THE BEGINNING AND END OF THE HAWAIIAN SUGAR INDUSTRY

The Ukraine War has stimulated a rise in democracy.  For one, European countries are now united for the first time in a long time.  Combined, their defense (meaning also offense) budgets will rise over the next few years to box Russia.  This will lead the USA to somewhat disengage from that continent to focus on Asia and the Pacific.  Hawaii will return to be strategically important.

My outing this week was to the 130th anniversary celebration of the Ewa Sugar Plantation.  Brought back memories, for my professional life began as a factory engineer at the Hutchinson Sugar Company in the southernmost community in the U.S., Naalehu.

Interestingly enough, this industry has been here for almost 200 years, for the first recorded planting of sugar cane was Manoa Valley in 1825, where I've had an office at  the University of Hawaii for 50 years.  While that effort failed, the first actual sugar plantation was started in 1835 in Koloa, Kauai, where my father lived.

Of course, sugar cultivation began about 10,000 years ago, most likely in what is now New Guinea, located north of Australia.  

• Farming moved across the Pacific and into India, where the production into sucrose became a closely guarded secret.  

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  Around 2700 years ago the concept was passed on to Persia, and sugar remained an important trade commodity through all of history.
• Then 1400 years ago the Islam world started another agricultural revolution into the whole Mediterranean region.
• For several centuries from the year 1000, Egypt became the king of sugar.
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  The Portuguese gained control of this commodity in the 1400s, bringing sugar plantations to Africa, making the Spanish Canary Islands a kick-off point for spreading sugar to the New World of America.
• The Portuguese established sugar in Brazil in 1500, and by 1600 became the leading supplier to European markets.

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  The Dutch in particular brought sugar to the Caribbean, with Cuba around the time of the American Civil War becoming the world center for sugar.  Slavery was widely used.
• Captain James Cooke said he saw sugar fields in Hawaii in the later 1700's, so when the Civil War cut off sugar supplies to the North, the U.S. government noticed that Hawaii had modern plantations, and thus began an attempt, with strong cooperation of local sugar growers, to annex the islands, resulting in an overthrow of the Hawaiian government.

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  Also at play was an extension of Manifest Destiny into American expansion from 1870-1914.
• The coup d'état against Queen Liliuokalani in 1893 was not an isolated event.

Just around this time my father's father, Kenjiro (I'm Kenji and was named after him--Kenjiro means first son, while Kenji is #2), was sent to the USA from Utashinai (that's me visiting that city a few years ago) on Hokkaido for training.  

• No actual records have been found, but I suspect he went to learn how to mind for coal, for his hometown had just found coal.  
• On his return home in 1901 he happened to stop off on Kauai, and led the building of the 3 megawatt hydroelectric facility at Wainiha.
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  He somehow got married, bore my father and just about completed that project.
• However, at the age of 33 or so in 1906 he fell and died at that site just before the generator was commissioned.
• That is me above at this facility about a decade ago.  The same power plant is still producing around 3 MW with original tunneling and hardware.

All that introduction is background for my coming to Naalehu for my first job.

• Many of my close friends at Stanford chose to join the first full recruiting Peace Corps class, and were sent to some isolated spot on the globe for $99/month.
• I took the easy was out by being hired at Hutchinson Sugar Company in 1962 to work in the factory for $500/month with free housing and a Jeep.
• The owner was C. Brewer, the oldest of the Big Five companies, formed in 1826.
• It is said that into the mid-1950s, every time you switched on a light, turned on the gas or rode a street car, you made the Big Five richer.  They ran the territory, and, of course, all the sugar companies.
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  Here in Kau on the Big Island, life was challenging.  Worked 10 hours/day for 19 straight days, with calls at night when something broke down.  I still jerk during night phone calls.  Toughest job in my life, for I was placed in charge of supervisors who were double my age.  No TV or even radio (at night you could barely detect stations from Hilo).  This was the southernmost point in the USA, for we had become a state in 1959.

• However, I did meet my wife, who was a nurse in the next sugar town, Pahala, introduced by Bill Baldwin, the manager.  We also worked today a decade later in the U.S.Senate.

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  I think C. Brewer was preparing me to someday become a plantation manager, for they sent me to graduate school at Louisiana State University to study sugar engineering, paying my full salary during my absence.  
• I also got a fellowship with tuition waiver, so for the only time in our marriage, we didn't know what to do with the money we made.  

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  I managed to get an okay to stay for a PhD, but they cut-off my salary and told me to somehow pay them back someday when I could.  
• I changed my degree to biochemical engineering, and minored in business and law.  

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  Nearly four years later I returned to Hawaii to work at the University of Hawaii and you now know the story of my adult life.  
• I did write an environmental report for one of their sugar factories one summer, and which amazingly satisfied all I owed them.
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  At one time there were 500 sugar plantations.
• The sugar industry created the Hawaii of today, for they brought to islands 337,000 workers from throughout the Pacific.  
• In 1959 just about a third of the population was Japanese.
• Started with 50,000 Chinese beginning in 1850, then 200,000 Japanese from 1885-1924, to 112,800 Filipinos from 1909-1930.
• The Big Five were all descendants of missionary families.  The plantations had a hierarchical cast system, and this is where Pidgin language came together.
• There were major environmental problems, which companies managed to circumvent.
• Production:

• Call it foreign competition, union problems, shift in state priorities, but sugar began to decline, and the last working sugar mill was on Maui, with final sugar shipment in 2016.

Ewa Plantation began in 1890 and operated until 1970.  Thus, this should have been the 132nd Anniversary.  Much of the plantation town infrastructure remains.  1200 residences in eight district camps were constructed, with different ethnicities separated, even Okinawans from Japanese, who lived in Tenney Village.  Caucasian supervisors were in larger homes, still today called the Haole Camp, with the manager having a showcase mansion.  You can still see them today, located close by the Ewa Villages Golf Course.

A few photos:

It wasn't much, but you had to have lived there to appreciate everything.

Click on THIS to watch the opening segment of Saturday Night Live last night.  President Joe Biden and Press Secretary Jen Psaki get advice from TikTok stars about what to do in Ukraine?  Why?  Russia shutdown Facebook and Instagram.

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