Franklin Odo: Flâneur of Asian American History

It was a shock to hear of Franklin Odo’s death in September 2022. I’d not known he’d been ill with cancer, so, when the news reached me in Oregon, where I teach, it was sudden. He was kupuna to me, an elder, one of the first nationally known scholars of Asian American Studies, a great friend and mentor since I was an undergraduate. We’d ever been in touch, crossing paths through the years, our interests intersecting, his leadership a constant inspiration. When he died, he was the John Woodruff Simpson Lecturer and Professor of American Studies at Amherst College. 

I am in Paris writing this, thinking about Franklin as I sit over a cup of Nespresso coffee, half looking forward to an evening of wandering the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, passing the gabfest of Parisian café-dwellers titivating over their beer, wine, and cigarettes. It’s been over a century since Charles Baudelaire glorified, in a splenetic poetry, his sybaritic saunterings through these streets, yet I find myself flitting inside of his lonely shadow as I walk toward a setting sun on Rue Chateau d’Eau each time I return to my apartment after my evening meal. It makes me recall another time of ambling, when I happened by a man sitting on a stone balustrade on the steps of the Capitol in Washington. It was 1987. I was there as a reporter for a magazine, covering the opening of the Smithsonian National Museum of American History’s exhibit concerning Japanese Americans and their mass incarceration during World War II. Among the throng of hundreds who’d gathered there for a ceremonial event, the man’s face was a familiar one, and I saw that a smile of recognition had brightened it, his lips forming the quick O! in our manner local to Hawaiʻi. Then I heard him call my name. It was Franklin, there with his wife, Enid, who was beside him, leaning against a vase-like column. Her ginger-colored hair was lit by the low angle of light from the setting sun. Stylishly, she was wearing a vintage aloha shirt tucked into olive green, pleated capris with a narrow snakeline of a shining black alligator belt encircling her waist. Franklin wore an aloha shirt too, over a pair of dark gabardine slacks. I noticed that he gestured to her with a shoveling motion, using both hands, and soon they came up to greet me. 

“What are you doing here?” he asked, after we’d exchanged pleasantries. 

I told him I was there reporting on the grand opening of “A More Perfect Union: Japanese Americans and the Constitution” and all the events around it. There were receptions hosted by Spark Matsunaga and Daniel K. Inouye, our two senators from Hawaiʻi; a gathering with Nisei veterans at the amphitheater of the Arlington National Cemetery; the premiere of The Color of Honor, Loni Ding’s documentary film about their heroism during World War II; and a ceremony on the Capitol steps featuring the three Nikkei members of the House of Representatives—Robert Matsui and Norman Mineta from California and Pat Saiki from Hawaiʻi. The exhibit told a story long under wraps to the general public—that of the durable loyalty of Japanese Americans, their earnestness as citizens, and the injustice they’d suffered from Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s Executive Order 9066 sending 120,000 of them into concentration camps in 1942. And, despite all that, young Nisei men from these camps and Hawaiʻi enlisted in the military to serve in Europe and the Pacific during the war. 

Why was Franklin there? He did not say, but later I realized he must have come partly to support his own elders, surviving members of the Varsity Victory Volunteers, Japanese Americans in the Hawaii Territorial Guard who’d been dismissed from duty in the aftermath of the attack on Pearl Harbor. In response, these young men formed a labor battalion that eventually was assigned to Schofield Barracks under the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, attached to the 34th Combat Engineers Regiment. For two years, they built roads, strung barbed wire, put up fences, and dug ditches almost without pay, building trust within the ranks. The War Department took note. In 1943, these men of the VVV successfully requested to be disbanded so they could join the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the all-Nisei unit in the U.S. army that was just being formed. We all know that part of the story.

Typically, Franklin voiced nothing about this at the time, following that brand of modesty those growing up in local Hawaiian culture practice like a religion. He was ever self-effacing, elevating others, slow to or never taking credit, a sponsoring scholar who acted behind the scenes, offering advice when asked, organizing, suggesting canny lines of inquiry and collection, quietly gathering up facts and building stories, assembling consensus, yet exercising, in his affable manner, the revolutionary vision he’d glimpsed as the t’ao, the path of the true way, from his time aborning as an intellectual during the turbulent sixties. 

