Voices from the Canefields

Voices From The Canefields is a collection of folk songs from Japanese immigrant workers in Hawai'i.

Folk songs are short stories from the souls of common people. Some, like Mexican corridos or Scottishballads reworked in the Appalachias, are stories of tragic or heroic episodes. Others, like the African American blues, reach from a difficult present back into slavery and forward into a troubled future. Japanese workers inHawaii's plantations created their own versions, in form more akin to their traditional tanka or haiku poetry. These holehole bushi describe the experiences of one particular group caught in the global movements of capital,empire,and labor during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In Voices From The Canefields author Franklin Odo situates over two hundred of these songs, in translation, in a hitherto largelyunexplored historical context.

Japanese laborers quickly comprised the majority of Hawaiian sugar plantation workers after their large-scale importation as contract workers in 1885. Their folk songs provide good examplesof the intersection between local work/life and the global connection which the workers clearly perceived after arriving. While many are songs of lamentation, others reflect a rapid adaptation to a new society in which otherethnic groups were arranged in untidy hierarchical order - the origins of a unique multicultural social order dominated by an oligarchy of white planters. Odo also recognizes the influence of the immigrants' rapidlymodernizing homeland societies through his exploration of the 'cultural baggage' brought by immigrants and some of their dangerous notions of cultural superiority. Japanese immigrants were thus simultaneously the targets ofintense racial and class vitriol even as they took comfort in the expanding Japanese empire.

Engagingly written and drawing on a multitude of sources including family histories, newspapers, oral histories, the expressed