What I did learn in the fields was to listen. Me listening, eh, what a surprise, but the workers’ whispers don’t stop, they keep growing louder, angrier, yeah. It doesn’t take long for me to see my real talent is in recruiting for the unions, fighting for higher wages and better working hours for the workers. Who would have thought, eh? After I attended my first union meeting with a handful of other men, I found my inspiration. I began recruiting workers on the hush-hush to continue our fight against the owners. Over the years, I moved up in the ranks to being the right-hand man to Hideki Sato, our labor leader here at Puli. He’s a smart guy, yeah, who reads and reads and always carries a book in his hands. He’s from a family of scholars back in Japan and teaches at the plantation school. The owners have no idea he’s our labor leader and we plan to keep it that way, on the hush-hush.

We’ve kept close track of earlier strikes on the other islands and why they’ve failed. I’ve begun to recruit from outside Kazoku village, hoping other plantations will do the same. “The only way we can make headway is to keep recruiting, yeah, and combining forces with our Chinese and Filipino brothers.” Most of the workers assembled tonight are Japanese, but I look around the room to see two or three Chinese and double the Filipino men from our last meeting. I’m overjoyed, knowing it’s a start, and I’m hopeful others will follow. We can only fight the owners as a collective. It seems so simple, yeah, but it’s anything but. It’s taken me a few months to recruit forty-eight new men, bringing us into the hundreds.

The room is hot and crowded. Just thankful the cloud of cigarette smoke covers up the foul odors. Workers squeeze in, standing two-deep against the walls, while still others spill into a smaller room in back and out the front door by the time I step from behind the curtain. We’re all sweating, breathing the hot, smoky air. Up front are a wood table and three chairs. I sit down in the chair to the right of Hideki. To his left sits Aoki, our secretary and treasurer, who calls the meeting to order.

Hideki speaks up. “Thank you all for coming.”