Hawaii Netsu (Fever)

I got this book at the swap meet called Pau Hana, Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920, written by Ronald Takaki.



I found the parts that were related to my great grandparents most interesting.  Below is an excerpt. 

Hawaii Netsu

The Japanese described it as "Hawaii Netsu"--the emigration "fever" sweeping through the southwestern prefectures of Yamaguchi, Fukuoka, Kumamoto, and Hiroshima in the 1880s. In small villages, recruiting agents for emigration companies depicted Hawaii as a land of eternal summer where people were sincere and gentle by nature" and "very kind towards strangers." Everyone it seemed, talked excitedly about going to the islands. Many prospective emigrants imagined bold possibilities for themselves in Hawaii, the place where they would be able to fulfill dreams of making money and building bright new futures.

Most of the Japanese emigrants were not poor. They were small farmers and tenant farmers, but they were experiencing mounting economic hardships.  The southwestern prefectures were in economic difficulty in the late nineteenth century. Many villagers were subsisting on tree barks and roots and others were starving to death. Food was becoming scarce in the densely populated prefectures. "The depression of trade in Japan has increased month by month and year by year, showing no signs of abatement," editorialized the Japan Weekly Mail in December of 1884. "It seems to have come to a climax during the autumn of the present year, for the distress among the agricultural class has reached a point never before attained.  Most of the farmers have been unable to pay their taxes, and . . . hundreds of families in one village alone . . . [have been] compelled to sell their property in order to liquidate their debts."

The future in Japan seemed bleak for these farmers in the southwestern prefectures, and the Hawaii Netsu seized many of them. They saw Hawaii as an alternative to moving to the cities in Japan, where they would be inducted into factory labor and forced to live in congested urban housing. Financially distressed farmers saw the Hawaiian Islands as an opportunity to earn a livelihood.  Hopefully, as dekasegi, laborers who would leave home temporarily to work in a foreign country, they might even succeed in saving one or two hundred dollars by working for three years in the sugar fields and build a nucleus of capital for future enterprise. Indeed, they might even be able to save enough money to purchase land in Japan and become farmers in their homeland once again. Three years of hard labor in faraway cane fields; three years of separation from friends, family, and village seemed to be a small sacrifice to make for the realization of such an ambitious dream. 

And so thousands of Japanese agreed to become contract laborers and to work in Hawaii for three years for $9 a month, plus food, lodging, and medical care. Their passage to Hawaii was to be paid by the sugar planters, and they agreed to have 25 percent of their wages deducted from their earnings and deposited in a savings fund for their return passage to Japan. They were told they would be able to save 400 yen in three years. The notion of accumulating so much money in a small span of time had electrifying appeal to people who knew that a silk mill worker would be able to acquire such a sum only if she worked every day for ten years and saved all of her wages. Thus Hawaii symbolized a new beginning for many farmers, and when the government of Japan announced its intention to fill 600 emigrant slots for the first ship to Hawaii in 1884, it received 28,000 applications. 

On January 20, 1885, the initial group of immigrants boarded the City of Tokyo at Yokohama: 666 men, 158 women, 69 boys, and 48 girls. After the ship had been quarantined for a week at Nagaura, it set sail on January 27. The vessel, as reported by Consul Jiro Nakamura "encountered no storms or rough weather," but "did not sail well due to winter seas.  There were some who suffered seasickness as well as from other chronic ailments.  There were two doctors on board who diagnosed and treated the ill. In addition to the customary Japanese dishes, special rations of milk, noodles, and rice cakes were served to the immigrants on their voyage across the ocean."

"The manpower shortage in this nation is such that all our people were assigned employment within a few days after arrival," reported Nakamura. "I have heard that many employers have been unable to have their requests filled and are anxiously awaiting the arrival of the next batch of emigrant laborers . . . . ". The processing was done efficiently and quickly, and by February 23 all of the immigrants had left Honolulu, obligated by labor contract to three years of plantation labor. Meanwhile planters waited impatiently for the "next batch" of Japanese laborers.

Many more batches of laborers from Japan would arrive in the islands as the Hawaii Netsu evoked dreams of hopes among the people of the southwestern prefectures and as the Sugar Kingdom demanded more and more labor.  After 1887 Japanese laborers paid for their own passage to Hawaii--an expense of two hundred yen, or about a hundred dollars.  This meant one had to be at least a member of the farming middle class to be able to afford to work in Hawaii. Still they came.  By 1924, forty years after the first group had been enlisted as plantation laborers for passage on the City of Tokyo, over two hundred thousand Japanese had migrated to Hawaii.