: She showed me her hands, you know, twisted and bruised and everything! The scars were still there!

Fuzzy Alboro: Working for the sugar company’s a dirty job. I used to dig ditch, repair pipes for the irrigation, and I was a fertilizer man.

George Fujiwara: My dad, uh I wish I knew him more. All he did was go to work, 30 days a month, 10 hours a day.

Ronald Takaki: The planters used the clock as a way to discipline and punish and control the work force.

SOUND: BIRDS, ROOSTER CROWING

SOUND: WHISTLE

ACTOR: At five o’clock, the wake-up whistle blows. The plantation police walk through the camps shouting, “Get up!” We eat one quick breakfast and gather outside. The bosses take twenty or thirty out to the fields.

SOUND: CANE BLOWING AND WALKING ON CANE

Six o’clock we start work. Some hoe weeds, some dig irrigation ditches. We plant cane, cut ‘em, and carry the heavy stalks on our shoulders to the wagons. At

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11:30 we get half hour lunch break. Then we keep working until 4:30. That’s ten hours of work! 1

Bill Puette: There’s plenty of examples of workers who were beaten. I mean the luna, the overseer in Hawaii notoriously carried this whip they called the ‘black snake’ and they didn’t hesitate to use this.

SOUND: WHISTLE

ACTRESS: One morning mom overslept and didn’t hear the work whistle. We were all asleep—my brother, his wife, my older sister, and myself. I was seven years old at the time.

SOUND: DOOR SWINGS OPEN AND FOOTSTEPS

ACTRESS: Suddenly the door swung open, and one big burly luna, the bossman, bust in, screaming and cursing,

ACTOR VOICE: “Get up, get to work.”

ACTRESS: The Luna ran around the room, ripping off the covers, not caring whether my family was dressed or not. I’ll never forget it.2

Barbara Kawakami: When they started working the fields, men and women, they’d hopaiko together. … You know hoppaiko is you cut the cane first into about 2 foot length and then after that you had to pile it, the long harvested sugar cane into bundles and they had to carry it into the cane car.

Bill Puette: They had people, this was mostly women’s labor by the way, that were stripping the cane by hand, manually, hole hole work they called it, stripping the cane. And they were bound up with clothes all around their face, all around their hands and arms and legs, and the reason for that is that this cane stalk would lacerate them.  When you see what they wore sometimes people are shocked because they think my god, this is Hawaii, they must have been sweating to death. Domingo Los Banos: If you break your contract the police come after you.  They were recaptured and he deserted.  Another guy recaptured and deserted.  There’s terrific amount of desertion, which told you that people hated to work in this harsh community.

Alma Ogata: Yeah, plantation work is very, very hard. They sacrificed. They were like the pioneers of the olden days in America.

1 Adapted from Pau Hana, p.582 Adapted from Asian Americans: An Interpretive History, p. 109

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ACTOR: So we work ALL day, and come home to wooden barracks! My bed is one long shelf on the wall, stacked three bunks high. There’s twenty, thirty, forty men in one building! No floor, no privacy, no running water.

Bill Puette: ‘cause certainly there was no idea in the minds of the planters that the people who were brought in, the Japanese, the Chinese, the Filipinos, would ever stay in Hawaii.  They were to be on these contracts and then they were to get out and go back to the country that they came from.  They did not want them building roots here in Hawaii. 

Domingo Los Banos: In the early days, if you broke a wagon, they charged you five dollars.  If you were late, one dollar.  If you were drunk, five dollars.  If they caught you gambling, five dollars.  Every behavior that they want to impinge on, there was a penalty.

ACTOR: So how am I suppose to save money?!

Ok, ok, I lose little bit gambling and sometimes I drink too much on the day off.

I miss home. I lonely. No women here. I cannot go back to Japan a poor man scarred by years of plantation work. So I stay in Hawaii, send for one picture bride.

SOUND: HOLE HOLE BUSHI SONG

HOST: This is Hole Hole Bushi—a traditional Japanese labor song. Picture brides sang songs like this working in the fields alongside their husbands…

In 1900, the plantations were bachelor societies. Some men married native Hawaiian women. Wealthier men returned home to find brides. A 1907 law, The Gentleman’s Agreement, allowed only family members to immigrate. So many Japanese, Okinawan, and Korean men asked their families to help arrange a marriage across the ocean. Barbara Kawakami interviewed many picture brides who married plantation workers in Hawaii.

Barbara Kawakami: …their marriage was arranged through a friend while working in the cane field digging! And then they said, oh, how about your daughter and my son get married.

Chapter Three of “Raising Cane.” “Picture Bride”

GEORGE FUJIWARA: My dad came to Hawaii when he was twelve years old by himself.  …And then when he was about 28 years old he got a picture bride. He looked at that picture, “Send them over.” And they were married forever. Not like today they think they love each other, one, two year they divorce.  But they were married until they passed away and raised nine children.

