Japanese Americans in Hawaii and the Sugar Boom

The Hawaiian sugar industry in the 1880s was a booming business. In contrast to Japan’s painful transition to a modern economy that had widespread unemployment, bankruptcy, and civil disorder Hawaii appealed to many Japanese that were looking for work because of the many job opportunities with the sugar boom. From 1884 to 1894, over 28,000 Japanese emigrants migrated to Hawaii, the majority being single men. As opposed to the first wave of Japanese to Hawaii who were from Yokohama, this second wave of emigrants were farmers and farm laborers who intended to emigrate as temporary workers instead of the typical work-settlers.

As years passed, three quarters of the Japanese emigrants moved back to Japan. Hawaiian plantation owners, anticipating the American laws against contract laborers in 1900, imported 26,000 contract laborers from Japan in 1899 in order to beat the ban (the largest ever admitted in a single year). However, the contracts were voided under U.S. law and left thousands of Japanese free to migrate to the mainland. Even with this opportunity, many Japanese chose to stay in Hawaii. Even up until 1910, there were four times as many Japanese residents in Hawaii as in the American mainland. One of the primary reasons many Japanese chose to stay was that race relations in Hawaii were much better than that in the mainland.

At a time when Japanese immigrants were virtually non-existent on the mainland, a small group of native-born Japanese ancestry grew in Hawaii. By 1910, the native-born Japanese were about one-third as big as the foreign-born Japanese in Hawaii; this was considered a huge increase when compared to the less than seven percent total on the mainland. Japanese American race relations with larger society were to some extent shaped by the wake of the Chinese immigration wave to America. Both on the mainland and on the islands, the Chinese too had started as unskilled laborers and had worked their way up the social ladder to become small businessmen and were resented by their advancement and competitors. Hawaiian-native Japanese were seen, during this time, as welcomed labor substitutes for Chinese workers.

However, the rising success of Hawaiian-native Japanese was short-lived due to the widespread stereotype of Chinese as “Yellow Peril,” soon all Japanese and Japanese Americans would also be clumped into this stereotype. This racial lumping of Asians and Asian Americans threatened the living standards of White American society, especially businessmen. Due to the feared outcomes of the “Yellow Peril” scare, laws were passed in Hawaii to block the movement of Japanese into positions of skilled occupations and their purchasing of land in California.

Upon their arrival to Hawaii, many Japanese gained their economic foothold in agriculture and working as contract-laborers. After their eventual acquisition of land and farming, many whites saw them as formidable competitors. On the farms where laborers were paid by the amount that they collected, Japanese earned significantly more through their hard work and longer work hours. Through the generations of Japanese emigrants that continued to stay in Hawaii and the American mainland, many Japanese Americans today still attribute their ancestry to those who left Japan in search of a better life and endured tremendous hardships so that future generations would have a better life. Since this Japanese emigration wave from 1884-1894, Hawaii was and still has the largest single population of Japanese outside of Japan, which accounts for nearly 15% of the entire state.