An Unlikely Revolutionary: Matsuo Takabuki and the Making of Modern Hawaii

Introduction

Introduction By Dennis M. Ogawa and Glen Grant “SOCIAL REVOLUTIONARY” IS not a term that one would normally associate with Matsuo (“Matsy”) Takabuki. Wellknown in the Hawaiian Islands over the past four decades as a financial and political leader, Takabuki has been largely viewed as a prominent member of the island establishment. Actively involved in the Democratic Party in the post–World War II years, he was among a generation of Americans of Japanese ancestry in the islands to rise to political power in the 1950s, serving for sixteen years on the Board of Supervisors of the City and County of Honolulu. For many years a confidant to Governor John Burns, Takabuki was given the nickname “Taisho” or “Boss” within the governor’s inner circle. Working with island entrepreneur Chinn Ho, Takabuki was also involved in some of the most important financial projects during the island development boom of the 1960s and 1970s, including the construction of the Ilikai Hotel, the first major condominium built in Hawai‘i. For over twenty-one years he served as a trustee of the Bishop Estate, Hawai‘i’s largest private landowner that oversees Kamehameha Schools, one of the wealthiest private schools in the nation. From Wall Street to the financial centers of Tokyo and Hong Kong, Matsy Takabuki has been involved in multimillion-dollar negotiations that have helped connect Hawai‘i to several international business investments. If the term “social revolutionary” implies 1 an anti-establishment radical who wishes to uproot and overturn the status quo, then Takabuki must definitely represent the opposite end of the political spectrum—a political and financial figure of extraordinary influence who has been at the center of island governance for nearly a half century. The description of Matsy Takabuki as a social revolutionary seems, then, wholly inappropriate for someone who has been described by some critics as a “power broker” or “kingpin ”1 of the island community. Yet in the historical context of his life, which spans nearly three-quarters of the twentieth century, Takabuki has been a leading player in a series of sweeping social, financial, and political changes that have fundamentally altered Hawai‘i’s racial and class structures. Whatever critical perspective the historian brings to the experiences of nisei, or second-generation Japanese Americans, in the era following World War II, one overriding reality remains unaltered: the severe racial limitations placed on this generation before and during the war were deliberately attacked and successfully lifted so as to allow a new rising ethnic group to achieve an economically and socially more secure place in island society. While the ultimate goal of this generation was not to destroy the basic structures of Hawai‘i or to throw out capitalism, their efforts to gain greater access to existing systems enervated the old sugar oligarchy and heralded a period of racial and class diversification. The process was far from equal for members of this generation. A few Japanese Americans such as Takabuki attained great degrees of power and in- fluence during this period while others struggled in workingclass conditions hindered by low wages, a high cost of living, and stagnant opportunity. However, when measured by the rising number of Japanese Americans entering the professional occupations after the 1950s, the expansion of small business operations in tourism and the service industry during the boom years of the 1960s and 1970s, and the rising personal and family incomes of the ethnic group in the islands, 2 AN UNLIKELY REVOLUTIONARY 1. Noel Kent, Hawai‘i: Islands under the Influence (Honolulu: University of Hawai‘i Press, 1993), p. 151. Takabuki and his contemporaries had indeed been unlikely revolutionaries in spearheading a tremendous change in Hawaiian life. They were catalysts for the emergence of a bona fide middle class for the first time in Hawai‘i since the introduction of a foreign economic system a century earlier. The concept of middle class in the context of 1950 Hawai‘i, however, goes beyond the attainment of a certain income level or financial security. Nor can it be measured solely in terms of being able to pay the mortgage on one’s home. Middleclass status for this generation meant having economic choice—being independent enough from a paternalistic plantation system to be able to attain employment in whatever profession one might choose and to rise to a level commensurate with one’s ability, not racial complexion. To identify oneself...