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ACTRESS: The matchmaker hands me an envelope and I rip it open. I pull out a black and white photograph of a man, so handsome in his suit. He stands in front of a house and looks so wealthy! Why would I marry a poor farmer in Japan when I can marry adventurous, rich man in Hawaii?

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: Well, majority of the women that I had interviewed who came as picture brides came from farming, agriculture background. And so the reason many of them came of course was the bachelors were here as the contract laborers.

ACTRESS: But the only way to get to Hawaii is if you are family of an immigrant already there.

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: Mr. Funikoshia, a well-educated man, very scholarly, he told me their marriage was arranged through a friend while working in the cane field digging! And then they said, oh, how about your daughter and my son get married. That casually marriages were arranged.

ACTRESS: It’s a little scary to marry someone I’ve never met, but I trust our matchmaker. He’s writes to both of our families and asks us all kinds of questions.

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: They would really do a thorough investigation: make sure the water’s pure in the village, no leprosy, no insanity. They would make sure that she’s properly trained.

ACTRESS: The family will make the final decision about whom I marry, but it’s still exciting when the picture arrives. When we agree to marry, my future husband sends four hundred dollars to pay for my boat ride to Hawaii. Then we have our wedding ceremony.

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: they had somebody standing in for the groom to be, and then they sipped the SAKE 3-3-3 times, a total of 9 sips. They have a girl dressed in pure white to serve the sake. Once that is exchanged, you’re … legally married…even if the husband is in Hawaii. …And then the wife’s name is put into the family register in the village office. And you’re declared legally married.

ACTRESS: After I’m legally part of the family, I have to wait six more months before I can travel to Hawaii.

BOAT SOUNDS, WATER SPLASHING

ACTRESS: The boat I sail on is called the Mexico Maru. There are several other picture brides on board with me.

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We each have our reasons to travel so far to marry a stranger. Some forced by parents. Some run away from shame in Japan. And some curious about far away land. But all of us think we’ll have a good life in Hawaii.

MUSIC UNDERNEATH

HOST: Stay with us for part two of Picture Bride… I’m George Takei.

ANNOUNCER: This is PRI – Public Radio International.

MUSIC BREAK

SEGMENT B

MUSIC UNDER

HOST: This is “Crossing East” and you’re listening to “Raising Cane”-- I’m George Takei.

Even though the Immigration Act of 1924 outlawed all immigration from Asia, more than 20-thousand picture brides came to live in Hawaii and to help their husbands work the cane fields… With them came hope for starting families and building communities… part two of Picture Bride.

MAY FUJIWARA: My grandmother came from Japan and so did my grandfather. My grandfather came first and as most men did I think, they ordered picture brides. In those days they thought going to Hawaii was quite an improvement and when they looked at his picture, too, they thought he was such a successful man!

RONALD TAKAKI: So there were Japanese women who became picture brides not because they wanted to get married, but because they wanted to get to Hawaii and then to California.

ALMA OGATA: And then when she arrived at Honolulu Harbor, she was detained three days to take out any toxins or whatever disease they may have brought from Japan. But on the third day, they were released. She said there were six couples that got married by the Christian minister in a mass wedding ceremony right at the immigration station.

ACTRESS: But when ship docks, my dreams of palm trees and paradise with my handsome husband are gone.

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FRANKLIN ODO: Many of them were misled, pictures of husbands who sent photographs from a decade earlier or of better looking friends or of themselves in a suit in front of a big building when they lived in a shack.

ESPY GARCIA: One lady shared about her grandmamma who came to the immigration, met the man she’s intended to. He had sent the picture of himself when he was 25 years old, he was now 45. She was only 19.

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: Ms. Osato, the picture bride from Okinawa, she was only 16…she said actually she didn’t want to come, but her family was so poor, they had to get her to get married to come to Hawaii to better her life and they thought the husband to be would help support her family. They heard from the early contract laborers Hawaii’s really paradise and the streets paved with gold. Although it wasn’t. They gave such an elaborate story because they didn’t want to consider themselves failures.

MUSIC: HOLE HOLE BUSHI RECORDING SUNG IN JAPANESE

ACTRESS: (overlapping over song)

Hawaii, HawaiiI saw as in a dreamNow my tears are flowingIn the cane fields…

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: Ms. Toki told me as soon as she came here, entered her new home, her mother-in-law already had the work clothes all ready for her! She had just arrived from Japan on a long 10-day voyage. She was so exhausted and yet she had to start working right away. They could barely make a living. Her husband was making only $.75 for the 10 hours a DAY! And she made $.65 a day working in the fields, too.

