Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945
Gary Y. Okihiro, 1991
The book consists of three parts, the first covering the years 1865 to 1909 and the second 1910 to 1940. The third covers the WWII years and is the section I'll deal with mainly.
The first section goes into a discussion of the early Japanese immigration as workers into Hawaii and covers the employee problems that happened and concern by the U.S. military over the Japanese workers long before World War II.
The third section of the book starts by noting that the government was considering how to establish martial law in Hawaii in the fall of 1941, even before the attack on Pearl Harbor. Various attempts by the Nisei in Hawaii to show their patriotism are discussed. The military was also realizing that placing all the Hawaiian Japanese-Americans in internment camps would not be practical, and they would all have to be replaced by white workers which was also not practical.
There were three plans drawn up, depending on whether or not Hawaii itself was in danger of invasion. If there was no danger to Hawaii, fewer than 250 people would be rounded up, 217 of them Japanese consular workers, and held. The second scenario was if surprise raids against the island were possible, and under that scenario an additional 54 would be picked up and held and the rest of the Issei and Nisei population would be put under surveillance and "be subject to state propaganda to ensure loyalty."
The third strategy was based on a threat of invasion of the islands, in which case martial law would be declared and all suspected Japanese would be interned. The author then talks about the Sand Island camp which almost no other book even mentions much less has a good amount of material in it on the camp as does this book.
They used the same system there as elsewhere; "enemy aliens" were Issei; Nisei were not considered enemy aliens since they were U.S. citizens; kibei, the ones who were born in the U.S. and went to Japan to be educated and then returned, were considered with perhaps the greatest suspicion of all three groups.
There were quite a few restrictions on the Issei. Certain areas were off-limits to them; they couldn't leave their home island without permission and they couldn't write or publish anything critical of the government.
There was even a "Speak American Campaign" urging all the Japanese Americans to stop speaking Japanese and speak only English. In 1942 the Honolulu Police Department got a "vagrancy detail" program going where it rounded up unemployed adults who were called "deserters" by the military. They were sentenced to imprisonment and hard labor. For example, a woman who no longer wanted to work at a laundry refused to report; she was arrested and sentenced to thirty days.
This was complicated by the fact that the Issei and some Nisei were prohibited from doing certain jobs; war project and dock work, fishing, transportation, photography and teaching. There was also strict supervision and attempted control of any unions in which Japanese members were a majority, especially if they threatened to or did strike. Plantation owners could get lists of unemployed workers (remember the law above?) In effect the military forced the Japanese Americans into a controlled labor program.
The book goes on to cover what things happened towards the end of the war and thereafter. The subject of Hawaiian Issei and Nisei is one that is usually either not covered at all or given very little coverage, usually along the lines of "they weren't interned in large numbers." This book shows what really happened and how the treatment of some of those arrested matched in cruelty and humiliation the worst things done in the Iraq prisons by U.S. soldiers.
Definitely not a happy-reading type book, but one that is very good and very important nevertheless.
Main Index
Japan main page
Japanese-American Internment Camps index page
Japan and World War II index page
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