Harry Urata was born in 1917 in Hawai‘i. After the Japanese attack on the U.S. naval base in Pearl Harbor, Urata, a Japanese American, was placed in the Honouliuli Internment Camp. There he met Kawazo Kenpu, a journalist who supported Urata’s interest in Japanese culture and popular music and encouraged him to research holehole bushi folk music once the war was over.

Holehole bushi are “folk songs from Japanese immigrants who worked on Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations during the late 19th and early 20th centuries... Bushi is the Japanese word for melody or tune. Holehole is Hawaiian for the dead or dying leaves of the sugar cane.”

When Urata was released from Honouliuli in 1945, he became a Japanese language instructor for the University of Minnesota but quickly returned to Hawai‘i to work for the Japanese-language radio station, KULA, to run their music programming. After a year, he traveled to Japan to study with the composer Koga Masao. When he returned to Hawai‘i, he opened a music studio. 

In 1960, composer Raymond Hattori came to Hawai‘i and worked with Urata to create a score based on holehole bushi, but it relied heavily on a single individual’s retention, which was met with protest. As a result, Urata traveled to each of the Hawaiian Islands, recording the songs with former plantation workers. He continued this fieldwork until the 1980s, gathering both lyrics and sound recordings.

Urata has been described as singularly responsible for the recovery of the holehole bushi repertoire. Toward the end of his life, he noted that his recovery, preservation, and revitalization of the holehole bushi recordings was his proudest accomplishment.

Dr. Franklin Odo met Harry Urata in the 1970s while Urata was running his music studio. While Odo was teaching in the Ethnic Studies Department at the University of Hawai‘i at Manoa, the two collaborated on writing an article about holehole bushi music and participated in a 1984 episode of Rice and Roses, produced by Honolulu’s public KHT public television station to discuss the holehole bushi tradition.

In the 1980s, Urata bequeathed his collection to Odo, who later became the founding director of the Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. His book Voices from the Canefields: Folksongs from Japanese Immigrant Workers in Hawai‘i was published by Oxford University Press in 2013 and dedicated to Urata to whom, he states in the preface, “this work owes its existence.” Urata’s collection consists of twenty open-reel tapes and cassettes recorded between 1960 and 1980, as well as transcribed lyrics.

In 2025, the Library of Congress’ National Recording Preservation Board added the Urata collection to the National Recording Registry.

A finding aid is available in the Smithsonian Online Virtual Archives.