Why Hawaii Put Japanese into Public Schools

When Honolulu’s McKinley High School began offering Japanese language classes in 1924, the program wasn’t introduced only to accommodate the needs of migrant workers’ children. The curriculum—a first for the local public school system—was also a bid to control communal loyalties in Hawaii, which the United States had annexed in 1898.

“[C]onflict over religion and assimilation seems to have been the motivation behind making Japanese part of the secondary curricula in Hawaii public schools,” explains Noriko Asato, an archive specialist whose research focuses on Japanese American history. Japanese laborers had been migrating to Hawaii since the 1890s, mainly to work on sugar plantations. Even though public schooling became compulsory in 1896, the language barrier and the remote location of many plantations led to gaps in access to these laborers’ formal education.

Japanese Christian leaders were quick to establish independent schools that offered a Japanese-style curriculum in the afternoons.

Eager to remedy this social problem, Japanese Christian leaders were quick to establish independent schools that offered a Japanese-style curriculum in the afternoons. The Christian missionaries who established these schools in the 1890s saw education as a way to improve the perception of their religion, which had been proscribed for centuries in Japan, as well as an opportunity to win converts from the mainly Buddhist Japanese community.

Buddhist clergy quickly responded—opening schools in Hilo and Kona in 1898 and in Honolulu in 1902, and sparking a showdown between leaders of both religions. “As competition between religious sects became more intense, it involved the entire Japanese community… prompting some parents to establish secular schools,” Asato writes.

By 1909, unaffiliated schools made up more than two-fifths of all Japanese language schools. Besides concerns over indoctrination, parents supported independent schools because the growth of religious schools “caus[ed] an enormous financial burden on the immigrant community,” which was expected to fund these institutions, she explains.

Tension around the role of religion in these schools was matched by a clash between the Japanese community and the white business and political elite in Hawaii. Plantation owners initially threw their weight behind temples, churches and schools as “incentives for laborers to settle,” as Asato puts it, and saw Buddhist Bishop Yemyо̄ Imamura’s intervention in a strike in 1904 as proof that Buddhism yielded compliant workers.

On the other hand, the Christian Hawaiian Evangelical Association sought to curtail its Buddhist rivals by telling the Department of Public Instruction that Buddhist schools “opposed the Americanism that Hawaii’s public schools had been nurturing,” Asato writes.

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Representatives of the Japanese government were also drawn into the controversy. Despite Education Vice-Minister Seitarо̄ Sawayanagi’s mandate that overseas education promote Japanese values, local diplomats like the Honolulu consul general “often deliberately ignored Sawayanagi’s 1906 order whenever they encountered resistance.”

After all, opposition to Japanese language schools was mounting among the American public. “Many white public school teachers claimed they felt threatened to see the majority of their students ‘move’ to a nearby Japanese language school right after public school hours, where they imagined alien teachers subverted their democratic lessons,” Asato explains.

The Hawaii Japanese Education Association was formed in 1915 to allay these concerns. The group revised the Japanese syllabus to include pro-American content, including a textbook chapter that told students: “Future American citizens, do not bring a stain upon the name of the fatherland and do not disgrace your ancestor’s name.”

Yet these efforts were not enough to stave off a broader American campaign against all foreign language schools—including Japanese schools, which one report in 1920 characterized as “centers of an influence which, if not distinctly anti-American, is certainly un-American.”

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Aiming to counter Buddhists’ influence in the community, Japanese Christians appealed to this nativist sentiment. Their push to move Japanese language lessons into the public school system succeeded, leading to inaugural classes at McKinley High in 1924 and Maui High in 1925.

All the same, language schools continued to hold their own, with more than 200 institutions enrolling more than 40,000 students in 1940. Only when war between the United States and Japan broke out the next year were Japanese schools in Hawaii forcibly closed.

Thankfully, “foreign language” education has since made a comeback. Japanese is now studied by tens of thousands of American schoolchildren—especially in California, Oregon, Washington and Hawaii, states with larger Japanese American populations. “[S]tudying the history of Japanese language schools in Hawaii,” writes Asato, “should contribute historical depth to Japanese language studies by elucidating our long and complex origins as providers of foreign and/or heritage language education.”

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