From Okinawa to the Americas: Hana Yamagawa and Her Reminiscences of a Century

Contract Labor

93 Contract Labor Contract-labor ships were slow in those days. We stopped for about four hours in Honolulu, and for the first time I saw a black man. He was smiling. There were men diving for coins. Then after Honolulu we went directly to Peru. During the trip, all in all about fifty days, the tough calluses on the soles of my feet flaked off. Duringthepassage,herreveredEmperorMeijidied,buttotallyunaware of this momentous transition in Japan from one era to the next, Mama herself was undergoing a metamorphosis. She gave herself the Japanese name Hana (Flower), which she liked better than her Okinawan name, Kana (Beloved). Mama says nothing about viewing Peru from the sea, but a journalist described it, in 1919, as a desolate land in which “a few scantily green valleys straggle down to the sea between barren mountains . . . high barren coast ranges near at hand and the tremendous snow-capped Andes still further back glistening in the sun.”1 These snowcapped Andes send rivers plunging down into the dry 94 part ii coastal valleys, some to disappear into the desert sand, others forming the occasional ribbon oasis or green delta fan. At Callao, Lima’s port town, we were transferred to a small steamboat that went south along the coast toward the sugar plantation in the Cañete Valley. On the way, there were flocks of birds that were different from any I’d seen in Okinawa and lots of porpoises that kept bobbing up and then disappearing. They seemed to guide us and welcome us. I was happy. I was eager for my new life. When we got to the harbor at Cañete [Cerro Azul], we were herded like animals onto an open freight train on tracks built right out onto the pier. The cars had railings, about four feet high all around, that kept us from falling out. Clinging to the railings or squatting on the floor, we were taken toward a sugar factory, owned by some British people. Shortly after Mama’s arrival in the Cañete Valley, an American artist touring Peru, Ernest Peixotto, wrote, in 1913, of his arrival in Cerro Azul, “a typical Peruvian port, barren and dry.” But after passing around the promontory of Cerro Azul, he continued: “The whole aspect of the country changed as if by magic, a change so startling that it fairly staggered us—the coast desert transformed in a moment from sandy wastes to broad cottonfields and acres upon acres of sugar cane. A tall factory chimney loomed up in the distance; then a Japanese village with its temple set among the banana-trees came into view.”2 This was probably the settlement of workers at Casa Blanca plantation, because there was no temple where she was housed, Mama contended. As we got near the factory, I saw, about thirty feet below the railroad tracks, rows of long warehouselike things made out of what looked like mud. What could they be? Tombs? Then I was surprised to see people going in and out of them. When the train stopped and we were unloaded, I wondered if we were going to live in that grand building I saw up ahead. But no, we were just checked in there. Our names were called off one at a time, and we were each handed a key to our quarters. Then we were led to our new homes contract labor 95 by a Japanese foreman named Koizumi, and again I was surprised. Those rows of warehouselike things—made out of mud, straw, and horse manure , we were told—were our new homes. They were longhouses of backto -back rooms, each with a little door to the outside. The rooms were bare, about nine feet square, with a dirt floor, no windows, and only a single hole in the ceiling. We would not sleep on the dirt floor and so busied ourselves gathering dry sugarcane leaves for a bed, which we covered with the blankets we had brought from Okinawa. Much later we got some boxes for a bed and sugar bags from the factory, which we took apart and made into a mattress stuffed with sugarcane leaves. For cooking, we found three rocks on the beach and stood them on the floor in a circle. From ancient times the fire deity in Okinawa was, and is to this day, paid homage and represented in the kitchen by...