There are two things I want to introduce as frames for my tribute to him. The first is Franklin’s ease of travel, his relaxed style of sauntering through things as a revolutionary academic and, never forgetting his ties to the community, an institutional organizer among newly confirmed ethnic and long-standing white elites. He collected and rummaged through mounds of information and artifacts, drawing from concerted acts of research and incidental discovery that which is crucial to the recovery of our collective history as Asian Americans. And crucial precisely because all of these had been deemed useless or irrelvant to general knowledge and its concomitant, white-centered epistemologies. 

As Walter Benjamin says about Baudelaire in The Writer of Modern Life, Franklin was “the secret agent of our discontent” sent to discover the clues of our own arising as a class of people from varied national origins in Asia and the Pacific and yet afflicted with the common receipt of antagonism via the forces of American discriminatory acculturation. For traditional historiography, says Benjamin, with its reliance upon a brand of mainstream storytelling that suggests the inevitable process and outcomes of historical change, is precisely created to conceal the very incidents when its tradition breaks down, passing over moments that offer those of us who wish to break from it the facts and relics that might provide us a new foundation upon which to base our liberation. It is indeed these breaks, these anomalies and details within large historical structures that have been ignored as the dominant class ascribes exclusive truth value to its own, ideologically inspired version of history. I am talking about the bango tag of the canefield worker that gives his plantation number, about improvised songs women workers sang as they stripped fibrous leaves from stalks of cane under a Hawaiian sun. I’m talking about family recipes for making bagoong or the lyrics to a kundiman, a poem in ideograms by Chinese detainees carved onto a wooden wall of a barracks on Angel Island, family photographs and humble heirlooms of pewter and brass. Just as Baudelaire described himself as a “passionate spectator” who “enters into the crowd as though it were an immense reservoir of electrical energy,” so did Franklin rummage through the broken potshards of our history to find their undisclosed fury and glazes of eminence.

As chairman of the board at the Hawai‘i State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, as Founding Director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Program, these artifacts are the very things that Franklin sought and gathered from what might have otherwise remained inconspicuously buried beneath the grand stories of nationally authorized history precisely because they were so useless in stories of power and its generations of rule. These songs and bango tags, these poems in Chinese and love lyrics in Tagalog, these family heirlooms provide a splendor of objects once evacuated of value, among which Franklin’s analytic intelligence could swiftly move, reading their dialectical images of under-imagined narratives in a way that produced the intuited presence of a profound counter-history—our Asian American and Pacific Islander histories. But unlike Baudelaire, who, at the core, had something aimless about him, visiting the arcades or wandering the Parisian streets however his mood suited, Franklin was by contrast completely dedicated, modestly purposeful and even driven. I’d have to say he was not the sybarite standing aside from things, but rather he searched into our history like a surfer gazing at the face and foot of a wave, reading its curl, foam, and glass for the magnificent torque underneath.

His numerous publications illustrate this singular resolve and his precious insights. As co-author (with Kazuko Sinoto) he published A Pictorial History of the Japanese in Hawaiʻi 1885–1924. As sole author he wrote No Sword to Bury: Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi During World War II; as editor he compiled the Columbia Documentary History of the Asian American Experience; and, as author again, he produced Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawaiʻi. As two-time president of the Asian American Studies Association, his easygoing personality, the tai-chi of his local boy identity, and the serenity and calm he exercised in gathering common interests (among the potentially fustian community of our academics) all cannily conspired to result in a varied list of conference presentations, academic and commemorative publications, numerous social and community movement projects, museum exhibits, and historical and artistic programming. From Hawaiʻi to Amherst, from UCLA to the Smithsonian, out of his long and productive life, out of his seemingly offhand, almost casual manner of conducting responsible survey into pressing matters, out of glittering intimations gathered from our neglected history, Franklin Odo built monuments of unaging intellect—a new truth. 

