Japanese ancestors emigrated to Hawaii to avoid draft, family reunion reveals

Last month I wrote about companies started by Japanese immigrants. In it I mentioned that a great number of those immigrants came from the island of Kyushu and southern Honshu.

My theory about why that is so is that there was a brief civil war on Kyushu called the Satsuma Rebellion, in 1877. It devastated Kyushu and neighboring southern Honshu areas, such as Hiroshima and Yamaguchi.

The movie “The Last Samurai,” with Tom Cruise, was about the Satsuma Rebellion.

Four years later King Kalakaua met with Emperor Meiji and worked out a policy that allowed Japanese to come to Hawaii to work on sugar plantations. Many of those who came emigrated from those economically depressed areas.

Last week Hawaii island native Kenneth Fujii wrote to tell me he had a different theory.

“At a big family reunion that we had 25 years ago at the Naniloa Hotel in Hilo, each family branch was asked to present an oral report to the group to tell us their understanding of why and how their first-generation grandparents decided to leave Japan and come to Hawaii,” Fujii said.

“One of the most fascinating revelations which came out of those family histories was the real reason that our first generation left Japan.”

During the Meiji Era, Japan was rapidly westernizing and industrializing its society, going from a feudal samurai society to a powerful industrial country with heavy industry and strong military might.

“Japan was also expanding their borders militarily to acquire raw materials and setting their sights on conquering and occupying weaker neighboring Asian territories,” Fujii’s extended family said.

“To build up their military power, the Meiji government drafted young men to serve in the army and navy. But the government exempted many young men from the draft, especially those who worked in manufacturing, railroads, construction, international trade and finance, and professionals like engineers, architects, mechanics, mathematicians and scientists.”

Workers in the silk industry were also exempt because silk was Japan’s No. 1 export at the time. Silk brought in foreign currencies and gold, which could be used to purchase heavy machinery and raw materials.

These essential and educated workers now had the support and ear of the emperor.

This was a major shift from past generations where samurai were the privileged class. The Satsuma Rebellion was a samurai-led protest against this change.

“That left the draft-eligible men in agriculture and farming as the main source of conscripts, as well as laborers, shopkeepers and restaurant owners.

“My grandparents were almost all farmers,” Fujii said, “with a few shopkeepers. They were prime targets for the Meiji draft. As Japan got ready for war in the 1890s, the prospect of being drafted scared most young farmers like my grandparents in Yamaguchi. They did not want to go and fight on the battlefields of foreign lands.

“So there was a big wave of applications to emigrate to Hawaii and later to other foreign lands like Brazil, Peru, Canada and the U.S. from those agricultural prefectures.

“These farmers were perfect workers for the burgeoning sugar and pineapple plantations in the islands. My grandparents were among the ‘draft dodgers’ who chose to come to Hawaii rather than being drafted into the Japanese military.

“Finding out that we were descended from draft dodgers brought a big chuckle from the audience in attendance at our family reunion,” Fujii says.

“My grandparents came to Hawaii around 1893, and by the following year Japan had entered the Sino-Japanese War against the Ching Dynasty of China in the Korean Peninsula and surrounding territories.”

In 1895 Japan invaded Taiwan and conquered that island. “So my grandparents barely escaped the war years in Japan by coming to Hawaii, before they got drafted. They were assigned to plantations owned by C. Brewer on the Hamakua Coast of the Big Island.

“The ‘cover story’ that my grandparents and their friends used when asked by Hawaiian Immigration Officials or later social scientists about their reasons for coming to Hawaii was, ‘to seek a better life and to make money to send home,’ but never once did they say publicly that their main reason was to avoid conscription into the Japanese military.

“So it remains a hidden factor in the history of immigration to Hawaii, regarding why so many Japanese men were anxious to leave Japan in the late 1800s.

“My grandparents were both worried and embarrassed about their reasons for leaving Japan because it was not a patriotic rationale, and so they never discussed it outside of the family. And when they talked about it at family gatherings, they switched from speaking English to Japanese so that we youngsters would not understand what was being said.”

Fortunately, some of them learned the language in Japanese schools and could understand their grandparents.

I asked Fujii whether there was more to the story about why so many laborers came from southern prefectures.

He said, “Although the initial plan was to recruit plantation laborers from throughout Japan, the experience with the first few boatloads of Japanese during the early years tended to indicate that Japanese workers from the southern prefectures worked out the best in the hot, humid climate of Hawaii.

“It seems that southern Japan’s climate resembles Hawaii, more so than the northern prefectures, which had a more temperate climate, with their snowy winters and changes of seasons. Japan’s northern prefectures are like New York, Massachusetts, New Jersey, while the southern prefectures are like North and South Carolina and Georgia.

“The Hawaiian sugar planters and the Japanese government focused most of their recruitment and approvals for those who came from principally four southern prefectures: Hiroshima, Yamaguchi (both on the island of Honshu), Fukuoka and Kumamoto (on Kyushu). In later years Okinawa was added to that list.

Ask your Japanese-American friends where their ancestors immigrated from. I bet more than half were from those southern regions.

Bob Sigall, author of the “Companies We Keep” books, looks through his collection of old photos to tell stories of Hawaii people, places and companies. Email him at Sigall@yahoo.com.