Japanese in Pu'ukoli'i

Sugarcane village. That’s what it was when my mother’s grandma came from Hiroshima, Japan and settled here in West Maui. Puukolii, red dirt village of immigrant plantation workers tucked in the higher elevations above Kaanapali was what my grandma Yuki called home in her earliest years as the youngest born in Maui to Japanese born parents.

“Grandpa used to meet them at the beach, on his horse, after working the fields,” my mom recalled the stories she heard of her mother’s childhood, while we stood in the breeze, gazing out to the sea, the tall weeds and prickly dandelions floating into our thick hair.  Momʻs Grandpa was a Luna, an enforcer for labor workers in the hot fields of late 1800’s through the 1920’s. They all thought it was rather strange to have an immigrant Japanese man in that role as it was not common in that time. This unusual man ordered my great-grandma from a picture-bride book to be his wife; she happened to be his cousin, and this was a common practice. Never having met my great-grandpa before, she left a trying time in Japan for the sugarcane Luna life when her family accepted his payment and shipped her to Maui at 16 years old.

 I cannot say I know all about this woman, Shikano, my great-grandmother, so please know there are many missing pieces to this story. But what I’ve learned of her is similar to what many Hawaii-born-Japanese have learned of their own – it took much strength, tears, sweat and inner tenacity to come here, stay here, mix into the many other cultures here and then to gain respect and find the determination to make a business amidst an unclaimed identity and brutal politics of Hawaii’s fallen nation, was something brave and brilliant…something only the 3rd and 4th generations would reap the wealth from. And it has taken me my own struggles of birth, marriage and parenthood to understand the strictness my mother’s culture held for us; that without all that discipline and enforced social skills of being respectful, likeable, moral, versatile and poker faced, we would not survive the race-based segregation and wild west of Hawaii’s pre-American days.

Shikano’s diaries were fascinating. In preschool, I spent what felt like hours in my great-grandma’s room of my grandma’s house in Wailuku Heights trying to decipher the shapes and elegant curves of the pen marks that looked like boxes, triangle-topped double-lines and scratched with apostrophes – in the paper notebooks kept by her old bed. Her small shrine sat across the bed, on a built-into-wall drawer set. Incense burning from the ceramic dish, a floral rice-paper-like-art-piece framed to stand behind the vessel of ash and a black and white photograph of her in a kimono, black hair sleek but puffed over-top of the head, pulled into that low bun with a large wooden clip in the back of the neck, no smile, children in picture also wearing kimono. I don’t remember all that Grandma told me of her diaries; I just remember Grandma said she was upset or feeling worried about money or a child sick or mad at her husband and sometimes missing Japan…she took my Grandma to live in Japan a year when my grandma was a child, but not the others. I don’t know what happened to make a mother of many take only one child back to her homeland for a whole year but I found the handwritten records of their names to and from the boats back in 1930s… ancestory.com did connect me with old documents and pictures for a lot of my family history, on that side, my grandpa’s side and my dad’s side as well… I wish I could say I can read a few of the hiragana and katakana characters of her diary but no, my teachings of calligraphy and phrases only lasted those preschool-after-school-afternoons with grandma Yuki and she has since passed... For my mother’s time was the generation raised after WW2, when to be anything but American was a traitor, weaker – and so was to speak anything but English.

The life in sugarcane villages was hard. The harshness is what fueled Shikano to find other ways of living – a way out. My grandma remembered Shikano crying when the red dirt would blow through all the wet, hanging laundry on the line outside, again to ruin her day’s work. She still has Shikano’s steel shears – for Shikano was a hairdresser for the village, men who had no wives often paid for laundry and hair-cuts. I was so angry when my mom would have my grandma cut my hair with great-grandma Shikano’s old scissors instead of the mall shop hairdresser. My bangs would be thick and sit straight above my eyebrows like the Kokeishi wooden dolls that sat on counters all over the house and I would always feel so far away from the fashion barbie dolls and cute, curly-haired Shirley Temple we watched on Friday nights.

Grandma Yuki told me how her mom would argue often with my grandpa, Yuki’s husband. They were the same she said – stubborn, smart, sharp minds, influential and proud and therefore, both dominating and could not back down from their opinions even though Shikano lived in the same house with them until she died. One time, Shikano was so mad at my grandpa, she took an axe in hand and chopped down his favorite cherry tree he had grown for years in the garden. Mind you, it was HER home they all lived in – Shikano had bought one of the first homes in Wailuku Heights when there was only that old twisted road above Iao valley connecting a couple streets of neighbors to Wailuku Town. She had been the one to build a name from nothing, make decisions above her own husband, taking the risk to buy a retail shop in Kahului (across the harbor), moved her kids into a one room back house of the shop and create a dry goods store in the 40’s that would fund this house purchase. She later made a branding partnership turning her shop into a retail franchise well known today in the islands – with multiple hardware and craft shops stemming from this business that she left to her kids, now run by a few of the grandkids, my great-uncles.

“If you want a man to marry you, don’t buy your own house,” Shikano would say to one of her daughters later. “Men want a woman to depend on them. Women who don’t need a man, a man will argue with.” I wish I knew her in flesh. Her truth was bold and perhaps why I cannot keep silent and docile– some drives of our being are not taught… but instilled in DNA. If only we all truly knew the life stories of our blood, perhaps we’d be less surprised when we find ourselves in our current state. I wish we all paid more attention to the lessons already lived for us – all the work already done to save us from our own societal destruction of grand, unearned fantasies. Our tales mights not be the most exciting, but those are sometimes the most important and what helps us survive.

 *Please note that this read is meant to be entertaining and not necessarily factual