GAYLORD KUBOTA: They were the first ones up in the morning because they not only made the breakfast, but they made the lunches for themselves and their husbands. Then they’d go out and put in a full day’s work and then they’d come home and they’d have to deal with dinner and all the other household things, so they were probably the last ones to go to sleep at night.

ACTRESS: Life in Hawaii is horrible. I have no kitchen. I cook outdoors on open fire with one single pot. The water near the house is just a trickle.

SOUND: LAUNDRY SOUNDS ACTRESS: I work in the fields and take in other people’s laundry just to make ends meet. I work so hard that my hands are swollen and bleeding.

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ALMA OGATA: I HATED it! [LAUGH] Because we didn’t have washing machine. Everything was done by hand. We had to boil the clothes in an out door galvanized bucket looking thing. And stir it. We had to scrape off some bars of soap. And then make suds. It took us all day to do that laundry. And all we got paid was $2. That was SLAVERY.

ACTRESS: And so we endure. Kabate Mashta. We build good marriages with men we knew only from a picture. We work under hot sun in fields and in the evening, we earn extra money under kerosene lamp. We raise a family and build a community. Kabate Mashta.

FRANKLIN ODO: Stable community life meant more babies and families being formed.

RONALD TAKAKI: Many of them were thinking about staying in Hawaii now because they had children born in Hawaii and Hawaii had become their home. And when you think about it, that was part of their Americanization. But that kind of reinvention would make them more discontent.

MUSIC UNDER

HOST: In the 20th century, workers began to demand higher wages. Bill Puette of University of Hawaii’s Center for Labor Education and Research.

BILL PUETTE: In the early days they could beat you to death or they could imprison you or they could deprive you of your house.

HOST: Though vulnerable to exploitation, workers slowly gained strength through both individual and collective action. Organized protests began along ethnic lines in the early 1900s. Plantation owners exploited racial differences. They pitted workers against each other.

Franklin Odo, director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program.

FRANKLIN ODO: The workers were pretty valiant about trying to carry on their work, but one of the things the planters did was to hire strike breakers: Koreans, Chinese, native Hawaiians.

HOST: Workers needed higher wages to support their families and a new strategy to beat the plantation system. In 1946, they organized the first multi-ethnic strike led by the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union.

The “Great Sugar Strike,” transformed Hawaii’s plantation society. With a union victory, Hawaii’s sugar workers became the highest paid agricultural workers in the world.

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But the building blocks of this movement began many years earlier…

Chapter Four. Resistance.

RICHARD NAGAME: Before the union you can’t do anything. No safety things. Not until after the union came into the picture.

BILL PUETTE: And it’s really a fearsome thing to have to do when you know that the other side’s ability to retaliate against you is enormous.

ACTOR: We was under contract like indentured servants! If we no work, our contract extended. So we did what folks called day-to-day resistance.

RONALD TAKAKI: Like the five am whistle would blast, but there were workers that didn’t get up. And there were workers who said, “I’m sick today.” They would fake illnesses.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: The way we agitated was go slow time, don’t go double time, work slowly. Secondly arson, burn the cane fields. ALMA OGATA: (rain in background)… and my father, they would hide in the cane field. Do you know what they were doing? They were gambling! And then a Luna would go and check the barracks where they were living and they’re gone. So the Luna would think these guys went to work already.

SOUND: CANE CUTTING

BILL PUETTE: The workers developed their own tools for trying to handle some of the problems and certainly one of the best known that has survived is the Japanese women used to sing in the plantation fields.

MUSIC: HOLE HOLE SONG FADES UP

BILL PUETTE: People singing while they’re doing hard labor is something that you see certainly in the south, and we think of them as uniquely African songs that came from African music traditions. Likewise in Hawaii the Japanese women, in order to make the work a little bit easier to bear, would sing these songs. they were called hole hole bushi. Bushi the song.  And hole hole is actually a Hawaiian word for stripping cane. 

MUSIC: HOLE HOLE SONG FADES DOWN

ACTOR: By 1905 Japanese the majority on plantations. Like 70%! So when we wanted things to change, we rallied together and protest. We’d stop working until we get what we want.

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BILL PUETTE: Conditions at the camps got to be better. The housing got to be a little better. Sanitation got to be better. And then the next big move would be where you had multiple plantations on an island get together.

RONALD TAKAKI: And in 1909 they went out on strike. And it was an all-Japanese strike. At that time we had what was called “blood unionism.” In order to belong to the union, you had to be Japanese. You had to have Japanese blood.

ACTOR: All Japanese, from all plantations on Oahu, we wanted the same pay as the Portuguese!

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: During strike you could not live in the camp. You got to live in tents outdoors.

ACTOR: But if we not working, we no can keep our plantation house. So the camp police kick us out!

