Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,753

This is the grave of Naoichi “Harry” Hokasano.

Now, I know basically nothing about Hokasano. And there is hardly anything online about him either. But this is the opportunity, thanks to a chatty grave, to get into an issue that we wouldn’t usually be able to talk about here, which is the Japanese workforce in early 20th century Colorado.

I suppose Hokasano must have been born in Japan. What I do know is that not only did he come to the United States but then became a labor contractor. To use the more common Italian term, he was basically a padrone, a guy who sponsored workers to come to the United States, did the work to get them there, and served as an intermediary between them and the larger white world, Could this be exploitative? Oh yeah, obviously. Gunther Peck’s excellent, Reinventing Free Labor: Padrones and Immigrant Workers in the American West, 1880-1930 goes into this in quite a bit of detail. He doesn’t look at Japanese workers here–learning Greek, Spanish, and Italian is probably enough for a book on American history….But one can guess the situation was probably pretty similar. These contractors performed some very real services and some of them definitely lined their pockets with the hard-won wages of the workers. Whether this includes Hokasano, who incidentally went by Harry in the United States, I have no idea.

There are a couple of direct references to Hokasano in history book. Thomas Noel (a piece of work for anyone who ever knew him and a lot of people in Denver did; he once came up to me drunk at a conference and told me that dinosaurs went extinct due to their homosexuality….) writes in Colorado: A Historical Atlas that Hokasano recruited workers in the sugar beet fields developing in the South Platte and Arkansas River Valleys, which remain a major industry there today.

There’s a mention of Hokasano in The Louisiana Planter and Sugar Manufacturer in 1903, talking about his work as a labor recruiter. In a story borrowed from the Greeley Tribune, Hokasano lived in Denver, but had traveled up to Greeley, volunteering to provide workers to work the fields by the ton instead a flat rate. See, the sugar operators in Colorado were outraged. They had recruited a bunch of German-Russians to work the fields and those immigrants dared to demand a flat rate. Hokasano said he could provide 75-100 Japanese workers experienced in beet work. But he also demanded the farmers provided decent land for camping, a good water supply, at least some of the expenses for railroad tickets to get the workers up there, and an advance. This all sounds very padrone to me. Of course, there was no such as labor solidarity here, but what that even mean to different immigrant workers competing with each other? That’s all great, but we shouldn’t read back too much criticism here. Hokasano was looking out for his people and the German-Russians were looking out for theirs and it was quite the forward thinking organizer that tried to get these groups to look out each other, though it was not unknown, as the 1903 Japanese Mexican Labor Association in California demonstrated.

By 1916 at least, Hokasano provided workers for road construction as well, at least according to the journal Engineering Record, Building Record and Sanitary Engineer. He was one of the contractors providing labor to build the road over Wolf Creek Pass in Colorado, a fairly gnarly road even today. Today, this is Highway 160 between Pagosa Springs and South Park.

That’s about all there is to know about Hokasano, at least in what is readily available. And most of what else we would learn would probably be repetitive anyway if we went deeper into similar sources. As you can see he died in 1927. Now, the Japanese community in Colorado was not locked up behind bars for the crime of being Japanese during World War II. In fact, the state’s governor, Ralph Carr, was quite welcoming of Japanese Americans moving there. They did. The Japanese community pretty much scattered after the closure of the camps. There would never be the kind of intensively local Japanese immigrant and ethnic communities on the west coast again, except in Los Angeles, which still has a great Japantown today. But a lot of people stayed in Denver and started their own communities there. It’s true that instead of the buildings looking like some exotic architecture from Asia like in LA, they are mostly just regular post-war construction in Denver.

In 1977, Hokasano was honored with a stained glass window in the state capitol in Denver. I don’t really know anything about who sponsored that, but I get hat the large Japanese community there wanted to honor one of their own, Hokasano was there, and it was the 50th anniversary of his death.

Naoichi Hokasano is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Denver, Colorado. I don’t really know anything about the Japanese Association of Brighton that put this monument up, but again, it’s an opportunity for a community to lay down a monument for one of their own. And in this case, it worked since it got my attention while I was walking around the cemetery. And it also allowed an opportunity to talk about issues we don’t often get to in this series.

If you would like this series to visit other Japanese Americans, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. The printmaker and painter Isami Doi is in Honolulu and the pioneering historian of Asian America Ronald Takaki is in El Cerrito, California. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.