I said I wanted to introduce two framing topics. The second has to do with the nativity of his revolutionary consciousness. Born in 1939 just before World War II, Franklin grew up east of Honolulu, in an area known as Koko Head that is today the suburb of Hawaiʻi Kai. Back then it was country—inaka—full of farms and pastures and open spaces. His parents were vegetable farmers, then ran a small store and the family lived above it. He had a brother and two sisters and, though rarely economically comfortable, “they had enough,” as local people say. He played barefoot football—a scrawny quarterback among tough, local kids—and he fished in the canals and streams, baiting his hooks with shrimp he’d netted earlier in the day. I think the hapa-haole song “Ku‘u Home Kahalu‘u” by Olomana’s Jerry Santos might sum up the bucolic nature of Franklin’s childhood too. He must’ve done well in school, because, after graduation from Kaimuki High in 1957, he went straight to Princeton—the first Kaimuki student ever to attend an Ivy. “That was a shock,” he said in an interview, as he was one of a few non-whites out of the seven hundred and fifty in his freshman class. “All men too,” he added. He graduated and then took a master’s in East Asian Studies from Harvard in 1963, continuing on for a Ph.D. in Japanese History from Princeton. But before completion of his dissertation, he took a job at Occidental College in Los Angeles. 

This first, full-time academic appointment was during the mid and late sixties, when the country was in turmoil over social protest demonstrations against the Vietnam War, during the aftermath of the traumatic sequence of political assassinations of Malcolm X, Martin Luther King Jr., and Robert Kennedy. Students at UC Berkeley had already struck and shut down the campus over issues of free speech. Young people of all races and ethnicities were rising in protest, seeking change, demonstrating in the streets, taking over other college campuses, demanding that their administrations denounce war and militarism, initiate social action, create programs in Black and ethnic studies, in Asian American Studies. “Asian America” was a brand new term then, coined by the couple and academic colleagues Emma Gee and Yuji Ichioka at UCLA, signifying the solidarity among Americans of Asian descent, brazenly acknowledging our then-hidden histories of exclusion, legal restrictions from land ownership, and roles constantly marginalized in society. Franklin, a young husband, father, and already an accomplished scholar, responded to all of this, creating his own analysis from his lived experience and his witness of Jim Crow practices perpetuated in the South, when he’d accompanied a white schoolmate to his home in Georgia during a spring break from Princeton. 

“In a service station where we stopped for gas and to go to the bathroom, I saw separate signs, not for men and women, but for whites and colored,” he said in this same interview. “I didn’t know which one I should use.” 

As a youth in Hawaiʻi, he’d always been part of the majority in its local culture. Whites were in the minority and mostly segregated into their own elite private schools. All of a sudden, Franklin, once an innocent, was thrust into America’s strict racial divide. It was the birth of political consciousness, an acute awareness of systemic injustice, a moment from which what Italian Marxist political philosopher Antonio Gramsci calls “the organic intellectual,” one loyal to his class, was spurred to arise. After two years at Occidental, Franklin moved on to UCLA, on yet another appointment, volunteering to teach some of the first classes in Asian American Studies. 

It was here that Franklin helped launch something instrumental to the future of Asian American consciousness. Co-edited with his students Eddie Wong, Amy Uyematsu, and Buck Wong, Franklin produced the first textbook of Asian American Studies. This was Roots: An Asian American Reader (UCLA, 1971), and it was the first collection of scholarly, journalistic, political, and literary materials devoted to our history and addressing questions of identity in a bound volume. It became standard for Asian American Studies courses for over a decade, going through numerous printings and selling over 50,000 copies. Franklin wrote the preface, setting forth the agenda for its movement-based production, its roots in the Asian American experience and conditions of its collective production as an identity. 

“These are critical times for Asian Americans and it is imperative that their voices be heard in all their anger, anguish, resolve and inspiration,” Franklin wrote. 