It was horrible! They threw out pots and pans and furniture, pile everything all outside the house. They nailed doors closed so we no can go back in. Fathers packed bags of clothes. Mothers carrying crying babies. Children cry ‘cause the camp police yelling.

We walk miles in to Honolulu and stay in empty buildings or camp in the park. The community pulled together. Women made soup kitchens. Doctors take care strikers for free. Businesses give us money and free service. Japanese workers on the other islands kept working to send us money.

RONALD TAKAKI: The planters broke that strike and then they looked elsewhere for another source of labor and they turned to the Philippines. And I’ve come across memos where planters stated explicitly that they wanted to bring in so many Japanese and so many Filipinos in order to pit them against each other and drive wages downward.

ACTOR: More and more Filipinos come to the plantation, but they live in separate camps from the Japanese. During the day, we work together. We all want better working conditions and better pay. But we stick mostly with our own people who talk the same, eat the same.

BILL PUETTE: But by 1920, there was actually something like a treaty where the Japanese union leadership met with the leaders of the Filipino Federation of Labor to try to have a synchronous strike.  It wasn’t really a merged group; it was the two groups who were going to try to strike at the same time. 

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ACTOR [THROUGH MEGAPHONE]: “We are laborers working on the sugar plantations of Hawaii. People know Hawaii as the Paradise of the Pacific and as a sugar producing country, but do they know that there are thousands of laborers who are suffering under the heat of the equatorial sun, in field and in factory, and who are weeping with ten hours of hard labor and a scanty pay of 77 cents a day?3”

ACTOR: After the strike started, over 3,000 Japanese parade through Aala Park. Our leader, Noboru Tsutsumi want fire us up.

SOUND OF PROTEST

ACTOR [THROUGH MEGAPHONE]: Ladies and gentlemen, it has been two months since the beginning of the strike. The Hawaiian Sugar Planters Association rejected our legitimate demands as workers and has attempted to mislead the public with false propaganda. Ladies and gentlemen, today’s parade is to expose the stubbornness of the HSPA and to inform the general public about our plea for justice.4

BILL PUETTE: There are stories that we have in our oral history where the Japanese women who said, “as we were carrying our signs about what little amount we were getting paid” they would look and see women on the streets, “the haole women,” they said who lived in the town and they were crying to see how badly we were being paid. They had no idea how poorly people were being treated.

RONALD TAKAKI: I saw a photograph of plantation workers on strike and they were having a mass demonstration in Aala Park in downtown Honolulu. It was a huge, massive demonstration, it was just a sea of faces. But what stood out for me was also a portrait of Abraham Lincoln.

SOUND OF PROTEST ACTOR [THROUGH MEGAPHONE]: “Hawaii’s sugar plantation workers are still suffering under slave-like treatment. Free these slaves, Free these slaves, free these slaves.”

SOUND OF PROTEST FADES OUT

RONALD TAKAKI: Maybe they themselves hadn’t heard the Gettysburg Address but their children had, their children in school, and they realized that this country was founded, “dedicated,” to use Lincoln’s language, “to the proposition that all men are created equal.” And so when they went out on strike in 1920, joining with the Filipinos, they were saying we’re Americans too and we should have decent wages because this is now our home.

3 From the Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Sugar Strike of 1920, p. 544 ibid p. 108

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FRANKLIN ODO: There’s a lot of hope that the inter-ethnic, international, inter-racial union can work. This turns out to be largely untrue within a couple of months.

BILL PUETTE: The best way for the planters to keep the labor disputes to a bear minimum is to have these two different competing ethnic groups or racial groups who would distrust each other.  And the greater the distrust, the less cooperation they will have with each other in terms of forming a labor movement. 

FRANKLIN ODO: So what the planters did with the Filipinos was to sew the seeds of distrust…

BILL PUETTE: …and try to frighten the Filipinos into saying oh, the Japanese, they’re going to take you over,

FRANKLIN ODO: And still the Japanese workers lasted something like six months anyway, so it was a pretty prodigious effort. And the community expended a lot of its energy and capital in that effort and so it was very difficult to get them going again for decades.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: The Chinese struck the bosses would pull them by their pigtail early on and run them with the horses.  The Portuguese women struck alone, the Japanese struck alone.

RICHARD NAGAME: And they never could win the battle. Because one group would be working and the others on strike. 

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: Not until ‘46 when they harmonized all the ethnic group and they stood toe to toe that they beat the plantation system. 

BILL PUETTE: The real story of Hawaii’s changing from that early past when you have racial unions into the period of multi-ethnic unions and multi-racial unionism is the story of the ILWU. 

AH QUON MCELRATH: It was through this particular union, the International Longshoremen’s and Warehousemen’s Union, known as it was at the time that we were able for the first time to get on a general basis, sugar workers who could send their children to college.

