Looking at the collective identities of Japanese American elderly in a former sugar plantation community in Puna, Hawai'i, this book investigates the stories in which they remember, evaluate, and represent their past lives on the plantation.

This enlightening book on the collective identities of Japanese American elderly in a former sugar plantation community in the rural town of Puna, Hawai'i, investigates the stories in which they remember, evaluate, and represent their past lives on the plantation from the 1920s to the 1980s. Author Kinoshita deftly explores the process by which they collectively delineate their identities in terms of ethnicity, class, generation, and gender. Presenting an ethnography of remembering that captures the so-called 'cultural testimony', the Japanese American elderly, in this book, narrate their plantation experience as both an internally-oriented emotional manifestation and an externally-based common understanding of their community. Kinoshita demonstrates how they employ their memories to reconstruct plantation experience and define their peoplehood as the collective identities of plantation-raised Japanese Americans.