The Japanese Conspiracy: The Oahu Sugar Strike of 1920

In "The Japanese Conspiracy," Berkeley historian Masayo Duus has rescued the record of a pivotal event in Hawaii's labor history, one whose significance has been misinterpreted. It usually is presented as a black and white drama -- or perhaps a brown and white one -- but Duus says, "Many writers on Hawaiian history have concluded that the Oahu strike of 1920 was a revolutionary labor struggle that transcended the bounds of race. But this interpretation is simply wishful thinking, based on a current perspective." Nor is it true that the Big Five simply ordered, "Jump," and everyone else asked, "How high?" "Many among the haole elite," Duus finds, " . . . still believed strongly in Christian charity and the aloha spirit. They did not want Hawaii to become like California . . . ." In 1920, Japanese sugar workers on Oahu struck the plantations. This had happened before, without much success, so a new strategy was devised. Only Oahu workers would walk out; they would rely on money and support from Japanese workers on other islands, who would keep working. During the strike, the house of Juzaburo Sakimaki, a translator and labor contractor at Olaa Plantation on the Big Island, was dynamited. At the time, newspapers did not treat the crime as either important or as directly linked to the strike. Sometime later, 21 Japanese strike leaders were indicted for conspiracy in the bombing. Fifteen of them came to trial in the Territorial court. Duus used the trial transcript, Japanese language newspapers and interviews with descendants of the strike leaders to reconstruct the story. It is a complicate one, and in Duus's telling the well-know struggle between labor and capital in Hawaii becomes a richer and more ironic drama that we have been used to. The bulk of the book concerns the planning and direction of the strike, and the movements of the 21 leaders, followed by detailed accounts of the testimony. It takes many pages just to introduce the alleged conspirators, and many more to follow them. But the effort is worth it, as in the final chapter Duus assigns a cascade of results, good and bad, to the episode. She interprets the indictments as one phase of a plan of the Hawaii Sugar Planters' Association to reopen Hawaii to Chinese labor. The plantations pursued a policy of preventing any non-white ethnic group from dominating the islands. In order to gain support in Washington to overturn the Chinese Exclusion Act, the HSPA portrayed the strike as a conspiracy of Japan to gain control of the Hawaiian islands. There seems to be no evidence that the Japanese government had any such intention, but the claim played into the hands of white racists on the West Coast who were trying to get a Japanese Exclusion Act passed. The strike was lengthy and eventually unsuccessful. Koreans, resentful of the behavior of Japan's colonial occupiers, were happy to cross picket lines. The Japanese were badly split, with Christians tending to back meliorist solutions, as advocate