They were recruited at a salary of $4 per month to support Hawaii’s burgeoning sugar industry, but few among the 149 Japanese who boarded the British sailing ship Scioto in Yokohama Bay on May 17, 1868, had ever worked the land.

A disparate group of city dwellers that included a 13-year-old drunkard known as Ichi the Viper, they were ill-suited to the grueling field work and harsh conditions that awaited them on the faraway plantations.

Purchased for $70 per man, the Gannenmono, as they are called, had no control over where they were sent once here and were subjected to rigid dictates in their daily lives.

By the end of their three-year contracts, two-thirds had either returned to Japan or would sail from the islands to seek better fortune on the U.S. mainland, leaving many to judge Hawaii’s “experiment” in importing Japanese laborers a failure.

Long overshadowed by the later waves of plantation workers from Japan — known as Issei, or first-generation immigrants — whose descendants continue to shape much of the modern history of Hawaii, the Gannenmono were reduced to little more than a historical footnote.

While lacking as farm laborers, historians say these very first arrivals planted the seeds for those future generations.

“These are the first Issei. This is truly when it all started,” said University of Hawaii American studies professor Dennis M. Ogawa. “It’s the beginning of the whole story of the Japanese in Hawaii.”

Few in number

Because they were small in number and dispersed throughout the islands, it’s hard to find obvious traces of the Gannenmono in Hawaii today. Only six of the Japanese men who arrived on the Scioto brought their wives, and unlike those who came later, the workers didn’t bond in tight-knit communities to observe their cultural traditions.

“There aren’t that many people who can trace their ancestral heritage back to the 1868 group because most of them didn’t stay, so they didn’t stick any roots in the community,” said Franklin S. Odo, visiting professor of American institutions and international diplomacy at Amherst College in Massachusetts and founding director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center.

Odo said the Gannenmono are notable primarily because they were the first group from Japan. But their story is worth retelling on the 150th anniversary of their arrival in Hawaii, he said, because of the global context in which it played out.

“It really is a lens through which we can take a look into what is happening in Japan and the U.S., and the development of sugar in Hawaii,” said Odo, who grew up on a small family farm in the Koko Head area of Oahu.

Ogawa speaks of the Gannenmono with unfettered enthusiasm, preferring to focus on the 50 or so who chose to start new lives here, marrying Hawaiian women, raising families, learning the native language.

“The count is not the ones who left, but the ones who stayed,” he said. “They were the whole key to getting the ball rolling.”

Gannenmono Journey: Key Dates by Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Scribd

Labor crunch

They were called Gannenmono, or “first year people,” because they left Japan in 1868, at the start of imperial rule under the emperor Meiji after civil war dismantled the feudal Tokugawa shogunate. It was a time of great upheaval and change, according to Gary Y. Okihiro, a prominent scholar, author and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University in New York who is retiring in June to take a position at Yale University.

“For Japan, that transition meant a new government and westernization, which led to industrialization, international engagements and eventually the contest with the U.S. over dominance in Asia and the Pacific that resulted in Pearl Harbor and U.S. entry into World War II,” he said.

Meanwhile, the United States was recovering from its Civil War, which had proven a boon for Hawaii’s sugar industry, thanks to the Union boycott of southern sugar. At this critical time of growth, island planters found themselves in a labor crunch, as the Chinese brought to Hawaii in the 1850s were leaving the plantations in large numbers and “anti-coolie” legislation passed by the U.S. Congress in 1862 restricted further trade in Chinese workers. (It would be followed by the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882.)

All this at a time when introduced diseases were exacting a terrible toll on the Native Hawaiian population, which had plummeted to about 70,000 by 1860, down from an estimated 300,000 at the time of Capt. James Cook’s arrival in 1778, according to the Native Hawaiian Databook.

“The last big epidemic had occurred in the previous decade of the 1850s,” explained Bishop Museum historian DeSoto Brown in an email. “But in addition to the lack of people, not every Hawaiian citizen chose to abandon subsistence farming and the gathering of ocean foods for an arduous job that was part of the monetary economic system.

“For this reason, the sugar industry looked to outside sources for workers, supported by the Hawaiian government.”

A ragtag bunch

Okihiro, who was born on the Aiea sugar plantation, said the kingdom’s overtures to secure Japanese labor were also “illustrative of its outreach to the rest of the world.”

“The Gannenmono didn’t just go to Hawaii; they went to Hawaii because Hawaii wanted them,” he said, and not just to work in the cane fields but as desirable additions to its waning population.

In 1865, Hawaii Foreign Affairs Minister Robert C. Wyllie, a Kauai sugar planter, appointed American businessman Eugene Van Reed as the kingdom’s Japan consul and tasked him with recruiting 350 to 400 laborers. Van Reed managed to muster only the ragtag group of 149 that included six women and a toddler. (The exact number of Gannenmono who came to Hawaii and left at different points in time, their date of arrival and other details vary depending on the historical source.)

“He did not do a good job recruiting. Basically, by his own account, he picked up stragglers on the streets of Yokohama,” Okihiro said. “They were a motley group that includes hairdressers, cooks, potters, former samurai, a 13-year-old kid who was a drunkard and a 19-year-old pregnant woman who was the wife of one of the men.

“They were unsuited for that kind of work. They had tender hands, and you had to have calloused hands when you work in the cane fields. It’s little wonder that many of them became too sick to work and one dropped dead and many others didn’t finish the terms of their contracts.”

Van Reed faced other difficulties in getting the Scioto out of Yokohama with its Hawaii-bound passengers. He had begun his negotiations with the shogunate government, but his plans began unraveling with the regime change in Japan. To avoid further delays, the Scioto sailed without authorization, sparking a bit of an international incident.

