Japanese sugar plantation laborers

This photograph, taken around 1890 at Kau, Hawaii Islands, showcases approximately 50 Japanese sugar plantation laborers. All of them are wearing Western-style clothing and hats, with some men holding plantation tools and buckets. But what is the story that lies behind this photograph?

 As a result of the opening of the 1885 emigration act, the Japanese were allowed to travel to Hawaii as contract laborers. The terms of the contract stated that the “Hawaiian government was to pay the steerage passage of the laborers and their wives and children from Yokohama to Honolulu.”[1] Yukiko Kimura states that in the early years when contract labors were being established, sugar planters had a policy for sending immigrants of the same prefecture to the same plantation and same living quarters.[2] I suspect that this policy was instituted on part of preventing language miscommunications. Even if they do all come from Japan, the dialect from the various prefectures might be different. Supplied as part of their contracts, medical care, living quarters, and firewood for cooking were provided free of charge. Yet their living quarters were “substandard and their working conditions subjected them to many indignities at the hands of ruthless overseers.”[3] I anticipate finding in further research that there was some greater reason for the Japanese to overlook these hard conditions and continue to migrate to Japan.

An additional question that this photograph raises for me is whether this ratio of men and women is reflective of the actual Japanese population that emigrated from Japan.