It was in this book that I first read the works of academicians Stanford Lyman, Yuji Ichioka, and Stanley Sue; poets Amy Uyematsu, Al Robles, and Lawson Fusao Inada; labor organizer Karl Yoneda; and an interview with movement leader (and my schoolmate from Gardena High School) Warren Furutani. It was a bold book, an essential book, an act of collective liberation that was a book. And Franklin, with his soft hands of guidance, helped bring it about. 

This anthology meant everything to those of us hankering for something in print that spoke, not only to our collective and generational experiences as young Asian Americans (I was twenty when it came out), but also to our emotional wishes for facts and narratives that might guide us as we sought to create identities of deeper historical loyalties than those provided us by mainstream culture—our school systems based on white centrality; films and television shows that mocked us as houseboys, cooks, gardeners, and easily available women; or the media that compared us to rebellious Blacks, declaring us America’s well-behaved “model minority.” We were in a psychological battle for alterity—an internal, self-generative, organic identity—and Roots became the scripture of our new faith, our new covenant with an illuminated history that had been obscured within the shadows of white supremacy, our keening text of lamentations for the suffering of prior generations, and a plainsong exhortation for the new, Asian American world aborning.

_____

In 1972, the year after Roots came out, I was a senior at Pomona College, where there were no courses in Asian American Studies. I’d already declared to myself, on a beach in Kawela Bay during a winter break on Oʻahu my sophomore year, that I wanted to become a poet and knew that I needed to know our history better, study strategies of cultural resistance, perhaps even try to meet some of the people who’d contributed to the great book. I’d searched my college catalog for anything that might touch on the subject and found nothing. I searched the catalogs of the other Claremont colleges too and likewise found nothing. I went to a Japanese American economics professor at my college and asked if he’d sponsor an independent study. He referred me to an accomplished historian at Pomona, a Caucasian, who’d written about the internment, but he was away on sabbatical. I was stuck. I decided to call the new Asian American Studies program at UCLA and ask for someone there who might teach me by correspondence. I asked for Franklin Odo and was told he’d just moved on. For a moment, my heart sank. But he’d only left to teach at nearby Long Beach State. I called Long Beach and got routed to “AAS”—Asian American Studies. The secretary asked me to hold and, miraculously, Franklin came on the line. 

I recognized just the touch of a lilt from Hawaiian pidgin in the way he spoke and was instantly cheered. He asked what I wanted. I told him, pronouncing in one breath a litany of specific subjects, an overview of what I’d gleaned from his reader, and declaring my Kahuku plantation family background, my childhood in the islands, my sincerity as a disenfranchised Yonsei descendant of the Asian/Hawaiian islands diaspora. 

“Hooo!” Franklin said. “You sound like you ready to do research—not just study!”

Unfazed by my voluble self-introduction, he said he’d be willing to send me a syllabus of his Intro course. But I asked for more.

“What will that be?” Franklin said.

“How ’bout you teach me by correspondence?” I said.

There was a pause. After that, he said he might be willing to consider it, but only on a trial basis. 

“Then we’ll see how serious you really are.”

To start, I’d receive the mimeographed sheets and bibliography of his reading assignments, along with a set of study questions I was to answer by the following Monday. If my answers were satisfactory, he’d continue so long as they were, he said. His program would pay for the outbound postage, but I had to cover the return. 

“And don’t forget to check spelling and grammar,” he cautioned, a rumble of humor in his voice. 

Within a day or two, I received a big manila envelope from Long Beach. The return address was rubber stamped in the upper left corner, Franklin writing his name in ink at the top of it and addressing it to me at my dorm. 

The week following, I got a surprise phone call from Franklin.

“Hey, Garrett,” he said, “whatchu doing wit’ the study questions?”

I told him I’d sent my answers in already, that he should have had them by now.

“Yeah, but,” he said. “Every answer reads like stream-of-consciousness. Endless. You cannot expect me to read so many pages. You do the assignment high on marijuana or what?”

