Raced to Death in 1920s Hawai i: Injustice and Revenge in the Fukunaga Case (Asian American Experience)

252 pages. On September 18, 1928, Myles Yutaka Fukunaga kidnapped and brutally murdered ten-year-old George Gill Jamieson in Waikîkî. Fukunaga, a nineteen-year-old ni sei, or second-generation Japanese American, confessed to the crime. Within thre e weeks, authorities had convicted him and sentenced him to hang, despite questi ons about Fukunaga's sanity and a deeply flawed defense by his court-appointed a ttorneys. Jonathan Y. Okamura argues that officials raced Fukunaga to death? first viewing the accused only as Japanese despite the law supposedly being colo rblind, and then hurrying to satisfy the Haole (white) community's demand for re venge. Okamura sets the case against an analysis of the racial hierarchy that un dergirded Hawai?ian society, which was dominated by Haoles who saw themselves most threatened by the islands' sizable Japanese American community. The Fukunag a case and others like it in the 1920s reinforced Haole supremacy and maintained the racial boundary that separated Haoles from non-Haoles, particularly through racial injustice. As Okamura challenges the representation of Hawai i as a raci al paradise, he reveals the ways Haoles usurped the criminal justice system and reevaluates the tense history of anti-Japanese racism in Hawai i.…