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Arrival of First Japanese Immigrants

When: February 8, 1885
Where: Kingdom of Hawaii
Part of: First Japanese immigrants arrive in Hawaii under the 1885 immigration convention

The first Japanese government-sanctioned immigrants arrived in Hawaii on February 8, 1885, as contract laborers for plantations.

Following the lifting of a ban on emigration that had been in place since 1869, the first Japanese immigrants arrived in Hawaii on February 8, 1885. They were contracted to work on sugarcane and pineapple plantations, marking the start of significant Japanese demographic presence in the islands.

Sources

Japanese in Hawaii Wikipedia, revision of 2026-10-02

Machine-drafted from the cited Wikipedia passages and checked by a reviewing model, not by a human editor. Every passage cites the revision it was written from; dates and places follow those passages.