Cane Fires: The Anti-Japanese Movement in Hawaii, 1865-1945 (Asian American History & Cultu) - Hardcover

Okihiro, Gary

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0877227993 ISBN 13: 9780877227991

Publisher: Temple University Press, 1991

Synopsis

Challenging the prevailing view of Hawaii as a mythical "racial paradise," Gary Okihiro presents this history of a systematic anti-Japanese movement in the islands from the time migrant workers were brought to the sugar cane fields until the end of World War II. He demonstrates that the racial discrimination against Japanese Americans that occurred on the West Coast during the second World War closely paralleled the less familiar oppression of Hawaii’s Japanese, which evolved from the production needs of the sugar planters to the military’s concern over the "menace of alien domination."

Okihiro convincingly argues that those concerns motivated the consolidation of the plantation owners, the Territorial government, and the U.S. military-Hawaii’s elite-into a single force that propelled the anti-Japanese movement, while the military devised secret plans for martial law and the removal and detention of Japanese Americans in Hawaii two decades before World War II.

About this title

From the Publisher

A history of a systematic anti-Japanese movement in Hawaii from the time migrant workers were brought to the sugar cane fields until the end of World War II

Outstanding Book in History and Social Science Award, Association for Asian American Studies

From the Inside Flap

"Okihiro's account is an important corrective to our understanding of the Japanese American Experience in World War II."
—The Hawaiian Journal of History

"Scholars of American race relations will want to read this book. So will anyone interested in Hawaii's history or in the experiences of Japanese or Asian Americans. It will go far in putting to rest any residual notion that the WWII experiences of the Japanese Americans represented 'aberration' or 'hysterical' reaction to wartime exigencies."
—Franklin S. Odo, University of Hawaii at Manoa

"A well-researched and well-written treatment of the subject."
—Library Journal

About this edition

• Publisher: Temple University Press
• Publication date: 1991
• ISBN 10: 0877227993
• ISBN 13: 9780877227991
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 290