I told him he’d set no limit on length, so I just wrote out what I thought. Granted, some of them were “free-style”—taking off on things, issuing ramblings and reminiscences of my childhood in Hawaiʻi and Gardena. I kind of gushed away. 

“Okay, some is on point but a lot isn’t,” he said. “It reads like The Sound and the Fury.”

“A tale told by an idiot?”

“Your words—not mine,” Franklin said. 

In the end, he agreed to accept my week’s answers but, from then on, I had to promise not to go off like Coltrane on my own verbal improvs. 

“No need try be one poet alla time,” he ended. “No make me suffah.”

Over the term, assiduously, I read materials that included scholarly essays by Cary McWilliams on Mexican- and Filipino-American agricultural workers, another on the Japanese sugar cane workers’ strike at Kahuku Plantation in 1921, and another on the exclusion of Chinese workers from the official photograph of the Golden Spike being driven at the completion of the Transcontinental Railway in 1869. The point of so many of them being to build an awareness of the diversity of Asian American history and creating solidarity, not only with our variety of peoples, but in defiance of a common source of oppression. We called it “The Man” in Gardena, where I grew up, though it often was identified in books by phrases like political power, capitalism, the environment of racism, generalized oppression, and the prevailing power structure. Still absent were terms like ISA—post-Leninist philosopher Louis Althusser’s “ideological state apparatus”—hegemony, superstructure, and commodity. But I could feel them lurking behind most every sentence. Later, I read historian Roger Daniels on the internment, sociologists Harry Kitano and Victor Nee, the great memoirist Carlos Bulosan, cinema studies scholar Irvin Paik, fiction writer Frank Chin, movement poets Tomi Tanaka and Janice Mirikitani, and so many more. I think I found out about Gidra and Rodan from Franklin—the new radical newspapers of Asian America. Do you realize that they were named after Japanese sci-fi cinema monsters hellbent to destroy the world?

_____

It must’ve been the fall of 1974, after I’d come back from a year in Japan on fellowship, studying Buddhism and writing poetry in Kyoto, that Franklin invited me to come and give a reading to his students at Long Beach State. Even then I tried to negotiate the honorarium upwards from the $150 he offered. He countered by volunteering to buy lunch. I accepted.

I think I read to about thirty-five students in a simple, somewhat oversized classroom. The guys were mostly dressed in pan’s and t-shirrt and the women in shift dresses or denim jumpers and turtlenecks. All were Asian. I read poems dedicated to the Issei, the first-generation Japanese Americans, a poem set across the street from a poker parlor in Gardena, a poem-sequence of nocturnal city scenes around Kyoto, a poem of lovesickness, playing hanafuda cards alone, missing my girlfriend. 

After I read, a young woman raised her hand and asked what, especially, made these Asian American poems? I bristled but was silent, as I had no answer. But Franklin did.

“If you don’t mind, Garrett,” he said, “I’d like to answer this.” He paused, looking at me, smiling, and then turning back to the class. Then he spoke. 

“We have to understand that the consciousness of race and its expressions of alienation or even belonging come to us in varied forms as we address our experiences as Asian Americans. To make overt claims of, let’s say, class struggle or ethnic solidarity or to make any overt political message isn’t always the requirement for authentic cultural expression. Of course, what we call ‘movement poetry’ or ‘the poetry of struggle,’ say, is immediately recognizable for its hectoring tone and purported political agenda to build class consciousness and solidarity, but we have to keep in mind that, in the gardens of change, there are a hundred flowers that bloom and that we can embrace and be thankful for every one of them.”

