A Bittersweet Goodby to Their Sugar Cane Village

They had come to say goodby, to pay final homage to their hometown, a small, sleepy plantation village that has outlived its usefulness and is soon to be razed by bulldozers.

They had come, these 750 young, middle-aged and old Japanese-Americans, from throughout the Hawaiian Islands, from many places on the mainland, to this obscure village hidden 87 years from the outside world by fields of tall sugar cane.

Among those paying their last respects to the village and a bygone era were many of Hawaii’s political, business and education leaders, the progeny of illiterate, immigrant sugar cane workers who came here from Japan.

One Last Glimpse

“We are here for our last glimpse of our beloved birthplace,” a teary-eyed Jerry Hirata said at an emotional banquet during the three-day reunion held recently in Hanapepe and Wahiawa.

Hirata, a 37-year-old software computer specialist from Santa Monica, was an organizer of the reunion and master of ceremonies at the banquet. He grew up in this village of 150 unpainted, company-owned frame dwellings. His mother and father were born in Wahiawa and have lived all but 14 years of their lives here. His grandparents, contract laborers brought from Japan to work in the McBryde Co. sugar cane fields, helped found the village in 1898.

“This is a journey home for all of us,” Hirata told those at the banquet in the Hanapepe Buddhist church community building. “This is no ordinary reunion. Our roots are here. Our families are made up of those who lived and worked here in a passing era.

‘Treasured Way of Life’

“A path that was cherished, a treasured way of life. Wahiawa is the story of the human spirit, of loyalty and love, of reminiscence and pride, of plain, simple country folks in times of change,” he said.

Later at the banquet, slides were shown of the village and the villagers from the early days of the century to recent time. Photographs lined the walls of the church hall with banners that proclaimed: “We cannot call back a single day that has passed. Time flies more swiftly than an arrow. Life is more transient than the dew.”

Shizuko Kato, 80, who came to the village from Hiroshima when she was 16, sang a song about picture brides like herself, a song that was sung by women working in the cane fields to relieve the monotony. After the song Kato recalled:

“I came from Japan alone in 1921 to marry a man I had never met. I worked 45 years in the sugar fields. Now I have two children, nine grandchildren, 13 great-grandchildren. My husband died 25 years ago.”

Ichiro Izuka, 74, who now lives in Kahuku on Oahu, remembers his parents being persuaded by an agent from the sugar cane company that Hawaii would be a paradise for the Japanese workers and “the work in the fields child’s play. The agent preferred couples to single men, knowing their children would also be available to spend long hours growing and harvesting the cane,” he said.

When Izuka was 10, he would spend 10 hours a day working alongside grown-ups and other children in the village, he said. “It was a tough life. It made us strong. It taught us how to survive.”

No signs point to Wahiawa (pronounced Wa-he-a-wa), five miles east of Hanapepe along Halewili Road, although that is where the turnoff to the village is.

Wahiawa is reached by a narrow, winding, red-dirt road, not unlike scores of other similar no-name roads that disappear into sugar cane fields spread over much of this lush, tropical island-mountain rising out of the sea. Northernmost of the Hawaiian chain, Kauai is nearly circular, has a circumference of 125 miles and a population of 39,000.

The name of the village--a camp for men, women and children who in the past toiled long hours for little pay growing and harvesting sugar cane--never has appeared on maps of the island.

Today the village is in ruins, choked with weeds. Homes are in various stages of collapse, some completely caved in with roofs resting on the ground. The community’s 1918 Buddhist Temple is abandoned, its walls and ceilings ripped apart by a hurricane two years ago.

Center Stands Empty

Desks in the village Japanese-language school are jumbled one atop another in a corner. The tin-roofed community center stands empty.

One row of nine homes are still intact, occupied by plantation workers who will move on in a few weeks when what’s left of Wahiawa is leveled and the land on which it stands plowed over to become another sugar cane field.

The population of Wahiawa began dwindling in the 1950s and 1960s as residents purchased homes elsewhere on the island. Mechanization, higher wages and better education were the inevitable forces that led to the dissolution of the community.

Third-generation villagers like Jerry Hirata no longer needed to turn to the plantation for employment. After graduating from high school, many went on to college, resettled in Honolulu and other island cities and towns or in mainland cities like Los Angeles, Chicago, New York where opportunities were greater.

Wahiawa is typical of old sugar cane plantation camps that once existed throughout the 50th state. Thousands of laborers were recruited from Japan beginning a century ago to work in the fields.

It was Feb. 8, 1885 that the first party of immigrant laborers from Japan--676 men, 159 women and 108 children--arrived in Hawaii on the steamship City of Tokyo.

