Transcript for the Piece Audio version of Raising Cane: Hawaii's Plantation Labor

TRANSCRIPT:

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

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.
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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

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, Hawaii
I saw as in a dream
Now my tears are flowing
In 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.

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.

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.

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.

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? ”

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.

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.

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…

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.

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