His family had remained quiet and apprehensive, while Koji could hardly contain his excitement. He wanted to jump down from the wagon and run the rest of the way, but he felt his father’s tight grip on his shoulder and knew to stay put. His mother held on to his younger sister in the back of the wagon, her face pale and thin from weeks of seasickness. They were surrounded by the sticky buzzing heat, the low, dark sky threatening rain, and the endless sea of cane. He remembered that his mother had leaned toward his father and whispered in Japanese, “So big and endless, but where is the beating heart?”

They were one of many Japanese families squeezed into the cane grass huts, huddled together at the northern end of Puli Plantation. There was no running water or electricity, and the outhouse was in the yard. His mother and father were put to work cutting cane and clearing away the cane trash, while ten-year-old Koji and his sister went to the one-room plantation school. He was a restless and distracted student until he began working as a “hoe hana,” weeding and loosening the endless rows of dirt to plant cane under the hot sun, watching the cane cutters along with Razor and other boys his age whose families had also emigrated from Japan. Through good times and bad they all lived together in a cluster of similar grass houses that comprised the Japanese village. While their tightly knit Japanese enclave continued to grow, and was aptly named Kazoku, or Family Village, Koji noticed that they were also kept separated by acres of cane fields from Chinese and Filipino and Portuguese workers and their villages on the plantation.

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