 Okay. We're back. We're live at three o'clock. Rock. Here on Life After Statehood with Ray Tsuchiyama, our regular contributor to this important historical discussion of Hawaii. Welcome back, Ray. Thank you very much, Jay, and I love your hat. You seem very like a gentleman farmer today. Thank you. There's a reason for that. Right. Because today we're going to discuss agriculture, more specifically, Hawaii, the perfect place for agriculture. Is that really, is that true? If you would think so with the history of sugar, of pineapple, and many other crops, you would think that Hawaii should be a leader in agriculture. Yeah, you would. That's correct. But let's talk about history for a minute. And you mentioned before the show began about the falls of Clyde, and this woman from Glasgow who is trying to recapture it for Scotland. And this tells us something, because here in Hawaii we don't care about the falls of Clyde. They in Glasgow, they care. So the question is whether we are appropriately sensitive to the history of our own place, are we? That's a good question, because when you look around, is there a plantation historical museum, for example, that people would go to and take their children and see how what the grandparents had to go through? Because when you think about it, the plantation era really was a long time in Hawaiian history, starting out like the 1830s and 40s, and going on into the 1960s actually ended perhaps last year with the closing of Maui Pines, a sugar plantation in Pune. And in fact, Pune and a cab on Maui was a small virtual town of 10,000, 11,000 people where my grandparents and relatives lived out of a population of barely 40,000 to 45,000 on Maui. And now it's gone, completely gone. It's as if we destroyed it and kind of relegated it to the dustbin of history because we are in a high-tech tourism-based economy. So back in 1850 or so, we had our first immigrants come. They were Chinese actually, they were Coolies, and they were working the land, but the land was not in plantation model not yet. And it took another 20, 30 years, maybe more, for the capital concentration to be developed so that these guys, former missionaries and the like, could get enough money and power when they were working on it all the time to actually build plantations. And the largest plantations at the time were built in North Kohala along the North Kohala. And they were huge, one after the other. And that was where the model, if you will, was invented up there. All that cultural and technological stuff that you had to have to make a competitive plantation. Very interesting. And this would be 1890, 1900, 1910. And most of the people, first it was the Japanese, and then the Portuguese came. Not from Portugal per se, you know. It came from the Azores, right? It's off of Portugal. But going back in time, you're absolutely right that actually the first crop, a cash earner, was actually sandalwood when you think about it. And it was harvested and sent to Hong Kong, other places, made into furniture. And that was a real cash crop. But that was not a sustainable kind of crop, because once you cut it down, it was gone. And it was a controlled kind of economy by the Ali, of course, using the lower cast in the Hawaiian society to kind of chop it up and take it away. So by the 1830s and 40s, you're correct. The business people from New England who intermarried and intermingled with the missionary families, the Castle and Cooks and Theos Davies and many, many families, looked at sugar as the big, big crop. But sugar was very water-intensive when you think about it. And you're correct that in the 1880s and 90s, like on Maui, there were two cousins, C.W. Dickey and Harry Baldwin. They both attended MIT. Harry Baldwin's major was civil engineering, 1894, the class of 1894 at MIT. Think of that as the internet of its time. When it comes back, C.Z.L. Valley, how do we draw water to the central plains of Maui? And that whole began the process of the canals. And it was a major civil engineering undertaking. So those three things, you had to have, first, you had to have land. That's right. And if you intermarried with people who have land, then you wind up with land. Secondly, you had to have money and connections will give you capital. You need that to operate. Thirdly, you have to have labor. And we had a system for importing labor from Asia that was working. And first it was the Chinese, then it was the Japanese. And I think the Japanese were the plurality, really, over the life of the plantation model of the workforce there. And in fact, when you say the Azores, Azores, of course, were kind of like the countryside of Portugal. It wasn't like Lisbon, Lisboa. And the early immigrants from Japan were from the Kanto area, Tokyo, Yokohama, that area. Of course, they knew nothing about the agriculture. So the sugar planters looked at a map and said, well, why don't we draw a line? The farthest away from Tokyo and Yokohama should be people who are rooted in the land. Therefore, exactly at the western edge of Honshu, Yamaguchi prefecture, Hiroshima prefecture, Fukuoka, Mai Rampers. My wife's family, Yamaguchi can. That's right. And of course, Okinawa, but the big one is Kumamoto prefecture, where my grandparents came. And when Harry Baldwin came back from MIT, he started working on the 1890s, 1900s, and my grandparents arrived in Kaholui Camp 1907. So you can see a direct correlation between his investment and the construction of the canals and the sugar coming up and harvesting. And like you said, the falls of the clouds and that type of ship, we don't have them anymore. There were the lifeblocks going back and forth. In those days, you know, 1890, 1900, the early 1900s, you know, people were moving around the world. It was like the early globalism, if you will. We don't know too much about globalism right now under this administration. But in the old days, there was a lot of globalism happening. A lot of people