Sugarcane Plantation Village: Roots Across the Pacific

At the end of June, we visited the Sugarcane Plantation Village in Waipahu, Hawaiʻi. As soon as we entered the building, we were surrounded by handmade novelties—from colorful woven bookmarks, to tunics stitched from loud printed fabrics. There was a homeliness to the space, unlike the other historical sites and museums we'd visited. We followed our tour guide into a small room, the walls plastered with photos and short descriptions explaining the process and historical details of the Hawaiian sugar plantations. The guide introduced himself as third-generation Japanese Hawaiian gesturing toward a picture of a worker chopping sugarcane as he explained how workers called the practice kachi ken, a term that evolved from the Asian immigrant pronunciation of "cutting cane."

Hawaii's sugar industry took off in the late 1800s when the Civil War divided the United States, preventing access to the sugarcane fields of the South. Plantation Associations contracted workers from Asian and Southeast Asian countries like Japan, China, the Philippines and Korea in large numbers to work on Hawaii's sugar plantations. For many families of multicultural roots, they trace their ancestry back to the sugar plantations.

Our guide led us outside, commencing the tour officially by stopping in front of a sprawling bodhi tree, the ficus religiosa, a plant species that had made its way to Hawaii from South Asia. He delved into the cultural significance of the tree, and its role in Asian culture, including how Buddha gained enlightenment under the shade of a peepal tree. The story of the bodhi tree felt significant, but I have to admit, I was slightly confused how it would connect to the history of the sugar plantation.

Nevertheless, we moved forward, stopping in front of a replica of a Hawaiian house, or hale. This house was a hale-noa, or a house freed from taboo. Families were not bound by the traditional Hawaiian spiritual kapu system which was abolished by Hawaiian king Kamehameha II and his mother Queen Kaʻahumanu after the arrival of missionaries in the early 1800s. This meant that unlike periods under the kapu system, wives could eat with their husbands.

We strolled past cotton plants and vibrant breadfruit, or ulu, trees, stopping in front of eight housing replicas, each one progressing further in time than the last and each one representing a different ethnicity present on the plantations. As we moved through we began to observe the adoption of practices across cultures, such as the removal of shoes inside the house, a historically Asian practice. A Japanese language school book contained pictures of tropical Hawaiian fields. My favorite stop was the barbershop replica, where according to our guide, Japanese picture brides quickly became well known for giving the best haircuts, bringing people from across different ethnic groups on the plantation together, chatting while they waited in line.

As we concluded the tour, I realized that our guide saw the peepal tree of our first stop as a metaphor for the cultures that had crossed the ocean to take root in Hawaiʻi. Upon first glance, Buddha's enlightenment has nothing to do with the sugarcane plantations of Hawaiʻi—but that is precisely the point. People and practices across the Pacific had no intention of establishing a lineage on the islands of Hawaiʻi, but once their circumstances led them here their cultures and stories were planted in the history of Hawaiʻi, their roots entrenched deeply in the soil across generations.

Hawaiian Pidgin, the language of sugarcane plantation workers that persists among the revered elders today, stimulated cross cultural communication, containing elements of the Hawaiian, Japanese, Portuguese, and more. The ethnic plantation houses showed cross-cultural practices over time, the evidence of which remains in Hawaiʻi's unique social fabric today.