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The Japanese laborers just needed to stop complaining. Demanding more money from plantation managers was preposterous, greedy — and totally unnecessary.

Sure, the $18-a-month minimum wage for Japanese workers was significantly less than what their Portuguese and Puerto Rican counterparts made, Hawaii newspapers acknowledged in a series of highly critical stories about the plantation labor movement that dominated headlines in 1909.

And yes, white teachers in Hawaii were complaining that they could barely make ends meet on $50 a month. But how, the decidedly anti-labor newspapers wrote, could Japanese laborers claim to be poor when postal data showed that many workers were sending money to families back home?

The plantation hands in Hawaii have “little or nothing to complain of,” the Pacific Commercial Advertiser wrote at the start of a large plantation strike in 1909, adding that any laborer who wasn’t making good money didn’t deserve it.

“They are unskilled, unthinking fellows, mere human implements, but a minority easily aroused by demagogues,” the paper stated.

Hawaii’s labor movement would eventually unite the ethnic communities that plantation owners had tried to keep segregated, and that played a huge role in the development of Hawaii’s unique local identity. But a century ago, if newspaper editors had their way, there would have been no unions or labor movement at all.

More than 7,000 Japanese laborers walked off their jobs in the cane fields across Oahu in 1909, in a highly organized and unprecedented show of force.

On one side were Japanese laborers who formed an organization that was essentially the first Hawaii plantation union, a Japanese-language newspaper and several Japanese men in a unique position to advocate for fellow immigrants with few legal rights.

On the other side were the plantation owners, the territorial government and pretty much every English-language paper in operation at the time. People worried about bias in the media today would be rightfully scandalized to read the stories published in Hawaii in 1909.

The strike fizzled out after government officials — in close cooperation with plantation owners — raided the office of a pro-labor Japanese-language newspaper, arrested dozens of strikers and put multiple strike leaders on trial for conspiracy.

But it was the start of a movement that would dramatically change Hawaii in decades to come.

An Eye For Injustice

The story of one of Hawaii’s most significant early labor strikes is also the story of several remarkable men who came together at a tumultuous time in the islands’ history.

The first Japanese workers arrived in Hawaii in the 1860s, but large waves of immigration really began in 1885 as plantations turned to Japan to solve their worker shortage. By the early 1900s, Japanese immigrants made up the bulk of the laborers in Hawaii’s cane fields.

Fred Makino, the son of an English businessman and a Japanese mother, moved to Hawaii in his early 20s and opened a drugstore in Honolulu after working on several plantations. He quickly became a go-to person in the community for Japanese laborers struggling with immigration or legal issues.

Yasutaro Soga was a Tokyo-born journalist and social activist who published a Japanese-language paper in Hawaii called the Nippu Jiji.

Motoyuki Negoro moved from Japan to California as a teenager, and was one of the first three people to earn a law degree from the University of California, Berkeley, but was unable to practice law in Hawaii because he was not a U.S. citizen.

Makina, Soga and Negoro helped form the Japanese Higher Wages Association after trying in various ways to help laborers who worked long hours for little pay and had few resources to turn to for help.

Workers had already tried striking for better labor conditions on several plantations (the first known plantation strike in Hawaii was actually in the 1840s) but most strikes had been confined to a single plantation or brutally shut down before they even got started. In 1889, Katsu Goto — a former-plantation worker who opened the first Japanese-owned store on Hawaii island and was an advocate for laborers — was lynched.

Then in January 1909, after a series of articles in the Nippu Jiji advocating for change, a group of more than 1,000 laborers met in Makiki and passed a resolution calling for higher wages from the Planters’ Association.

Early English-language newspaper coverage characterized the effort as a movement “engineered chiefly by storekeepers in Honolulu, backed by a few professional agitators, who look only to their own selfish interests and are careless of the suffering and privation that may result from their advocacy of a strike.”

The papers also took to publishing outrageously bad translations of Nippu Jiji articles, claiming that the paper was calling for the execution of rival Japanese-language newspapers that opposed a strike.

The editor of the Nippu Jiji, “the Japanese yellow journal of Honolulu, is preparing the way for his own prosecution or deportation,” The Hawaiian Gazette wrote a few weeks after laborers signed the demand letter.

Labor organizers waited months for a reply from plantation owners, all while a steady stream of newspaper articles, invariably referring to the workers and organizers as “agitators,” portrayed the effort as dangerous, selfish and misguided. Finally, in May, more than 1,000 workers with the Higher Wages Association voted to strike.

Most of the organizing had been done on individual plantations by laborers in touch with the Higher Wages Association, since gathering regularly in large groups was difficult. But within 10 days of the initial strike declaration, papers reported that every plantation on Oahu was impacted and thousands of laborers had been evicted from the plantations for refusing to work. Many walked for days to reach Honolulu, where the association worked with Japanese merchants to try to house and feed the workers and their families.