were immigrating all over the place. It was a sort of an arbitrage of labor in those days. And the arbitrage here came mostly in those days from Japan. But what I want to add, though, is that we had to have something else, too. We had a technology, you mentioned it, engineering for the water. We had to know about, you know, plant science. We had to know about that. And therefore, in 1910, when the University of Hawaii was established, what do you think we have? CITAR, the College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. I will never, maybe you can help me with this, understand why human resources is in the College of Tropical Agriculture. But even today in 2017, it still is. And I guess that's because it was really the College of Plantations, and they both fit in the same container, Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources. Well, that's a very good point, because they needed people to work on the plantations. And of course, when you think about the plantations, it's about growing cane, and you had to really figure out about disease, nematodes, insects, all that kind of thing, including people to look at water quality and so forth. So you're right that the early college curriculum probably focused on tropical agriculture of that period. It wasn't on cars. It wasn't on steelmaking. It wasn't on all those areas that East Coast colleges were focusing on. They were focusing on how to have a quality harvest and how to ship that harvest to the mainland and other places. So that whole ecosystem began to develop, especially in the 20s and 30s. And when you talk about culture, Hawaii was a very closed society back then. And the governor was appointed. It was a territory of Hawaii. And of course, there was a small ecosystem or a group of families that really controlled life. It was very hierarchical also. You only go back on that very point. So now we had to take over the overthrow in 1893. Now this changed things, because now there wasn't a monarchy anymore. It was a bunch of howly businessmen who some of them had into marriage. They could get the ships. They could get the money. They could get the land. They could put it together. And they formed that group, that big society, a closed society, a very hierarchical society. And query whether the plantation system could have developed to the extent it did, had that not happened. It seemed to me that that laid the groundwork for the development of this hierarchical arrangement where you could own large plantations and operate them and get all the elements you needed and make them profitable. And they were profitable for a long, long time. They built the state, really. That's right. And they were always looking at centralization. A lot of institutions still continue, like the school board and why there isn't a mayor of Pearl City or Lihue, when you think about it, or Kahui. The county system is very weak. The state is omnipresent in taxes and so forth emanating from Oahu. And you're correct that in the 20s and 30s, something else happened, though, that laid the seeds to really destroy the plantation system. And that was number one, education, public education. In the 20s and 30s, many, many teachers came to teach at Oahu where my father went to Maui High School in Hamakawa Pogo, who were like the Peace Corps of its day, people from Michigan, from Washington State, from Stanford, from the East Coast of Dunburn. Teach for America, the same thing. Yes, very similar. My father had English, math, Latin. They studied Shakespeare. His best friend was called Cassius from Julius Caesar. They had proms. They were like... And they went home, but their parents spoke no English. It's so interesting. My grandparents spoke no English. It was the Americanization of the plantation population is what it was. And they were laying the seeds for an easy kind of thing because in the neighborhoods, especially the plantations had the judges, the police, and so forth. It was more like a police state when you think about it. You could not go and get a job at the Big Five Company. You couldn't go. They weren't hiring Japanese at that point, even though you went to University of Hawaii. But what changed everything was the war. The war in 1941, Pearl Harbor comes, and that allowed the Nisei, my father's generation, to suddenly see Gay Paris. They saw New York. They saw Germany. They were at the same level as any other soldier in the U.S. Army, and they found out something else that they knew as much or even more than people from Arkansas, Mississippi, Alabama. So this transformed their minds and already... A level of confidence now. There's a huge, what we would call in retrospect, consciousness building in a way. So they come back in the late 40s, and they see a system where it's like going to the U.K. for education, coming back to Johannesburg in the 70s and 80s, and seeing that it's not sustainable. Coming back from the war really was an amazing experience for them because they had distanced themselves. Now they can understand it with a much greater clarity. But let me take you back to the 30s for a moment. Your father was on a plantation. My wife's parents run it. And the question is, what was life like there? You were at the bottom of the hierarchical totem pole. You didn't get paid very much. The work was physical. And yet a great culture was developed, particularly around the Japanese culture. And I mean, when some of these old folks talk about life on the plantation, they talk about it in sweet terms. They had a wonderful time, they had a social experience that they still carry around today. What was so good about it? Well, you have to understand that when my grandparents left, they left a place in Kumamoto or Hiroshima that had an overpopulation. There was not enough land. I would guarantee that the males who came to Hawaii for Japan were never the first son. They were the third or fourth son who couldn't inherit land. So Japan was going