Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 [Paperback]

Ronald T. Takaki (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback: 236 pages
• Publisher: University of Hawaii Press (October 1, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0824809564
• ISBN-13: 978-0824809560
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #104,915 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

My grandfather emigrated from Japan to work on the cane fields of Hawaii in 1886, and my mother was born on the Hawi Plantation. As a teenager growing up on Oahu, I was not academically inclined but was actually a surfer. During my senior year, I took a religion course taught by Dr. Shunji Nishi, a Japanese American with a Ph.D. I remember going home and asking my mother, who only had an eighth-grade education: "Mom, what's a Ph.D.?" She answered: "I don't know but he must be very smart." Dr. Nishi became a role model for me, and he arranged for me to attend the College of Wooster. There my fellow white students asked me questions like: "How long have you been in this county? Where did you learn to speak English?" They did not see me as a fellow American. I did not look white or European in ancestry. As a scholar, I have been seeking to write a more inclusive and hence more accurate history of Americans, Chicanos, Native Americans as well as certain European immigrant groups like the Irish and Jews. My scholarship seeks not to separate our diverse groups but to show how our experiences were different but they were not disparate. Multicultural history, as I write and present it, leads not to what Schlesinger calls the "disuniting of America" but rather to the re-uniting of America.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

16 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Pau Hana, April 17, 2006

By 

Kameaiulanalole (Waimanalo, Hawaii) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (Paperback)

In many ways it was the plantation labor experience that makes Hawaii unique in the world. Sugar plantations were very labor-intensive operations and workers were needed wherever they could be obtained.

Management couldn't mistreat the plantation workers because the workers were so essential. But as plantation labor matured, they began to assert more demands for higher wages and better treatment. Takaki tries to be fair to all sides in the "contested territory" of the plantation.

There is a myth in Hawaii that local Hawaiians were unsuited to plantation labor -- depending on your prejudices, Hawaiians were either too lazy or too smart to work so hard. Takaki observes that the indigenous labor structure of Hawaii wasn't any less exploitative than the plantation system, and native Hawaiians did work on the plantations, sometimes as lunas (field bosses). Problem was, the labor needs of the plantations exceeded the ability of the local population to supply, especially after the calamitous die-off of locals from imported diseases.

I wish Takaki had not stopped at 1920. The history of plantation labor from then until it finally disappeared in the 1960s and 70s could be another book.

The unhappy irony of the Hawaiian plantation system is that once the planters provided humane wages and living conditions the Hawaiian plantations could no longer compete with cheap-labor producers elsewhere in the world where workers are treated more poorly.

Takaki's book helps explain why the word "Hawaiian" today can apply to a person of a dozen ethnic backgrounds, or a blend of any combination of them, including ethnic Hawaiian.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent book on the life of the different ethnic groups., March 7, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Pau Hana: Plantation Life and Labor in Hawaii, 1835-1920 (Paperback)

This book revives memories of times gone by. It covers a period of laborers working in the sugar plantations of Hawaii. A diverse group of people, coming together under hardships, overcoming adversity and language barriers. Mr. Takaki did an excellent combination of relating the days that made sugar King, and how it was built on the backs of the Portuguese, Japanese, Chinese, Filipino's. Today's descendents can read this book, smile, weep, and relate from stories told to them as children by these hardy laborers.