“A Harvest of Hawaii Plantation Pidgin” by Myra Sachiko Ikeda

Spurred by the realization that erai means “tired” on Hawaii plantations, but means “great” or “excellent” in Japanese, Myra Sachiko Ikeda’s interest in Pidgin English began in the 1970s. She began to focus on the use of Pidgin English on Hawaii Island sugar cane plantations in the Japanese communities.

“Plantation talk was community talk,” Ikeda writes. She describes Pidgin English as a language that grew out of a need to communicate quickly between different communities, made of shorted or contracted words or phrases, built from many languages, characterized by rapid speech, and with many spelling variations. Pidgin English is not “broken” English, but rather “the foundations for the communication which helped build and forge the strong bonds among the people on the plantations,” Ikeda states proudly. “Pidgin is the language which identifies Hawaii as it reflects the shared knowledge and experiences of its people.”

Ikeda’s research is compiled in “A Harvest of Hawaii Plantation Pidgin: The Japanese Way” (2015), illustrated by Jeffery Kalehuakea DeCosta, which explores Pidgin English and its impact on Japanese people and the assimilation of lifestyles and cultures.

Ikeda describes plantation camp names, nicknames, children’s games (the enduring jan ken po gets its own chapter), plantation terms, food, and anecdotal stories, and includes a glossary of words and phrases in Pidgin, English, and Japanese.

She makes categorical distinctions between Japanese generations: issei (first-generation immigrants), nisei (second-generation), sansei (third-generation), yonsei, and gosei. She stresses that the Japanese people have a strong cultural identity, but that Japanese culture was “frozen” in the time of the Meiji Era, while the Japanese language in Hawaii has constantly evolved – or been suppressed during World War II, when Japanese language, culture, customs, and clothing disappeared.

My favorite parts of the book were the humorous conversations, with Pidgin English misunderstandings and mis-hearings. Thought my mother grew up on the Big Island, most of the Japanese words and Pidgin English in the book are unfamiliar to me; I don’t think she taught me the Pidgin English she might have heard growing up.

The one thing that seems enduring is jan ken po. I grew up with the rhyme “jan ken na po, I canna’ [cannot] show.” I didn’t even know that there were other verses! It didn’t surprise me to learn that my son learned this rhyme from his classmates, another generation of jan ken po players.

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Tags: A Harvest of Hawaii Plantation Pidgin, Myra Sachiko Ikeda, Pidgin English, Plantation Pidgin, Sugar Cane Plantations

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