The Real Plantation Life
Plantation life as described in the book All I Asking for is my Body by Milton Murayama is one of hardships and sacrifice. Within the book we see the life of Kiyoshi, the younger son of a Japanese plantation family who is working hard to pay off a family debt. This being the focus of the story, the harsh reality of racial division, poor sanitation, and disease on a plantation is pushed into the background. We do hear that the family and others who work on the plantation will work for hours on end doing backbreaking labor for very little pay, however the reality of the situation was much worse and is left out of the story.
Those who worked on plantations often had ten hour shifts with little time for resting or refreshment and they did this work for six days out of the week, men often making less than fifteen dollars a month in the early 1900s and twenty dollars a month by 1920, women and children made roughly half that rate (McGowan 177, MacLennen “Plantation” 280). Kiyoshi says that at his plantation adults make twenty five dollars for working forty eight hours a week. This is one of the reasons that Kiyoshi’s family is never able to pay off the debt, something that Kiyoshi’s older brother points out to his parents as a reason he refuses to be stuck doing plantation work (Murayama 65).
The management of the plantations encouraged racial divides between the workers, as did the living arrangements. The luna or plantation overseer was often a mainland American or Portuguese man who had the authority to reassign workers to different areas of the plantation and increase or decrease wages as they saw fit for an individual (McGowan 178). This is shown within the story when Kiyoshi is out with his work group and they say they won’t clear all their fields today because if they do that then tomorrow they will be expected to do the same amount of work for half the pay (Murayama 40).
The racial grouping of plantations is also shown within the story when the Filipinos went on strike then another nationality group, such as the Japanese, would step in and take over some of the labor (Geschwender and Levine 352-353, Murayama 32-37).
With this extra labor came extra money. As stated in the story the school kids were getting two dollars a day to do the work of the Filipino people (Murayama 32). This worked out well for the plantation owners because they got the same amount of work done and actually paid less to the men and women doing the work (Geschwender and Levine 354). If the luna and plantation owner simply raised the pay to one and a half times what they normally paid the workers (the workers usually get one dollar, now they get one dollar and fifty cents) they would have saved themselves fifty per cent of what they would have paid to say, the Filipinos in the story. This deepened the racial divide between groups because on group took advantage of the group on strike, thus betraying their fellow workers and neighbors.
The racial divide is brought up within the story in the form of the teacher, Mr. Snook who questions the school children for not supporting those on strike. It is also exemplified in the basic housing layout of the camp. Since sugarcane plantations were often built onto the sides of steep hills, the most efficient and inexpensive form of waste disposal was small ditches that used water and gravity to bring the waste downhill. At the top of this hill in the story the luna reside, followed by the Japanese Camp, then the more run down Filipino Camp. There was no indoor plumbing for the worker’s houses, they had to use communal outhouses instead which also fed into the gravity fueled drainage system. All of this waste ended up at the bottom of the hill where pigs were kept in large pens. Kiyoshi’s house was neighbor to the pigs and at the end of the drainage line (Murayama 28-29).
Over time the turnover rate for those working on plantations began to increase because more people were able to find their livelihood elsewhere in the islands. Before U.S. annexation the plantations would hire contract workers; they would pay to ship people to their island to work on their plantation for a set number of years. The laborers agreed to work for many years with a set wage for the entire time, and knew that the money for their boat fare, housing, and food came out of their monthly paychecks. If the plantation failed to uphold their end of the contract the worker could complain to a board of directors and the plantation would be inspected, however little disciplinary action usually followed a complaint. After annexation plantations stopped hiring contract workers for fear of scrutiny from the American government. They began paying their workers fluctuating wages and hiring day laborers to complete specific tasks (Geschwender and Levine 355).
Having a migrant workforce combined with the general squalor of the camps made communicable disease a problem that is not faced within the story. By the time Kiyoshi ad is family are living on the plantation, the United States Government had taken action to “improve” the housing and waste disposal on many plantations because of outbreaks of diseases such as cholera, diphtheria, and bubonic plague. Yet these improvements were rarely seen within the camps, especially smaller ones, because even if they were implemented they were hardly maintained (MacLennan “Kilauea” 7). This is shown within the story because of Kiyoshi’s description of his camp setup, but we are simply told that the camps are “run down” we are not shown how run down they are. We are told that when the wind stops blowing Kiyoshi’s house smells of sewage and pig pen (Murayama 29), but we do not hear of the flies, rats and other pests that come with being so close to such squalor.
One of the problems with the upkeep of the improvements was corruption within the administrative workforce. The Territorial Board of health provided new laws for the health and safety of plantation workers because if a majority of workers got sick it halted production and caused a product shortage on the mainland. However, few of these demands were brought down the line to the plantations, especially the smaller ones. Eventually the Board of Health brought in new inspectors who were supposed to uphold the sanitation law. When plantation managers refused to make changes or seemed to be too slow in making the changes, a plan was created in which a group from the Board of health would enter the plantation and force the changes. However, even with the changes in sanitation the houses were still susceptible to rot from the rain and salty air as well s rodent infestations from being so close to the fields and waste drainage (MacLennan “Kilauea” 9-10).
Kiyoshi never mentions sickness or disease in his account of life on the plantation even though it was a very real thing happening on plantations all over Hawai’i. There were cases of influenza that killed hundreds of people from single plantations, cholera was always a problem because of improper disposal of fecal matter which people would later come into contact with while caring for animals or working in the fields, and bubonic plague was carried by the rats and mongoose that lived within the fields (MacLennon “Kilauea” 12-5).
Even though Kiyoshi is a younger child within the story All I Asking for is my Body he narrates a life of financial and familial struggles. He is aware of the racial divide that living on a plantation has created and has learned to take advantage of that to further his financial standing. He has watched his parents work for hours on end in the fields and find little gain from it. Readers are allowed to understand his mental surroundings, however he does not mention his physical living conditions very much. Historically, plantations were the breeding grounds of disease, and death or disfigurement was often the result of such exposure, but Kiyoshi does not mention this as a part of his world even though he lives right next to what would have been one of the most disease ridden places on the entire plantation. It is possible that he, as a character and narrator, simply overlooks one of the most horrific aspects of his life, but from a historical narrative there is a duty to properly represent as much of your time period as possible which Murayama has not done.
Works Cited
Greschwender, James A. and Rhonda F. Levine. “Rationalization of Sugar Production in Hawai’i, 1946-1960: A Dimension of the Class Struggle.” Social Problems. 30. 3. (1983) 352-368. Web.
McGowan, William P. “Industrializing the Land of Lono: Sugar Plantation Managers and Workers in Hawai’i. 1900-1920.” Agricultural History. 62. 2. (1995) 177-200. Web.
MacLennan, Carol. “Kilauea Sugar Plantation in 1912: A Snapshot.” The Hawaiian Journal of History. 41. (2007) 1-34. Web.
MacLennan, Carol. “Plantation Payday: A Research Note.” The Hawaiian Journal of History. 42. (2008) 277-284.
Murayama, Milton. All I Asking for is my Body. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 1988. Print.
