Excerpted from Faces of America
Kristi's paternal grandfather was a man named Tatsuichi Yamaguchi, born April 24, 1879, in Ureshino, Japan. He died in California in 1958 when Kristi's father Jim was just eighteen. Kristi never met him, and her father knew surprisingly little about his origins when we talked to him. But we were able to reconstruct his story -- and it is as inspiring as any story I encountered during the course of this project. We found a passenger list from the Japanese Diplomatic Records Office showing that Tatsuichi Yamaguchi, a twenty-one-year-old farmer, left his hometown in Japan for Hawaii on November 16, 1899, under a labor permit. Tatsuichi had signed a three-year contract with the Onomea Sugar Company on the big island of Hawaii, near Hilo. At that time, Hawaii was about to become a territory of the United States, and it was dominated by vast sugar plantations owned by American companies. These plantations required huge numbers of workers and the indigenous population of Hawaii had been decimated by the diseases introduced by foreigners. Labor had to come from abroad. Japanese workers were welcome and desired. This was a new phenomenon in Japan. "Hawaii Fever," as it was called, exerted a powerful attraction, especially for younger sons of large families, because they could never expect to inherit their family's farm. In 1899, 130 people from the Saga prefecture applied to emigrate to Hawaii, and 57 were granted permission to go. They set sail in November of that year. Kristi's grandfather was among these pioneers. Tatsuichi was the fourth son in his family. He had no hope of inheriting any land in Japan. It was a calculated risk. |
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