Harsh working conditions

During the 33-day voyage, one of the Japanese men died. When the Scioto arrived at Honolulu Harbor on June 19, 1868, King Kamehameha V welcomed the Gannenmono with gifts of clothing and salted fish.

The foreigners were said to have received a friendly welcome on the streets of Honolulu as they walked about. The Hawaiian Gazette described them as “a very good-natured and lusty-looking set of fellows.”

“They are very polite withal, having picked up our salutation of ‘aloha,’ and are not without a small degree of shame-facedness in regard to their appearance in coarse and sea-soiled clothing,” reads a June 24, 1868, account.

A separate report in the same newspaper opines, “The experiment of bringing hither emigrant laborers from Japan is not only a matter of importance to us, but excites no small interest in the minds of the foreign element in Yokohama. We believe the Japanese will find their own condition bettered by coming here to labor and we hope our employers will find them satisfactory laborers, so that the immigration so auspiciously commenced may be further encouraged, if necessary.”

The Gannenmono were sold at $70 per man. Under the terms of their three-year contracts, they were promised food, housing, medical care and $4 a month, half to be paid in cash and the remainder in script to be redeemed later.

Their employers included well-known missionary and business brands such as Atherton, C. Brewer, Chamberlain, Castle, Cooke, Wilder, Judd, McInerny, Richardson, Bishop and Theo H. Davies, who put them to work at Kaalaea Plantation on Oahu, Haiku Sugar Co. and Makee Plantation on Maui, Lihue Plantation on Kauai and elsewhere. A handful were purchased for Queen’s Hospital and as domestic help.

Seventy-one workers were sent to Maui, 51 to Oahu, 22 to Kauai and four to Lanai, according to Okihiro. The conditions were harsh and their lives subject to strict oversight. Field workers toiled 10 hours a day, while those in the mills put in 12-hour shifts, with a half hour for lunch, he said.

“Every day was mapped out for them: when they could go to bed, when they could smoke — it was highly regimented. Often times they were not paid because there were deductions for being late and for curfew violations, if they were sick or injured, and for breaking or losing tools,” said Okihiro, whose 1992 book “Cane Fires” examines anti-Japanese sentiment in Hawaii from 1865 through World War II.

“It varied from plantation to plantation. Some were really bad and some were relatively good, depending on the manager.”

One of the workers’ biggest complaints was that their contracts could be sold to other employers without their consent.

It wasn’t long before their grievances reached Japan, which dispatched special envoys to the islands in December 1869 to investigate. Despite uncovering abuses at Waialua during a tour of Oahu plantations, the lead envoy wrote to Hawaii Foreign Affairs Minister Charles C. Harris that “we have everywhere found our countrymen well cared for and kindly treated by their employers.”

Nonetheless, on Jan. 11, 1870, the Japanese representatives reached an agreement with the kingdom to send 40 Gannenmono back to Japan, with the understanding the others could remain in the islands at the end of their contracts if they so desired.

The 40 who wished to leave did so on Jan. 29, 1870, aboard the Hawaiian barque R.W. Wood. Once home in Japan, they published a statement accusing plantation owners of cruelty and not living up to the contract terms, igniting a public uproar. The Meiji government shut down further departures of contract laborers for years to come.

As for the remaining Gannenmono, only about a dozen chose to return to Japan after completing their contracts in 1871. Of those who stayed in the islands, 40 eventually moved on to the U.S. mainland, while roughly 50 made Hawaii their home.

“Some of those men married Hawaiians, and for the others is was not as easy to simply go back. Even though the planters’ contract contained a stipulation that they would pay for the return voyage, that was not always the case,” Okihiro said.

Among those who stayed was Sentaro Ishii, a former samurai who learned the Hawaiian language, married a Hawaiian woman, had four children and became a Roman Catholic. By 1885, he had worked his way up to a luna, or overseer.

Ishii, the last of the original Gannenmono, died in 1936 at age 103 in Kipahulu, Maui. A year earlier, he told an interviewer the work was “not bad” and the food adequate while employed on Makee Plantation.

A living testimony

Because of the Gannenmono experience in Hawaii and other concerns about the treatment of Japanese nationals overseas and its own image in the global community, Japan refused further requests for contract labor for almost two decades.

Visiting Japan in 1881 as part of his world tour, King Kalakaua referred to the Gannenmono in making a personal plea to the emperor to resume migration to Hawaii, according to Ogawa.

“The 50 who stayed were living testimony, solid proof. They were Japanese who chose to stay here as opposed to being forced to or had no choice but to stay. The Gannenmono were the example that opened the door,” said Ogawa, whose new book, “Who You? Hawaii Issei,” co-authored with Christine Kitano, commemorates the 150th anniversary of the Gannenmono’s arrival.

An immigration treaty between Japan and Hawaii in 1885 led to the importation of approximately 950 contract laborers, to be followed by thousands more.

From the time of the Gannemono to when Congress passed the Immigration Act of 1924, which excluded immigrants from Asia, 214,000 Japanese had come to Hawaii on labor contracts. By 1920, there were more than 109,000 Japanese in Hawaii, comprising over 40 percent of the population.

“Indirectly, in terms of a lasting legacy within Hawaii, one could only say (the Gannenmono) were the foundation upon which later migration of Japanese was built, although you didn’t see the same kind of community infrastructure of later generations,” Okihiro said.

The Gannenmono “experiment” also may have contributed to better working conditions for those who followed.

“Later migrations in the 1880s were regulated by Japanese government, from recruiting to housing to transportation to Hawaii,” Okihiro said. “The Japan consul in Hawaii really looked at the welfare of the Japanese and kept an eye on the migrant population. They were much more careful.”