Franklin Odo’s Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i is the single most comprehensive and in-depth study of the folk tradition of holehole bushi—a song genre born from traditional Japanese folk songs and poetry, and adapted and composed by a generation of Japanese immigrant laborers, who were brought in large numbers to work in Hawai‘i sugar plantations from 1885 to 1924. The book will be especially useful to scholars of Japanese American history and historiography, ethnic studies and labor, immigration and diaspora, Hawaiian history, ethnomusicology, and for those interested in the recovery of folk traditions.
Composed largely in Japanese, the holehole bushi lyrics include bits of Hawaiian, Hawai‘i Creole English (Pidgin), English, and other languages, and record the unique experiences of migration, encounter, struggle, and transformation of the issei, or first generation of Japanese immigrants. The name “holehole bushi” is indicative of this tradition’s mixed heritage: while “bushi” comes from the Japanese word for “tune” or “melody,” “holehole” comes from the Native Hawaiian word for “to strip,” in this context, as the plantation laborers had to do the work of stripping dead cane leaves from the stalk to prepare for harvest. Consisting of just four short lines of 7, 7, 7, 5 syllables, holehole bushi lyrics “reveal nuances of life and love, labor and lust among Japanese immigrants in relatively unvarnished and gritty detail” (xi).
The project moves back and forth among details and traces of lived experience to larger transnational frames of political and economic power. In chapter 1, “Japan to Hawai‘i,” Odo frames the Japanese immigrant experience in terms of the political and social transformations as Japan became a modern nation state, the US turn to militarism and imperialism in the Pacific, the development of industrial agriculture on a global scale and the transnational flows of cheap labor that required, and the turbulent struggle for sovereignty in Hawai‘i between the independent Kingdom of Hawai‘i and a small group of wealthy white American businessmen and plantation owners. These frames contextualize holehole bushi while also making visible their surprising interventions in the larger narratives.
The middle chapters are organized by themes that emerge from the song lyrics. Chapter 2, “World of Work,” discusses lyrics about the often brutal experiences of plantation labor, drawing connections to the traditions of “work songs” in Japan and folk songs that emerged out of slavery in the US. The holehole bushi in chapter 3, “Despair and Defiance,” explore the gritty details of these difficult lives, recording the social roles of alcohol, prostitution, and gambling, and emotional responses running from fear to rage. The songs in chapter 4, “Love and Lust,” vibrantly rewrite the “sanitized” history of the hard-working, obedient Japanese American by foregrounding stories of transgressive female desire. Chapter 5, titled “Reflections,” focuses on lyrics that reveal issei thoughts, emotions, and other reflections on their experiences. In each of these chapters, Odo points out the new or more nuanced insights that holehole bushi offer each of these historical themes.
Chapters 6 and 7 turn from a focus on the lyrics and themes to a discussion of the methodology of the project and the process of recovering a folk tradition. “A Last Hurrah,” chapter 6, records a moment of collective archiving and celebration of holehole bushi in 1960, when many issei sent in lyrics in response to a call put out by a Hawai‘i Japanese newspaper to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Japanese immigration to the islands. “Renaissance of Holehole Bushi,” chapter 7, impressively maps the resurgence of this tradition in scholarship and popular media, drawing on sources specific to Hawai‘i, Japan, and the US, and ranging from manga, university classes, documentaries and film, audio recordings, and literary anthologies. Important to note is Odo’s tribute to his teacher, Harry Minoru Urata. Odo acknowledges Urata’s profound dedication to holehole bushi—from traveling around islands with a recorder while the issei generation was still alive, to translating from Japanese with a careful attention to regional dialect, to amalgamating melodies and teaching the songs to countless younger students—as the sole reason we have a record and renaissance of this tradition today.
The author chooses to focus on lyrics more than performance and musicality, and includes an invaluable appendix of every recorded holehole bushi lyric, indexed separately in English and Japanese. There is also an official companion website with audio recordings, and a suggested website for public access to multimedia resources (http://www.hawaii.edu/uhwo/clear/home/CanefieldSongs.html).
The style of the book is engaging for a general audience, imbibing the vitality and emotional force of the holehole bushi themselves. The chapters are gently repetitive, and could easily be used as stand-alone pieces for a variety of audiences. With his own familial ties to the history of holehole bushi, it is clear that Odo is also lovingly offering this research to Japanese Americans in Hawai‘i, who inherit this legacy.
In his conclusion, Odo offers a few exciting directions for future study, including issues of geography and “rurality,” oral history, and transnational or diaspora studies. For scholars who focus on Hawai‘i and for scholars with Hawaiian-language skills, I would add that the careful archiving of primary sources in Voices from the Canefields can make an important contribution to future studies of translation, and to decolonial scholarship interested in recovering more complex relationships between immigrant groups, or between immigrant and indigenous peoples. Though Odo’s central argument is not new to folklorists—that folksongs’ “direct, unmediated expressions” (x) of lived emotion and experience can radically complicate and transform the way we tell our histories—Voices from the Canefields is an inspiring example of committed and caring research that makes possible a wealth of future work by those interested in honoring the details and complexity of human experience.
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[Review length: 958 words • Review posted on May 7, 2014]