_____

In 1977, I was living in Seattle, running the Asian Exclusion Act, a community theater group, and got the idea to put together a road show with Lawson Fusao Inada and Alan Chong Lau that combined poetry with music. I imagined that I could use a long poem by Lau and his shorter-lined, even reticent lyrics as the structure for a score of meriyasu-like musical accompaniment. Meriyasu is the background music of traditional Japanese kabuki, a kind of pre-cinematic, atmospheric music tied to the shifts of narrative action, dialogue, and visual presentation of this style of eighteenth-century Japanese theater. At almost the same time, I conceived of a poem I might write that would be accompanied by a serially composed jazz suite—a combination of borrowed tunes and a variety of rhythms, improvisations, and instrumental soloing. I knew inside my hara it could work. And just about all of Lawson’s poetry was written to an implied jazz accompaniment or score. He had, of course, already trained as a bassist and, with a fluid bari-tenor voice, could scat like nobody’s business. I’d heard him perform a poem he’d called “Billie’s Bounce,” after the tune about Billie Holiday composed by Charlie Parker. In readings that he gave, Lawson would alternate between his lyrics and scatting the tune aloud, deftly weaving back and forth from poetry to song. Inada was a jazz band all on his own. We three could be the front line of a jazz ensemble.

I called Franklin Odo at Long Beach State and proposed that the Asian American Studies Program sponsor a concert by “The Buddha Bandits,” the name I’d christened our new group—us three poets and a combo of musicians built around reed player Alan Furutani and my brother Eldon Hongo on electric guitar. Almost instantly, Franklin agreed. But not without a scholarly riposte. “Philosophically speaking,” he said, “you are the voices of the community legitimated by an under-expressed wish for cultural change.” Financially speaking, I said we needed planefare for us three poets, honoraria for all, and rehearsal time compensation for the musicians. It would be a few thousand bucks. Plus a hall for the event. 

“Anything else?” Franklin asked. “You want lodging and room service at the Hilton too?”

Furutani, Eldon, and I, along with Lau and three other local Asian American musicians, rehearsed for a week in my parents’ garage in Gardena. The musicians would jam along as Lau read various segments of his poem, and I would identify particular moments and sequences of improv that I wanted them to repeat and then connect with other moments into a score we were composing. I was like a director capturing pieces of physical gestures, blocking, and the tenor of emotions to the delivery of certain lines, knitting them together as the pieces of the poem progressed, nailing down the specific notes, character, cadences, chords, and percussion effects into a meriyasu of Lau’s poem. It worked. The band and I then started on the poem-sequence of mine that I’d already imagined scored as a musical suite, using the John Coltrane tune “Equinox” to kick things off, then morphing into a few bars from the jazz standards “Body and Soul” and “‘Round Midnight,” all held together with meriyasu interludes of the band’s collective composing. We thought it was dope, as the kids say now. 

Backstage, on the evening of our performance, we Bandits had dressed ourselves as Asian American superheroes, decked out in aloha shirts, haori jackets, happi coats, kung-fu pants, and long gabardine overcoats we’d scrounged from the Salvation Army that we planned to throw off as we took the stage. Lawson, who’d arrived just before curtain, wore a short black haori emblazoned with white cranes over a black tee and dark Levi’s. Tall and handsome, he looked the coolest. There was a thrill in the air as we took the stage, shouts and applause from the audience. As though he were captain and we the Lakers, Lawson lampooned low-fives as we all filed out. In the packed hall, the air was electric. There were some three hundred out there.

Before the first downbeat, Franklin stood in front of us all, looking fully academic in sharply pressed pants and a long-sleeved, white dress shirt. He held a mic in his hand and took the moment to give us an introduction. His words were calm yet dramatic, and we hung on what he said as he spoke about community, how we needed to create our own festivals, praise our own gatherings, come together to witness the creation of this new art we were about to perform. Franklin said Asian America needed its artists, poets, and musicians just as much as it needed “food and water,” the same as we needed political organizers in the fields and in the cities, health clinics in our Japantowns and Chinatowns, fair housing for our aged, and museums to celebrate and commemorate our history. He said that art validated the experience of the people it spoke to, that poetry was the words that called to us, that music was what rose from the same earth we walked upon. He said that our poetry did not come from textbooks, that our music did not arise merely from the Top Forties, but, echoing the great Carlos Bulosan, from “America in the heart.” He spoke extempore, without notes, quietly but with the authority of deliberation and study perfected by historical analysis years long in the making. As he did for so many of us involved in cultural revolution, Franklin sponsored and introduced the Buddha Bandits to Asian America.

