Hawaii -- Stroll Into The Past At Sugar-Plantation Village

The crop that ruled Hawaii for more than a century is all but gone from the islands, but the days when sugar was king live on for islanders and visitors at Hawaiian Plantation Village on the island of Oahu.

The recreated village is in the Waipahu Cultural Gardens park 12 miles from Honolulu in historic Waipahu, a sugar town on Oahu's central plains.

The village's more than two dozen buildings include a Chinese Society building, a company store, and 19th- and early 20th-century homes of Hawaii's many ethnic groups.

Many of the guides on the village's hour-plus tour grew up on sugar plantations in the 1930s, and tidbits from their own experiences bring an extra dimension to their historical accounts.

A few of the village buildings are original to the Waipahu site or moved from elsewhere. Most are replicas, arranged along a path shaded by lychee and banana trees.

An ethnic mix

"We wanted to show the lifestyle of families, and how that relates to Hawaii's multi-ethnic society of today," says village director Calvin Kawamoto, who grew up on a Big Island plantation where his father was a mechanic.

In reality, the homes of laborers from various ethnic groups would not have been side-by-side, but divided into "camps" two or three miles apart - part of the owner's plan to keep labor subservient.

But field workers came together at noon around the "kaukau tin" - a two- or 3-tier lunch bucket. Says Kawamoto, "The top tray contained the delicacy of the person's group. They'd sit in a circle, put the tins in the center, and share. They quickly learned to unify - especially after all the early ethnic labor strikes failed."

Native Hawaiians worked in the earliest sugar fields in the 1840s, but within a decade sugar planters imported the first immigrant workers.

Chinese men came to earn $3 a month on five-year contracts. Many arrived with one change of clothes, but stayed on in Hawaii, some becoming merchants and many marrying Hawaiian women.

The Plantation Village path winds past the Chinese cookhouse, where a jar of salted lemons stands ready to make a medicinal tea to ward away colds.

With the Chinese leaving the plantations and a sugar market booming after the collapse of agriculture in the U.S. South because of the Civil War, sugar planters imported other labor in the 1860s and 1870s: Japanese and Portuguese workers.

Along the path sits a 1918 Portuguese house, with a picture of Jesus and Mary on the wall and a cornhusk mattress on an iron bedstead. Behind the two-room house is the "forno," the oven that produced the prototype of the Portuguese sweet bread that today's Hawaiians love.

The board-and-batten houses - the early ones are two simple rooms, but those built after World War II have as many as four bedrooms and indoor plumbing.

Pausing in a Japanese house, the guide said, "Plantations finally realized married men were better workers, and they encouraged `picture brides'."

Pictures were sent both ways by prospective grooms and brides, but the less handsome men would submit a friend's picture. "Many of the girls were disappointed and after a year or two ran away to the man whose picture she'd been given," said the guide.

In the village's Korean house - Koreans began coming to Hawaii around 1903 - the table is set for a baby's first birthday. The honored child predicts his fate by choosing an item on the table. Long rice means a long life; a ruler and pencils means a scholar; rice, a provider.

Outside the Filipino bachelor quarters next door, a betel palm holds the narcotic promise of its nuts. The bachelors kept their rope tobacco twists in their rooms, their fighting cocks in pens outside. Families polished their linoleum floors with coconut husks.

At the end of the path is the social hall, not far from the sumo wrestling ring, around the corner from the infirmary, the company store and the camp office.

And above the entire Hawaiian Plantation Village, across a road rust-colored from the dust of volcanic soil, sits the aging Waipahu sugar mill.

Along with Plantation Village, it's a reminder of the thousands of laborers who brought with them the customs and lifestyles that make up Hawaii today. ----------------------------------------------------------------- IF YOU GO

- Plantation Village tours are offered daily. Reservations are requested: phone (808) 677-0110. Cost is a donation.

- For general information on visiting Hawaii, contact the Hawaii Visitors Bureau, (808) 923-1811.

Sally Jo Bowman is a freelance writer from Springfield, Ore.