Amazon.com description: Product Description: From Introduction: One hundred years ago, on 8 February 1885, the first group of 944 government-sponsored contract laborers from Japan arrived in Hawaii aboard the City of Tokio. Primarily through photographs, this volume shows how the Japanese immigrants met the demand for laborers on the Hawaiian sugar plantations, a need that could not be met by the declining Hawaiian population, and how their labor built much of the sugar economy upon which agribusiness in Hawaii is based. The book emphasizes the period from the 1885 arrival to 1924, the the United States prohibited Japanese immigration.