When we were kids, during the summers, we used to load the jeep and trailer on a Young Brothers’ barge and head to different neighbor islands to camp. After a while, we ended up repeatedly coming to Kona.

On one of those Kona trips, sixty years ago, we headed up mauka and our father got us all out and said we were going to build a house here.  It turns out we ended up building on a different lot, up Donkey Mill Road, the first left after the dip.  We planted macadamia nuts on a 20-acre KSBE lease.  Well, ‘we’ didn’t do the planting, it was all arranged through Mr Takashiba.

Yoshitaka Takashiba was “the son of immigrants from Fukui-ken, Japan, was born on May 23, 1913, in Captain Cook, Kona, Hawaii.”

His father, Koshu Takashiba, a rice farmer in Fukui-Ken, left Japan in about 1909, in search of work, and had intended to go to Canada; rather, they stopped and stayed in Kona.

Koshu Takashiba was Issei (first generation) – born in Japan and emigrated to the Islands from 1885 to 1924 (when Congress stopped all legal migration).   The term Issei came into common use and represented the idea of a new beginning and belonging.

The children of the Issei, like Yoshitaka Takashiba, were Nisei, the second generation in Hawaiʻi and the first generation of Japanese descent to be born and receive their entire education in America, learning Western values and holding US citizenship.

Yoshitaka was the eldest of five children.  In Kona, the family was engaged in coffee farming.  “As a youth, Yoshitaka helped on the family coffee farm and attended Konawaena School.  In 1927, at the age of 14, he quit school to assume more responsibilities on the farm.”

“In 1933, he married Chiyoko, and three years later, began growing and marketing tomatoes to supplement their [coffee] income.  In 1945, he started macadamia nut seedlings which he eventually planted in the fields three years later.”

Mr Takashiba was a man with only an eighth grade education but was a patient pioneer in the macadamia nut industry in Kona and a leader of several agricultural cooperatives.  I learned a lot from him – I suspect to his dismay, though, one of the things I learned was that when I grew up, I was not going to be a farmer.

But Mr Takashiba was a great farmer, friend, and contributor to the future of Kona that we live in now.  He did an oral history interview for the ‘Social History of Kona’ project – I’ll let him tell some more of his story …

“At the time that I was growing up it’s not like now, you can see all the opportunities and you can see what [is available]. Even at the local you can see the mechanics and carpenters, electrician, all that kind.”

“I don’t know how the teenagers now feel but we were not exposed in that kind of opportunities so we didn’t have any idea what our future will be and we weren’t thinking about our future, it’s just day by day.”

“So we weren’t thinking what I will be in the future.  In general, I kind of like growing things so I didn’t think too much about feeling that I want to get out of farming or that sort. … [and] my parents insisted that I should take care of the farm.”

“[T]he coffee was the main production so most of the local farmers were Japanese and like I’m nisei, I was brought up in such that my family came from Fukui-ken and they were farming and they were real conservative.”

“Every inch of the farm was put in production so I was trained in such that every inch of the soil is valuable and most of the farmers, the nisei farmers were taught in such that they were reluctant in cutting any coffee trees.”

“So even how narrow [the farm road] is, even the two coffee trees touched the jeep or whatever the vehicle is, they are forced to go through that line without cutting the coffee trees.”

“[M]ainly the object was to keep the families’ children in the farm. Not as of employing the children. So the families’ children did a lot of work. In fact they did better than the adults did.”

“[I]f you have a teenager then they will start working at the time that their parents start working and they would end up at the time that the parents end up. So in other words, if you work 12 hours then the teenager will work 12 hours, whereas a hired hand will only work eight hours.”

“[W]e were brought up in that locality that most of the farmers, in fact, all of the farmers were Japanese. After we left school our conversation was in Japanese mostly so actually when I went to school the English was not as fluent as of what we spoke Japanese.”

In 1945, Mr Takashiba started getting into macadamia nuts … by 1947 he stopped coffee farming – “Too much labor in picking.”