The march of families and workers with their belongings from Waipahu to Honolulu was like a “war-time exodus,” the Sunday Advertiser wrote.

The papers were hardly sympathetic to the evicted workers. One Pacific Commercial Advertiser story went so far as to suggest that plantation owners conspire to fix the local price of rice. “Dear rice would soon exhaust a strike maintenance fund,” the paper wrote.

Breaking The Strike

When the strike began, Hawaii papers were quick to claim that it would not last long.

They also predicted that although Japanese laborers constituted an ever-growing portion of Hawaii’s population, the group would have little influence on politics in the islands — in 1909 or in the future.

Both prognostications would prove laughably wrong.

The strength of the strikers and the reach of the Higher Wages Association caused enough alarm for the heads of plantations on all islands to gather together and pledge to stand firm with “the Oahu contingent.” No concessions on wages were to be made on any island, they said.

Strike leaders like Makino, who was also writing articles for the Nippu Jiji, argued that the cause should be viewed through not only the American values of democracy and equality, but under the values of Christianity.

“Most of the capitalists of Hawaii are the descendants of missionaries,” the Nippu Jiji wrote, according to a translation published in the Hawaiian Star. “The wealth that was inherited by these capitalists was not intended to be spent leading a life of luxury and pomp … Was it given to them to suck the blood of poor laborers in order they may live in luxury? We would say, no.”

In late May, the editor of the Nippu Jiji was charged with “disorderly conduct” for writing articles to incite the strike. The strike had seen several acts of violence, including an attack on a Japanese worker who had not joined the strike. Makino and other strike leaders disavowed the violence, but that did little to appease the authorities.

A few days later, police arrested one of the labor leaders in Kahuku for running “afoul” of United States Postal Laws. Strikers had — according to the Hawaiian Star — tried to prevent the delivery of a Japanese-language newspaper siding with the plantation owners. They had also scrawled the word “traitor” on the papers.

Then in mid-June authorities arrested five of the main strike organizers on charges of conspiracy and “being disorderly persons.” As part of the arrest, they raided the offices of the Nippu Jiji and broke into the newspaper safe without a warrant.

Later that month, an Associated Press story claimed that the Japanese consul had told superiors in Japan that the strike was the work of “anarchists” and that plantation owners should be unyielding in their response. The consul said the next day that he’d made no such claims, and the Hawaiian Star published a story with multiple theories about where the false claim could have come from — none of them being that the story had been faked. All of this added to what had become a newspaper war between pro- and anti-labor publications.

Something had to be done, The Hawaiian Star argued in June. Not about false stories in the English-language papers, but about that pesky “anarchist” publication the Nippu Jiji.

“The situation, seems, in fact, to be reaching a stage where, leaving all wage questions aside, these Japanese strike newspapers and their allies, have overstepped the line of what the community ought to tolerate, or the federal authorities allow,” the paper opined. “Is it thoroughly realized, how far the disrespect for the authorities is being cultivated?”

Lasting Legacy

The trial against the strike leaders, including the editor and publisher of the Nippu Jiji, lasted nearly a month. Partway through the trial, a member of the Higher Wages Association violently attacked the publisher of one of the main pro-plantation Japanese-language newspapers, further inflaming the situation. A few weeks later, the strike leaders were sentenced to 10 months in prison.

The arrests of the strike leaders — along with arrests of more than 50 other laborers over the course of the strike — did not fully stamp out the movement. But coupled with a successful effort to entice Chinese and Hawaiian workers to take the place of the Japanese laborers with higher temporary wages, plantation owners were able to end the strikes later that summer without making any concessions. They had won — or so it seemed at the time.

A few months after the strikes ended, Oahu plantations agreed to raise the wages of Japanese workers and made further agreements to build temples and improve living conditions.

The fight to improve the plantation system was far from over, and some of the most dramatic moments of Hawaii’s labor movement were yet to come — including the Hanapepe Massacre of 1924, in which 16 Filipino workers and four police officers were killed on Kauai.

But as the , the strike was well organized and had long-lasting impacts. It effectively scared the sugar planters for years to come.

After his release from prison, the editor of the Nippu Jiji took a more conservative stance on the labor movement. Makino, the pharmacist, launched his own newspaper in response and became a well-known and sometimes controversial advocate for the Japanese community. The paper he founded, the Hawaii Hochi, printed its last edition in 2023.

At a meeting attended by more than 1,000 laborers near the start of the 1909 plantation strike, an English lawyer involved in the movement spoke passionately about the tone and motivation of newspaper coverage of the strike. Newspapers were calling for them to be arrested he said.

In the future, he predicted, sentiments would change. The strikers’ descendants would point with pride to the fact that their fathers and grandfathers been a part of the 1909 strike.

A century later, with Hawaii often pointed to as having one of the strongest union forces in the nation, it’s clear which side won out.