through a population boom. And a lot of things that would lead to war in China and Manchuria and other places came out of that kind of families that had five, six children were the norm in those days. And so when they came to the plantation, first the plantation really took care of everything. The house was, you know, they could live in for cheaply. They had a canteen, they had, and they could buy things from cheap. They could get credit on the stores. They had a hospital at the plantation. They had, you know, education through the schools. They care of everything. In local parenthesis, you don't need a mayor. You can have a plantation manager, you know? And it also, yeah, it led to what we don't understand that well, but I think it also led to a cultural-ethnic mixing. They had what was the Kau Kau Tin. Everybody had a tin that they would bring to lunch, and it was food inside. And they were sharing this. Portuguese food, Japanese food, Chinese food. And you could see in the 20s and 30s the breakdown ethnicity and then the acculturation of becoming more of Hawaii. Building a great culture was building the culture we have today. That is remarkable and important. We'll take a quick break, Ray. That's Ray Tsuchiyama. We're here on life after statehood, although we talk about before statehood too. We're talking about Hawaii, the perfect place for agriculture. You'll see. We'll come back and we'll talk about more about how this culture and the plantations invented this special Hawaii culture. Aloha. 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A study of how the agriculture has evolved or not in the state of Hawaii. So I wanted to ask you, we talked about the way various cultures would mix, which was actually a beautiful thing. I mean, it is one of the best things about Hawaii. We are the original, the perfect melting pot. It's remarkable. It's lovable. It is our essence. But then when I came here, which was in the 60s, people talked about the plantation mentality. This was not necessarily a good thing. What is the plantation mentality? What are the characteristics of it? That's a very good question. And because when you lived in a plantation, remember you began your day by a blast of a hooting horn somewhere on the plantation. A steam whistle. And then at the end of the day, there was another whistle. And it reminds you of 1984 kind of thing. But it was a regular kind of life. And it forced you not to look outside the plantation. Everything you had was inside. Ideas, oh, they were like horrifying to the big five and the ruling elite. So they tried to suppress education. They tried to suppress learning about the world, which oddly and paradoxically, the public schools enlightened young people to learn about the world and so forth. But you're right, the plantation mentality is not to accept new things. And not to be innovative, kind of. And to accept things as they are. And that continued on into the, even into the 60s, you know, you would have Japanese coming to companies. Do you hire Japanese? The first question. Because they were, you know, propagandarized, so in their mindset that you could not get a job if you were Japanese at a bank or insurance company. And that's why a separate ethnic network of banks and finance companies and stores and so forth just evolved in parallel. But that hierarchical thing was part of the plantation. That, what I'm going to call it, racial discrimination was part of the plantation. And it took us a while to figure out how to get out of that, but it was not sustainable. Oh, yes. You know, when these guys came back from the war with new ideas, new thoughts, new fresh air, they were not going to tolerate that going forward. They were going to leave the plantation. That's right. That's exactly so when you look at the 54 elections. And that comes after a series of very, very tumultuous strikes in the late 40s. ILWU and the workers began to really agitate for higher wages, better living conditions, and ways to get out of the plantation, live outside the plantation. And the late 40s were very violent in many ways, leading up to 54 elections. And then comes all the 442nd veterans, the Nadal, Yoshinaga's, Daniel Inoue, Tadal, Beppu, and the others like Elmer Cavalli, Patsy Mink, who came out of Maui also. And this would go and bring in John Burns, of course, and who had another vision of society. All the people came in. If you asked them, would you like to continue the plantation society to Daniel Inoue? They would just go ballistic. That was not the future. It meant a bad thing. Yes, that's right. That's right. At that time, because they all wanted to work in the air-conditioned office, it was a very physical demanding with no, it was not a career, you know, ascending kind of work. It just did. It just didn't evolve into other companies or other innovations. As a result, people came from the neighbor islands to the city, to Oahu, to Honolulu. They did not have any long-term regard for agriculture. They wanted to get away from it. And I guess the neighbor islands changed because that's where the agriculture was in large part. And maybe they lost something in the process. I mean, we got exactly what we wanted. No agriculture. Well, I say this surprises people. From 1945 to the late 70s, the population of Maui was static. They lost people. There were people born in Maui, but they all moved to Honolulu because there were no jobs other than sugar in Maui. So, you know, going to banking, the UH, federal jobs, pro-harbor jobs, insurance, you had to move to Honolulu. So, the neighbor islands experienced, I'll give another example of a place, Kona. In the late 50s, early 60s, the entire Japanese population of Kona moved to Honolulu because of the failure of the coffee plantations there. So, you have what is called in Honolulu, the Kona Club. There is a very interesting society where they still meet together their grandparents came from Kona, but they haven't been to