ACTOR: I heard about the dock workers who want start one union on the Big Island. They said, “Race doesn’t matter because we’re ‘brothers under the skin.’” They talked to us sugar workers because they wanted to organize from the docks to the cane fields.

SOUND: NEWREEL FROM WWII… “On December 7th, 1941…

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MUSIC FADES UNDER AND OUT

ACTOR: But when Pearl Harbor brought us into World War II, martial law stop everything. We no can change jobs, they went freeze our wages, and the military was paid more for doing the same work as us.

We buckled up to win the war. But once war was over, we were ready to fight back against the plantation system. Jack Hall and the ILWU people want tell us what we already know.

JON ARISUMI: So we signed up and joined the union. Worked for a little while trying to get a contract. Then September 1, 1946 we went on strike.And let me tell you, we weren’t prepared for the strike. Not prepared at all.

AH QUON MCELRATH: and so for the first time all of the units in the ILWU worked together. It didn’t make a difference whether you were Filipino, Japanese Chinese or whatever it is, they gave their all in order to win the strike.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: You see, to prepare for a strike you have hunting teams, fishing teams, soup kitchen.

ACTOR: 25,000 workers on every plantation but one refused to work. And after 79 days, we won one contract.

AH QUON MCELRATH: This was a magnificent illustration of how people of different colors got together and worked to win the strike.

RICHARD NAGAME: Before the union started people didn’t have cars, people didn’t own homes. After the union came in the picture, they own homes, they have cars, they send their kids to college.

GEORGE FUJIWARA: We were so strong that they start to respect the union. That’s the reason why we all got confidence and we’re not afraid to speak up.

MUSIC: FLUTE FADES UP, THEN TAIKO DRUMS

ACTOR: We showed our power in the fields and at the election polls. We elect pro-labor candidates. Now the hopes and dreams of our parents, grandparents, and early contract workers was coming true as we start for build one Hawaii that we can call home.

HOST: To learn more about the Great Sugar Strike, visit our Crossing East.org.

MUSIC OUT

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HOST: By 1930, more than 400-thousand Asian men, women and children had come to live on the plantations. Ronald Takaki, author of Pau Hana, Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii.

RONALD TAKAKI: In Hawaii you had a diversity of workers from all over the world. China, then Japan, the Philippines, Korea. On other plantations you don’t have that kind of diversity. So that makes Hawaii unique…

HOST: Plantation workers lived in camps next to the sugar and pineapple fields. The plantations segregated them – there was Chinese camp, Filipino camp, Puerto Rican camp and so on. The Camps had a hierarchy—wealthy owners at the top, followed by the Lunas or Managers who were usually European. Then at the bottom…the workers—mostly from Asia. Conditions were often squalid until families took steps to improve their own lives.

In a moment, Chapter Five. Plantation Culture.

ANNOUNCER: This is PRI – Public Radio International.

SOUND: MUSIC BREAK

SEGMENT C

MUSIC UP

HOST: This is Crossing East and you’re listening to ‘Raising Cane.’ I’m George Takei…

MUSIC OUT

HOST: Our next Chapter of “Raising Cane” takes a look at what life was like growing up and living on the plantations. And how this life shaped the multicultural society that is now Hawaii…

SOUND OF PLANTATION VILLAGE UP

At Hawaii’s Plantation Village on Oahu, there is a replica of a plantation village. Docent Espy Garcia is our tour guide.

ESPY GARCIA: (GIVING TOUR) So as we enter we have the first area, which is the Chinese. This is a Chinese kitchen, a cookhouse…

WILLIAM BOYLAN: The Chinese came, the Japanese came, the Filipinos came and the Koreans came. Because the Hawaiian population, like so many indigenous people, when they were introduced to foreign diseases, foreign microbes, they began dying off at a very rapid rate. Estimates differ between

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250,000 to 800,000 Hawaiians were here. By1900 when Hawaii was annexed to the United States, it was down to 39,000. When you need an industrial labor force, that means you had to import labor.

ESPY GARCIA: Chinese who were the first immigrants were paid three dollars a month, five year contract. We had people who came from the South keep asking, did they come as slaves? We said no. They had to sign a contract.

MOSES PATAKI: We were surrounded by plantation camp: Portuguese camp, Puerto Rican camp, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino. And all of my friends were all plantation.

ESPY GARCIA: We’re now in the society building. They had a single man’s dormitory right up here. Now if someone came here and wanted to stay overnight but had no place to stay, that is what was afforded him.

WILLIAM BOYLAN: All plantation villages had barracks, because the guys came as bachelors. So the Filipino camp first camp I ever stayed in was at Papakeo camp and we stayed in the bachelor’s house, which was nothing but single rooms for bachelors, or rooms that they could share. But there were no, they didn’t have families. And so it was a barracks, basically.