“[M]y friend coached me that in the future, macadamia nuts might be one of the important product in Kona. So with that two things, sort of encourage me to plant the macadamia nuts.”

“At that time the university, the university experiment station was doing some research on macadamia nuts and they were collecting various variety that were grown in Kona and elsewhere in the state of Hawaii.”

“I was told that the macadamia nuts would not germinate too fast so I had a patch of tomatoes growing and under the tomatoes I started the seedling of macadamia nuts. In other words, I planted the tomatoes and macadamia nut seed at the same time.”

“While the tomatoes were growing, the macadamia nuts were ready to germinate and then it germinated about four months after I planted the seed. So by the time the tomatoes were out of production the macadamia nut plant was just ready to sprout or some were couple inches grown up.”

“Some of [his friends] said, ‘Oh, you damn fool.’ … After I planted my macadamia nut and the university felt that macadamia nuts would be one of the industries for Kona they [university] were propagating a lot of grafted macadamia nuts.”

“And at the start they were selling for $1.50 per plant which was about three to four years old. Some of them bought and planted at that time but at that time that the university was selling the seedlings, I had already planted in my orchard so I didn’t go and buy them.”

“But at the time that they had this macadamia nut grafted and ready to be planted in the orchard, some of them were sold but some were start getting overgrown so they used to give the farmers free. And that’s when quite a number of the farmers planted the macadamia nut because they were getting the plant free.”

“But some of them planted macadamia nut free and as the trees started producing, they weren’t too strong market so they cut all the trees. So when I visit those farmers, they said, ‘Gee, Takashiba, if I had that macadamia nuts I think I would be in the same category with you but damn fool me, I cut the tree. ‘  I think there were a couple of farmers that had cut the trees.”

He got involved with the Kona Macadamia Nut Club that evolved into the Kona Macadamia Nut Cooperative, an organization he later led. (The duty of the cooperative “was to get the farmer’s macadamia nut together and sell to the buyers as a cooperative”.)

“From the very young stage I was real interested in cooperative, I know once I went to a gathering where at that time Japan was real active in cooperatives. … so, I was from the very kid days, I was interested in getting the farmers together and marketing together.”

“For that reason I was real active in this cooperative so I did a lot of sacrificing job. I had a truck, I went out to collect the nuts with my own expense and then market it together to whoever bought the nut from us. That’s how I was involved in that supervisor/manager at the same time.”

“The macadamia nut, we don’t have that world market price [Kona coffee prices were based on Brazilian and Columbian coffee prices] so the [macadamia nut] price was sort of controlled by the buyer. Hawaiian Host is one of the buyer and we have Menehune and Honokaa and Keaau. But the  biggest buyer is Hawaiian Host, Honokaa and Keaau.”

As for his vision of the future … “the Japanese style is that, what do you call, you leave everything for the children. They try work hard and they leave for the children. They wish that, or they try to train the children in such that in the future it will be [a certain way].”

“But I feel that you cannot control the children as much as what you think you’d like to control. And then even you want them to be in a good position, if you cannot support them to get into that position it’s your ability.”

“So my thinking is you should worry about that but I think the main thing is to have them well educated. Then the thing is, if you educate the children as of what you should and from there on I think it’s their ability or their responsibility to get whatever they want to.”

“If they want to be lazy and they have the education and if they don’t want to use the education to get some money then that’s their business not the parents. You cannot tell them you should do this, you should do that and if they don’t do, then how can we control it.”

“So I think beyond that is, we’d like to see them in successful position but I think you cannot push them to do this or to do that.  I think as long as we give them the education then from there on it’s their kuleana.” (Yoshitaka Takashiba)

A successful man, with an eighth-grade education, gets it … the future is framed by working hard and getting an education, and taking personal responsibility for your actions (and occasionally taking some risks).  Yoshitaka Takashiba passed away on August 22, 2011 at the age of 98.

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