Kona, but they're like a Kenjin kind. They're a perfect organization from a neighbor island living in Honolulu. So, there are these waves of people who had another migration to Honolulu after coming to Kona for coffee. But then you're absolutely right that the numbers of Japanese and so forth did not increase after the war. So, Maui, especially Kona and others, changed because of mainland migration. We shouldn't not mention the Filipinos. The Filipinos came in the 20s. They were the wave after the Japanese, after a couple of Japanese waves, and they populated these plantations for what, 44 years? And they were still coming in the 70s and 80s, the 90s. And they were still working on Lanai when you have Japanese families there who were from Lanai before the war, but they all left and the Filipinos replaced them. They continued to be on Maui, for example, Pune and so forth. In the 60s and the 70s, it appeared that these events, that is coming off the plantations, a need to get away from the plantation structure, get away from agriculture as physical labor, and the change in the state. What it created, I think, was a wasteland, a Sahara, all over the neighbor islands. A population left. There were no jobs. And then it was up to the central state government to try to fix it for the people who were left behind. That was hard. You're actually right. And the other thing is that the plantations tried to change themselves. There was a Hawaii Sugar Planters Association lab in Halawa for 50 years. They were trying to find other products, value-added products, other than basic sugar. That was the price determined on the Chicago Mercantile someplace. They failed. I mean, they went to rum, they went to the biomass. There were many, many things. But you couldn't compete for the Philippines or Beechiger, Brazil, Europe. I mean, just couldn't compete. And you could see the writing on the wall. And I'll give you an example. Even Dole in the early 70s had an innovation of its time. It was canned pineapple in its own juice. You could see that they weren't going into export markets and so forth. It was doomed because of cheaper products coming in from around the world. Yeah. Oh, let's talk about pineapple, you know. The big pineapple plant down there in... Evilay. Evilay. With the big pineapple. Right. And everybody would come in from the airport and say, you know, do you hear they're going to take the big pineapple down? Really? Are they? Yeah, it's ripe. It got ripe. That was the joke. For decades it was the joke. But anyway, where did that come in, Ray? And what role did that play in trying to preserve the plantation system? Well, I... And the planters, executives worked with Tropical Agriculture. They worked with many, many organizations and within scientists. But they tried to get to a place where they could retain that plantation system and so forth. But you could see the writing on the wall that it was not producing products. But, however, recently there's been labs like on Maui. There's a food and innovation lab that just opened on Maui that was trying to bring people, entrepreneurs and farmers to create some kind of new product for export. That is a new thing, a deer jerky or a guava-based jam or a stew that could be vacuumed out. Don't forget papaya. Papayas or something on bread food. And all these products we would think could have been exported out and earning revenues for the state. But we've had trouble, I think, because of scale, of trying to make products and then the Japanese like it will send us 100,000 cases of this. It's hard to scale up. We don't have that kind of scaling abilities anymore. But the other thing that I wanted to state, today in Star Advertiser we're talking about 8.9 million visitors. It's a big number. But remember why these people come and there's a kind of a thing in the American consciousness of Elvis Presley in Blue Hawaii and the hundreds of acres of pineapple and the waves of sugarcane. Remember that? That was the kind of Hawaii that people expected and still expect when they come to Hawaii. And I think people will be very surprised that we don't have agriculture anymore. Am I correct? Absolutely. They don't get out there to see what's going on in Mililani. So the result is they come and they go and they still think there's waves and fields and cane sugar and pineapple all out there. It's not there anymore. It's an illusion. But tourism in Hawaii is built on that illusion of that movie which was a spectacular movie also revered by Japanese who come here. But it's a complete now illusion. So here we are to look at the present. Sitar still exists. There is a certain amount of science going on. There's a lot of entrepreneur mentoring and all that to try to get young people out of college to be farmers. It hasn't really taken but there's a lot of effort going into it. And I really think it's very important that we get back to the land. How can you talk about the environment without farming? How can you talk about being sustainable without creating your own food supply? But we haven't yet done that. And I really wonder whether the rejection of dirt under your fingernails or rejection of the hierarchical plantation system is still with us and is still limiting us from going back to the land and doing modern diversified agriculture. You may be completely right. You see very few children saying, I want to be a farmer when they grow up. In 7th grade at Kalakaui Intermediate I learned weeding and it still taught some agriculture in the late 60s back then. However, no one's thinking of joining a plantation. Very, very few people of that time were actually having a career objective going into agriculture. We have to discuss this further. Every Thursday we have a show on Hawaii Farming but you and I have to discuss exactly with the social historical context. Rai Tsuchiyama, life after statehood here in Hawaii the perfect place for agriculture. Thank you very much. Thank you very much.