The Japanese and Okinawan Kitchens in Hawaiʻi

The Japanese kitchen came to Hawaiʻi with the sugar plantations. A first party of labourers, the Gannenmono, sailed in 1868, and from 1885 the Japanese government contract workers followed in large numbers. The Okinawan kitchen arrived with the first Okinawan plantation workers in 1900, and the two groups, though they shared the cane fields and the camps, brought different foods, different habits of seasoning and different tables.

The plantation camp is where these kitchens took their island form. Workers brought shoyu, miso, rice, dried fish and the habit of the packed midday meal, and found in Hawaiʻi a country where the ingredients of home could be replaced, one by one, by what the land and the sea offered. Rice stayed the centre of the plate. Shoyu, sugar and ginger became the base of a family of marinades and braises, of which shoyu chicken and misoyaki butterfish are the best known, the second made with sablefish, the black cod Anoplopoma fimbria, glazed with miso. Maki sushi and cone sushi, dashi broth, somen salad and the noodle soup that became saimin belong to the same inheritance, each altered by the camps in which Chinese, Japanese, Portuguese and Filipino workers ate beside one another. The musubi shows the method most plainly. A block of pressed rice, a strip of nori and a slice of Spam glazed in soy and sugar make a portable meal that answers the packed lunch of the cane field and the plate-lunch counter alike. The Japanese bento and the okazuya, the small deli that sells cooked dishes by the portion, supplied the model for much of what the islands now call local food. Fried chicken, pickled vegetables, rolled egg, simmered burdock and kamaboko still fill the okazuya case. The Okinawan contribution is quieter in the printed record but real. Aloha Kitchen notes that more than 50,000 ethnic Okinawans live in Hawaiʻi today and that their first workers came in 1900, though it gives no Okinawan recipes. The purple Okinawan sweet potato, a variety of ʻuala Ipomoea batatas with chestnut notes, is the plain sign of that kitchen on the local table, and it now appears in baked sweets and in haupia bars, where the coconut pudding of the Native Hawaiian table sits over a purple layer. The Okinawan kitchen shares the Japanese reliance on pork, sweet potato and seaweed, but it keeps its own character in the use of the root and of pork.

The Japanese and Okinawan table in Hawaiʻi tastes of shoyu, sugar, ginger, dashi and rice, set against the salt of the sea and the sweetness of the root. A plate of shoyu chicken, rice and a scoop of macaroni salad, a musubi eaten from the hand, a bowl of saimin in clear dashi broth with green onion and kamaboko, and miso-glazed butterfish are the meals by which it is known. Cone sushi, made with sweetened fried tofu pockets filled with rice, is served at family gatherings, and the purple sweet potato is baked, steamed or set into pudding bars as the sweet end of the meal.