HAWAII'S PLANTATION VILLAGE

Fully restored, this 20-hectare sugar plantation village gives a complete and interesting view of the daily life of the workers who lived there. From the mid-19th century to the 1940s, plantation managers employed over 400,000 foreign workers. The Hawaiian population having been largely decimated by the diseases that Westerners had introduced to the archipelago, the plantations lacked the manpower to develop the promising sugar crop. Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese, Koreans and Filipinos, in search of a better life, came to Hawaii. In order to stifle any wage demands (wages were very low) and to break any attempt at union in advance, the workers were grouped by ethnicity in the villages. This can be seen very clearly in this village, where people lived together while preserving their traditions. All the religious communities had their place of worship, as the Buddhist and Shinto temples testify. However, these workers of all origins gradually came together, mixed, and united against the bosses to demand better wages. In the 20th century, major strikes finally forced the plantation managers to raise wages. It was these successive increases that would have contributed to the sinking of Hawaiian sugar, making it more expensive in the face of increasingly tough international competition.