*

   Puerto Rican Grinds with Franklin and Enid

   In Kailua

   A Family Portrait

   Loʻikalo

   At an AAAS Conference

*

It was early June of 2009, my year’s teaching at Oregon was coming to a close, and I was looking forward to a summer without academic duties when I got a call from Franklin. 

“Are you ready to come?” he said. 

“For what?” I answered. “What’s this about?”

“The television documentary. For you to come Hawaiʻi and talk story about horehorebushi.”

There was a pause. I’d forgotten completely about it. The blizzard of my university teaching and service had driven me mentally blind and, of all things, I’d not put it on my calendar. This was for friendship and love and it never made it to my list of future obligations.

“Oh, yeah,” I said, casually. “When was that going to be?”

About a year before, I’d heard a cane worker’s plaintive song on a recording Franklin sent me. He was researching what would later become his book-length study Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawaiʻi. The song was called horehorebushi, meaning song of hole-hole, a Hawaiian word referring to the action of twisting cut cane in your hands and stripping it of leaves with a cane knife or machete. Its suffix, bushi, is from Japanese, meaning a tune, an air, a knot of wind. Franklin had found a source, an older man named Harry Urata, who’d made it his calling to collect hundreds of songs that were sung by early Japanese immigrants who worked in the Hawaiian canefields. Urata was born in Hawaiʻi but educated in Japan, returning to Honolulu for high school just as war broke in 1941. He’d made his living as a music teacher, band leader, and radio host, but, late in life (as John Lomax had done for the blues and field hollers of the Black South), Urata found a folklorist’s passion for going around with a tape recorder to retirement homes, asking residents to recall the songs they’d sung in the sugarfields. Urata’s songs haunted me, fixed a feeling in my blood about that first generation of my own people, stooping to do hoe-work, chopping at the dirt, and using scythes or knives to trim leaves from stalks of cane, raising mournful voices that twisted in the hot air like fists of wind.

To Hawaiʻi, Hawaiʻi I came,

    Land of my dreams.

But I grunt like an animal

    And my tears fall

Amidst endless fields of cane. 

 

—from the Japanese, version mine

The song was simple, sung haltingly, in a spiraling but descending line to a rhythm that I recognized from tunes my maternal grandfather had sung during my childhood. It started at a slow, grieving pace like a funereal tune, then had a hitch, a kind of catch in the middle of its verses, where the melodic line would pirouette from its descent and climb way high in a pentatonic interval, then cut itself off abruptly, dropping to the next line of verse, quavering out a long vowel. It put a grip on your blood like a wraith was squeezing the tough muscles of your heart, who then let go just before it stopped, so you felt a flush in your veins, a spot of blue terror, your soul suddenly clarified and made serious like the rain drilling down on a tin roof. It ceased just before you began to cry.

            I grunt like a beast.

                  I hack and I slash through canes.

    I trample them under my boots.

               But, in the evening, when crickets sing,

                              I keep, just for them,

        An island of stalks I never cut, their leaves still whispering

                            In winds that are soft and not cruel. 

 

—version mine

The songs told stories in a scarce few lines, most of them depicting lives of hard labor and disappointment, a nostalgia for Japan alongside invoking items from their lives—wooden lunch pails, ditches where the water ran, knives and hot sun, the sticky pitch from the cane soaking their gloves, the needles of leaves getting under their skin. I thought these songs a kind of blues, a legacy of deep feeling even through the pains of hard labor. They came in a creole of Japanese mingled with words from Hawaiian sometimes, or in English, all pronounced in the Japanese way, sung to set tunes that the kanyaku imin brought over from their native chores of planting and harvesting rice, tea, and millet in Kumamoto, Fukuoka, and Okayama. 