ESPY GARCIA: The men came as single, the only women they could marry were the Hawaiians. And this was our greatest mixture of races in Hawaii. When you see someone looking Hawaiian but has a Chinese last name, he would automatically Hawaiian-Chinese. You see someone with a different feature with a differnet last name, that’s the blending that started. So we don’t have too many pure Hawaiians anymore.

MOSES PATAKI: We had Hawaiian camp also and all of my friends’ family lived in this Hawaiian camp.

RONALD TAKAKI: The plantation setup was like a pyramid. You had the plantation master’s home on the top of the mountain and then you had the Portuguese Lunas and their cabins, and then you had the Japanese workers and below the Japanese workers you had the Filipino camps. Hawaii’s diversity didn’t just happen. It was diversity by design. The planters wanted to bring in workers from all over the world in order to pit them against each other, especially workers from Asia.

ESPY GARCIA: When the Portuguese were hired from Portugal, Madeira, Azores Islands, they knew they were going to stay. Because they were fairer they had better jobs like the supervisory capacity and they could pick up English. And so they had supervisory jobs, they had better housing it seemed like, so they fit always on the top area of the immigrants who came in.

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BARBARA KAWAKAMI: In those days the camps were segregated and we lived in Japanese Camp. They called Camp One Japanese Camp, next to the Filipino Camp and they had Okinawan Camp. Korean Camp, which had only about three Korean families living up on the hill – very segregated.

RONALD TAKAKI: The separation of the camps also reinforced this separation of workers from different nations. And the pitting of these workers against each other. ESPY GARCIA: On Kauai we lived in a plantation camp of 11 houses.

RONALD TAKAKI: At first the camps were clusters of shabby buildings, shabby cabins, but then they began to give their homes a feeling of the old country. The Japanese for example would build furos and they would put bonsais aground their cabins. And they began to see Hawaii as their home, a permanent settlement.

ESPY GARCIA: So we’re coming now into the community furo and pipe in the hot water at five o’clock, so by the time they came at six then they would be able to take a bath…this is the women’s section. When we were little we would swim underneath and get a scolding by the men and the little boys would come this side and they get scolding by…(fades out)

SOUND OF WASHING CLOTHES

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: Many Japanese women and widows and even Japanese girls, as soon as they graduated eighth grade, they were sent to work at haole homes as a domestic. But for my mother in her pregnant condition the only thing she could think of was while taking care of her own children, she took in laundry from the Filipino bachelors who lived right on the corner. So of course the money was so you know cheap. For one person the laundry charging about 2.50 per month you know? To do all the dirty laundry.

ESPY GARCIA: The bundle that you see there is the clothes of the single men that have been finished. We children would take it to the respective single men because she took in laundry and everything was done. She would iron on that army blanket on the floor. That is almost a replica of my mama’s iron.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS [SINGS]: Honolulu pretty girl, stop. Too much good-looking, number one sweet. Naughty eyes make, oh oh, you bet I know… FADES UNDER DOMINGO LOS BANOS: The Filipinos, the single men, were very, very frugal. They work hard, five days a week, but Saturday comes they put on their best silk shirt, they put on the pomade. And they will go to the dime-a-dance. And the

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dime-a-dance girls were blonds and brunettes, etc and I’d pay ten cents to dance with them.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS [SINGS]: Me number one a-good looking…

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: And the other thing that caused us to become multi-ethnic. Just imagine when a Japanese girl is washing the clothes of a Filipino man and they have to deliver the clothes. So you touch hands, you touch hearts and you fall in love and pretty soon you forget ethnicity. And this is part of the things that made Hawaii so unique and so united. We’re all mixed.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS [SINGS]: To much aloha, ha, ha, ha, ha, away.

ESPY GARCIA: The Filipinos during the Christmas season we make paro. It would denote the Star of David and this is why every house always had. And they’re multi-colored. Some are very ornate, some are very simple, but always with bamboo that’s glued to the paper and makes this beautiful star, paro. And this is usually hung outside the door during Christmas. Sometimes they would put lights inside of it…

RONALD TAKAKI: Because of the crisscrossing of paths of workers from all around the world, you find them living together, you also find the sharing of cultures. They shared their holidays, like Rizal day…

ESPY GARCIA: Jose Rizal was one of the martyrs of the Philippines.

RONALD TAKAKI: Chinese New Year, the Obon festival…

AMY SAKAI: The obon is a season where they honor the people who have passed on

RONALD TAKAKI: They even had a Christmas tree there with the German immigrants working in Hawaii and I think that made Hawaii a uniquely multicultural society.

FESTIVAL MUSIC UNDER

ESPY GARCIA: Every festival no matter which ethnicity, food is always the central focal point.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: And Filipinos if you have a party you’re going to have food, you’re going to have music, so the food is laid out, you got roast pig. The Japanese will come and they’ll bring their sukiyaki…

AMY SAKAI: That’s why people here eat all of the different ethnic foods. You grow up with them.

