Storied identities: Japanese American elderly from a sugar plantation community in Hawai'i

Abstract

This is a study of the collective identities of Japanese American elderly in a former sugar plantation community in the rural town of Puna, Hawai'i. Investigating their plantation stories in which they remember, evaluate, and represent their past lives on the plantation from the 1920s, to the 1980s, I explore a process of which they collectively delineate their identities in terms of ethnicity, class, generation, and gender. My analysis focuses on the contents as well as the contexts of plantation stories that include their social and cultural circumstances now and then, transitions in the socioeconomic environment in Hawai'i, and historical events that they have gone through. The purpose of this study is to produce an ethnography of remembering that captures ethnographic voice-cultural testimony in which the Japanese American elderly narrate their plantation experience as both an internally-oriented emotional manifestation and an externally-based common understanding of their community. I demonstrate how the Japanese American elderly employ their memories to reconstruct plantation experience and define their peoplehood as the collective identities of plantation-raised Japanese Americans.