A Harvest of Hawaii Plantation Pidgin: The Japanese Way

A Harvest of Hawaii Plantation Pidgin: The Japanese Way examines, from the perspective of language, the plantation experience of the issei and subsequent generations who came to Hawaii (Tengoku) to work in the sugar fields. Hilo-born Myra Sachiko Ikeda shows how the Japanese language spoken by the first workers became influenced by the need to communicate with other workers and how pidgin, the common plantation language that had developed earlier among the Chinese, Portuguese, and Hawaiians to undertand each other, quickly integrated Japanese words. She also shows that for workers living close together, socializing and sharing food at lunchtime, plantation camps came to have a great or even greater impact on identity than ethnic background, and the important role that Hawaii Pidgin English played in the dynamics of local identity.