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ESPY GARCIA: Our bento or lunch can when you used to go to school. You open it, main dish.

SOUND OF WALKING THROUGH CANE FIELDS

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: My mother would prepare lunch, bento for my brother and we all hiked from Camp One. From there, barefooted, we didn’t even own shoes, all barefooted we walked up the pipeline, we followed the pipeline five miles up to Camp 19 all surrounded by sugarcane. And every Saturday we did that.

ESPY GARCIA: Bottom half was always rice. Top half was the main dish. And this is what they shared out in the fields while they worked together. And that is how we started to learn eating different ethnic groups’ food.

LOS BANOS BROTHERS [SINGING]: You come my house, you eat bagao, that’s the Filipino style. You come my house, you eat daikon, that’s the Japanese style. You come my house, you eat Kim Chee, that’s the Korean style. You come my house, you eat baccalau, that’s the Portuguese style. FADES UNDER

GAYLORD KUBOTA: And that’s where I think our plate lunch came from. With the wonderful tradition we have here of mixed plate, where you can have a Japanese and Chinese and Korean entrees together with macaroni and rice and tacua and kim chee. It’s a pretty amazing tradition we have here in Hawaii.

SOUND: CHILDREN TALKING

MOSESN PATAKI: We went to school together so we grew up together and I was always going to my friends’ house which was in a plantation camp.

SOUND OF IRRIGATION DITCH

ESPY GARCIA: We always had irrigation ditch where they had the water go to the different parts of the sugar fields. The ditches were our swimming pool. I mean it was right in our front yard from the time we were little. Here’s the sailboat, we’d put it in the ditch. He would be on one end, one bank, I would be on the other bank. My boat would go down, his boat would go down.

SOUND OF BALL GAME

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: Another thing that brought us together was sports. Waipauhu had Filipino ball teams, Japanese ball teams. But I was a good athlete. In the morning we would always play games Portuguese against the Japanese. So where do I go? They all want me. If I want to eat noodles, I go

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Japanese side. If I want to ride horse, I go Portuguese side. They had the horses. So that’s how we learned to adapt.

RONALD TAKAKI: In the camps these workers were reinventing themselves. Ethnicity is not something that is static. You’re not just Japanese or just Filipino. In the interaction with other Asian Americans you become Asian American. And I think that’s what was happening to Japanese, Filipino, Korean, and Chinese workers on the plantations of Hawaii.

SOUND OF SLACK KEY GUITAR FADES UP

BARBARA KAWAKAMI: For us, because there were no TVs or radios during our growing up period. From 1929, 30s, every evening after we finish our chores and after dinner we would gather on the front veranda, plantations always had this spacious front veranda. And we would all sit around and the neighborhood kids would all gather at the front veranda and even in the dust we kept on talking stories. That was a favorite time. We would talk about the day’s happening. My brother got up and worked in the fields too so there were a lot of stories to talk about…

MUSIC FADES UP

HOST: Special thanks to the Hawaii’s Plantation Village for our look at plantation life.

Talk Story is a term used in Hawaii for people gathering together for conversation, to tell stories… on the plantations, people of different ethnicities had to find a way to communicate, so they created a common language to talk to each other. On the Islands, you hear “brah” for “brother,” Stink Eye for “dirty look” and “dakine” for “whatchamacallit.” Islanders call it Pidgin English but it’s a mixture of Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese and Hawaiian.”

Our final chapter. Proud to Speak Pidgin.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: What you want talk about?

ESPY GARCIA:: We can talk about any kind. Maybe dakine what we cacao this morning.

DOMINGO LOS BANOS: This morning I had egg and bacon.

ESPY GARCIA:: Egg and bacon. Then I stir it with a stirrer…

ESPY GARCIA: When the teachers started to hear us talk, they couldn’t make heads or tails of what we were saying because they came from the mainland. Whatever we said, she could not listen to what we were saying at all.

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KENT SAKODA: We were told that it was just bad English. I guess I grew up kind of thinking it was just a bad habit that we had. We would ask to use the restrooms, like “I can go toilet” or something and they’d withhold the permission until you got the English part of that correctly, and those things can be problematic. We’d just see these as things we were constantly reminded of or reprimanded for.

JEFFREY SEIGAL: The language in Hawaii is a Creole language, which is a Pidgin language, which has become the community’s mother tongue. It’s a bit confusing here in Hawaii, because everybody calls it Pidgin but linguists call it a Creole language, and it’s a Creole language like other Creole languages in Jamaica, and in some of the French speaking ex-colonies.

KENT SAKODA: It’s “go stay go, bambye you goin’ stay come, bambeye you goin’ be late.”

