Uchinanchu: History of Okinawans in Hawaii

Uchinanchu is the term used by Okinawan immigrants and their descendants in Hawai'i to identify themselves as an ethnic group distinct from the Yamatunchu or Naichi of Japan’s four main islands. Some 25,000 men, women, and children left their impoverished Okinawan homeland between 1900 and 1924, hoping for a better life in Hawai'i. Their early experiences were marked by hard, lean years on sugar and pineapple plantations. In this book, eighty- and ninety-year-old issei, first generation immigrants, describe through interviews what it was like to pull up roots in their homeland and make new lives in the islands.