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Japanese immigration to Hawaii (view source)
Revision as of 13:51, 24 June 2014
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Certain portions of the emigration process were managed by private companies in Japan since the earliest days, and even though the Convention of 1886 expanded the Japanese government's responsibilities in overseeing immigration to Hawaii, the burden of administrative work associated with the process led to the Japanese government turning over operations of much of the initial stages of the application and selection process to private companies beginning in [[1894]].<ref>The most major of these companies are listed on Odo and Sinoto, 44.</ref> These companies charged the emigrants a variety of fees, and also earned commissions from railroads, steamships, inns, and other agencies working with the emigrants, in order to make their profits. By this time, selection criteria became somewhat more selective; agents sought to recruit chiefly men from farming families (who therefore had the experience and physical ability), ages 20-30, excluding those obligated to military service, or those who sought to go to Hawaii with their children but without their wives. These private immigration companies dominated the process for about ten years, until [[1905]], when the Foreign Office cracked down on them for their unfair practices; from that time until the end of Japanese immigration to the US in 1924, the Japanese government handled immigration matters directly, without any private companies collecting fees or commissions.
Certain portions of the emigration process were managed by private companies in Japan since the earliest days, and even though the Convention of 1886 expanded the Japanese government's responsibilities in overseeing immigration to Hawaii, the burden of administrative work associated with the process led to the Japanese government turning over operations of much of the initial stages of the application and selection process to private companies beginning in [[1894]].<ref>The most major of these companies are listed on Odo and Sinoto, 44.</ref> These companies charged the emigrants a variety of fees, and also earned commissions from railroads, steamships, inns, and other agencies working with the emigrants, in order to make their profits. By this time, selection criteria became somewhat more selective; agents sought to recruit chiefly men from farming families (who therefore had the experience and physical ability), ages 20-30, excluding those obligated to military service, or those who sought to go to Hawaii with their children but without their wives. These private immigration companies dominated the process for about ten years, until [[1905]], when the Foreign Office cracked down on them for their unfair practices; from that time until the end of Japanese immigration to the US in 1924, the Japanese government handled immigration matters directly, without any private companies collecting fees or commissions.
==Plantation Life==
The grueling conditions of life on the sugar plantations, and the particular cultural developments which emerged as a result, have left an indelible mark on the collective memory of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii. While many locals of Hawaiian descent are today quite successful in white-collar professional fields, most look back to the plantation experience as the defining immigrant experience of their ancestors, contributing considerably to their notions of their own history and identity as Japanese-Americans in Hawaii.
While trains were used to carry laborers to the fields, and cane to the mills, and while the mills themselves involved some heavy machinery, most stages of the process involved considerable manual labor. Workers lived in barracks associated with the plantations, and lived on the company's clock, being woken, generally at extremely early hours of the morning (4:30AM was typical), by company bells or whistles, and working 10-12 hour days before being allowed to call it quits for the evening. Company doctors determined whether someone was too ill to work on any given day. Workers from different ethnic backgrounds (and with different native languages) were combined in the fields, as part of a strategy to prevent them from organizing strikes or protests. The Japanese workers eventually organized major strikes in [[1909]] and 1920 nevertheless, the second of these being organized alongside Filipino workers, and coming one year after the Japanese workers were able to form an official labor union.
Japanese workers invented and sang work songs called ''[[holehole bushi]]'', which sang of their toils, while other groups came up with songs of their own. On some plantations, younger and stronger workers called ''hippari'' men were paid an extra ten cents a day for their ability to work a little harder, or faster, and were encouraged to set a faster/harder pace for the other workers. This generally attracted the ire, however, of the other workers, who could not (or would not) work harder, or faster, and who saw the ''hippari'' men as collaborating with the ''luna'' (foremen). This system further evolved in a variety of ways. One system known as ''ukepau'', from the Japanese ''uke'' for "to receive," and the Hawaiian ''pau'' for "done," allowed workers to earn being done for the day if they completed their work early. On some plantations, this later developed into a system of paying workers not by the day or by the month, but by the actual amount of work they completed (e.g. in pounds of sugarcane processed). Another system, known as ''ukekibi'' (J: "receive sugarcane"), functioned similarly to tenant farming. Families or groups of workers would be given a plot of land to tend on their own, without managers or overseers, and would turn over the sugarcane they produced each year, being paid by the size of their harvest. Finally, after the 1909 strike, many plantations created systems of bonuses, allowing workers to earn extra for reliable, loyal, or extra service.
As of [[1901]], Japanese represented roughly 70% of the nearly 40,000 plantation workers in the islands.
==Annexation and the end of contract labor==
==Annexation and the end of contract labor==