The horehorebushi Franklin sent came to me in middle life and were like an undiscovered legacy, mournful testimonies to the difficulties of, not only those first lives on the Hawaiian earth my ancestors had lived, but of their consciousness, how they felt about things, how much they yearned for a return home to Japan, then how determined they’d become that they would tough things out, scrape a living from the canerows, the chaff and dust from the cane, smoke from the oil fires they lit to cure the stalks for harvest, all choking them. When they took the quiet respite of a hand-rolled cigarette or ate their lunches from a pail by the side of a sluice where the air was cooler, they were surveilled by bosses who marked their breaks with whips and pocket watches. 

If you listen to a lot of them, the tunes sound almost alike, except for odd, rhythmic accents now and then, great, emotional leaps of pentatonic octaves like a yodel or coyote’s cry. It’s as though Thelonious Monk took a saké drinking song and twisted it into the brief measures of a dissonant blues. But to each one there is an overwhelming tone of grieving, a sadness that rises from the gorge of a body up through the warbling throat that gives its muscular cry a tune carrying through the air so you can hear it, but not without feeling how it’s wrenched from unrelenting travail and loneliness. These are songs of something beyond sadness, a combination of a chain gang’s heaving woe and a personal, grievous lamentation.

I got myself to Honolulu late that August, booked three nights in a seaside cottage in Hauʻula on the North Shore of Oʻahu where I’d last lived as a child. I took my daughter, all of five years old, with me. We waded in the shallows of Hauʻula Beach. She got stung by jellyfish for the first time and wept. We went to Sea World, saw a whale and dolphins desporting, and I bought her a plush pink penguin. I took her to the studio where the taping was to be, and one of my young cousins met us there, so she could babysit while I blabbed on camera. 

When Franklin interviewed me for Canefield Songs, his PBS special, I called them “the Buddhahead blues.” The term “Buddhahead,” which to many today might sound offensive, in fact derives from the Japanese-English creole term buta-head, or “pig-head,” what the early laborers called themselves for their stubbornness and resolve. Among the Japanese American upper middle-class today, it’s often mistaken for a slur, something like Chicano may once have been for Mexican Americans before they adopted it as a term of honor. Like them, our Issei generation, the kanyaku imin, could not be broken, but would persevere, fostering descendants for five more generations. When I called their songs “the Buddhahead blues,” it was to me (and to Franklin, who’d asked me to declare it on film) a term of tribute to their strength and endurance and an invocation of another people’s contribution to our common legacy as Americans. Their horehorebushi are songs that look forward to freedom and release.

With one willow trunk,

                A bachelor I came to Hawaiʻi.

                    Sending for a bride by photo,

  The sting went away from cutting cane.   

      Now I have children,

         Grandchildren too.  

 

—version mine

That the history is terrible rather than noble, that a varied literature did not until recently exist, that our ancestors never wrote and no one bothered with them enough to transcribe their full lives into writing, provides us with the stark watermark of an absence that these songs and our own current dreams must fill. Thanks to Franklin and Henry Urata, we’ve now at heart a canefield song, like the rising apparition of a moon that ascends a blank sky in the most brilliant light of day. In its verses, we can see cane workers arrayed around a locomotive, our ancestors trudging off their immigration boat in Honolulu Bay, a midday rainstorm drenching a village of thatched huts amidst an ocean of sugarcane. What words there are of theirs come to us in the real snatches of these few lyrics that have survived the canefields, horehorebushi, born of unchronicled sufferings, sung by anonymous artists who imparted the trace of their labors to Urata-sensei, who taped them, to Professor Odo, who first translated and celebrated them in a book. Together they sing accompaniment to our early history in this country, the music and meriyasu for a walking tour, we freshly empowered flâneurs through Asian American history taking quiet survey through the broken rectangles of old plantation camps in the midst of stands of abandoned cane, along the spit of a sandy promontory, half-eaten by the sea, studded with wooden grave markers, silvered by wind-wear and the sun, broken and rotting with more than a century of age. Hommage. Homage to kanyaku imin. Homage to Franklin Odo.

—Paris, June 2023