They came to work 10 hours a day, six days a week in the cane fields, men receiving $9 a month, women $6 a month. In Japan, laborers at the time were paid 10 cents a day, less than $3 a month. The immigrants came planning to work a few years in Hawaii, save enough money to return to Japan and live a more comfortable life. Few returned.

Stress on Education

“There was a saying the first generation passed on to the second generation-- kodomo no tameni (for the sake of the children,)” said Carol Iwata, 37, a paralegal who now lives in Chicago.

“Our parents put so much stress in education. ‘If you have an education, you will be able to do anything.’ They pounded that into our heads. They said, ‘If we don’t leave anything for you, we will educate you. That will be our legacy.’ ”

Hawaii’s two U.S. senators, Daniel K. Inouye, 60, and Spark Matsunaga, 68, are descendants of immigrant sugar cane workers. Inouye’s grandparents were among the founders of Wahiawa. Matsunaga’s parents migrated from Japan to work in a Kauai sugar cane plantation a few miles from Wahiawa.

Inouye flew from Washington to attend the reunion “to visit old friends,” he said, and “to honor the grueling sacrifices of the early plantation workers, my grandparents and my father among them. The legacy of our ancestors will live on.” While in Wahiawa, Inouye visited the home that his grandparents lived in for 25 years, a home his father lived in the first 20 years of his life.

‘Dreams for Better Life’

Hawaii’s Gov. George R. Ariyoshi, 59, in office since 1973 and the first American of Japanese ancestry to serve as governor of an American state, spoke at the banquet. His father, who was a sumo wrestler in Japan, came to Hawaii to work as a laborer and later ran a dry cleaning shop.

“These immigrants brought more than their skills and energy to Hawaii, they brought their homes and dreams for a better life,” the governor said. “It was not an easy life. What is important is they wanted a better life and worked hard on behalf of the generations that followed. We are grateful to them.

“Their labors contributed to the emergence of sugar as one of the Hawaiian Islands’ most important industries and to the growth and prosperity of our society.”

Hawaii is the only state where a majority of ethnic roots are Asian, not European. Caucasians represent 33% of the population, Japanese 25%, Hawaiians and part-Hawaiians 18%, Filipinos 14%, Chinese 6%, Koreans 2% and blacks 2%, according to the 1980 census.

On a balmy Sunday morning, the third day of the reunion, the villagers gathered in Wahiawa to walk the streets of the collapsing homes, to remember, to attend services in the abandoned temple where the Rev. Koichi Miyoshi led prayers in memory of those no longer living who had called Wahiawa home.

Kamako Nakasone, 92, was the oldest at the reunion. “I have not left my home in Honolulu in years, but I could not pass this up. I come to see my old friends, to see the old camp,” she explained.

She came to Wahiawa as a picture bride in 1912 to marry a man she had seen in photographs but had never met. She worked 20 years in the cane fields, in between having three children. One child died at 4. Her son, Henry, 65, is a widely known plant geneticist, a University of Hawaii professor of tropical agriculture. Her daughter, Kimiye Nakasone, 68, is an executive secretary in Honolulu.

“I worked in the fields and later took in laundry, washing clothes for single men in the camp. We had no washing machines. We boiled the clothes in a big iron kettle, hit the clothes with a stick to get rid of the dirt,” she recalled.

“During World War II, I did laundry the same way for soldiers stationed in a nearby army camp, charging 20 cents to wash and iron a pair of khaki pants.”

During World War II, unlike mainland Japanese-Americans who were removed to internment camps, those living in Hawaii continued to live in their homes.

Matsu Shimabukuro, 83, of Honolulu, spent several moments alone in the abandoned Japanese-language school, at one point resting one hand on a desk, her eyes closed in meditation.

Waiting patiently outside the school was her 88-year-old brother, Choyu Shimabukuro, also of Honolulu, who labored in the cane fields here from 1915 to 1936.

Children who lived in the sugar cane camp attended Japanese-language classes after regular public school in nearby Waimea. One of the most popular persons attending the reunion was Hanako Ozawa, 77, who taught Japanese in the Wahiawa school here from 1931 to 1951.

Jerry Hirata, who served as master of ceremonies for the reunion, his two sisters, Adele Iwasaki, 40, of Lihue, Kauai, and Evelyn Masaki, 45, an elementary schoolteacher from Gardena, Calif., walked slowly through the ruins of the village with their parents, Fumiko, 65, and Sadao Hirata, 71, from Eleele, Kauai.

In a few weeks, the temple, school, community center and all the homes will be gone.

“It’s sad,” Jerry Hirata mused as the family sat on the steps of the house they lived in. “I dread the finality. To visit your hometown and know you will never see it again doesn’t happen to too many people. . . .”