ESPY GARCIA: As for instance, I’m going to say “oh you go stay go.” You go when over there.

KENT SAKODA: It’s “go stay go, bambye you goin’ stay come, bambeye you goin’ be late.” Let’s say a bunch of friends and I were going to go to a movie or something close to where I’m living and they come by to pick me up and I’m not ready and I’ll yell out to them, go stay go, bambye you goin’ stay come. So you be going and later I’ll be coming, bambye you goin’ be late, otherwise you’ll be late.

ESPY GARCIA: When we say the word “dakine,” you know exactly what we’re saying “did you see dakine?” The word dakine is universal. We mention that for everything.

KENT SAKODA: “Cao cao” means either to eat or food itself, and it actually comes from Chinese pidgin English brought over by the sailors. The original word was ‘“chow chow” -- in American slang, ‘chow.’ But it was brought over by the sailors to Hawaii and “chow chow” then becomes “caocao.”

ESPY GARCIA: That’s how we talk. But we had to learn good English eventually because that was a detriment to us.

KENT SAKODA: Pidgin was associated with the working class. It’s a language that was enough to do menial labor on the plantation, but in the urban setting for the middle class they thought that that wasn’t appropriate. That you need to speak standard English to get ahead.

MUSIC STARTS

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LEE TONOUCHI: “They Say if You Talk Pidgin, You No Can…” Be smart, be important, be successful, be professional, be taken seriously…

LEE TONOUCHI: Pretty much all when you’re growing up people tell you if you do this in Pidgin, where can you go? People always tell you can’t do this, you can’t do that, you can’t do that. The perception is the Pidgin talker is going to be perceived as less intelligent than the Standard English talker. When I was in college, after I discovered guys writing in Pidgin I said heck yeah, I can do this Pidgin creative writing. Eventually I did my thirty-page research papers in Pidgin. Master’s thesis in Pidgin.

LEE TONOUCHI: …be one teacher, be one doctor, be one lawyer, be big businessman, be the Pope, be the President, be the wife of the President. They say if you talk Pidgin, you no can.

JEFFREY SEIGAL: You have more and more people who are bilingual here. In the past you had a lot of people and the only language they spoke was the Creole. But now especially in Honolulu the majority of people would really be bilingual and they switch back and forth. The language has another kind of prestige. It’s like the language of the community, and it’s something that you’re proud of because it shows your identity.

ESPY GARCIA: It really makes us very unique because we have this thing that we can interject with each other. We interplay daily in our lives, as soon as we meet each other, you can tell the people that come from Hawaii that know how to speak Pidgin and then switch over to good English, then you know that person has really arrived.

SOUND: MUSIC OUT

HOST: “Raising Cane” was produced by Robynn Takayama and Dmae Roberts… with assistance by Jennifer Dunn. In this hour we heard the voices of…

Gaylord Kubota, Domingo Los Banos, Espy Garcia, Ah Quon McElrath, Barbara Kawakami, Alma Ogata, Fuzzy Alboro, George Fujiwara, May Fujiwara, Jon Arisumi. Moses Pataki, and Richard Nagame.

Our scholars were Ronald Takaki, Franklin Odo, Bill Puette, William Boylan, Lee Tonouchi, Kent Sakoda and Jeffrey Siegel.

Our actors were Dann Seki, Chisao Hata, Denise Aoki Chinen, and Keith Kashiwada.

Hole Hole Bushi songs were sung by Shigeko Miyashiro

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Slack Key Guitar Music by Led Ka’apana.

HOST: Special thanks to Chris Conybear, producer of the “Rice and Roses videos” at the University of Hawaii’s Center for Labor Education and Research. And thanks to Hawaii Public Radio, the Alexander and Baldwin Sugar Museum, Hawaii’s Plantation Village and the West Maui Senior Center.

MUSIC FADES UNDER

HOST: We came in many waves…

We worked in the sugar fields…

…we raised families

…we rose up against injustice…

and we built a new kind of America…This is Crossing East…

our stories, our history, our America…

I’m George Takei…

ANNOUNCER:

Crossing East is produced with funding by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting, the National Endowment for the Arts and individual donors of MediaRites Productions.

Our theme music was composed and performed by Shasta Taiko.

Our lead scholar is Judy Yung, Professor Emeritus of American Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz

The Managing Editor is Catherine Stifter, the Associate Producer is Sara Caswell Kolbet. Our Master Engineer is Clark Salisbury with technical advisor Michael Johnson.

The Executive Producer is Dmae Roberts.

For more info…go to CrossingEast.org.

Support for Crossing East comes from this station and Public Radio International stations and is made possible in part by the PRI Series Fund, whose contributors include the Ford Foundation and the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

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MUSIC ENDS

LOS BANOS BROTHERS [SINGING IN HAWAIIAN]

PRI BUTTON

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