Category Archives: Hawai’i

Even before coming back to Japan, I knew that every year for the past few decades at least a million Japanese citizens have visited Hawai‘i, many more than once. But I’ve been surprised again and again by the depth and breadth of Hawai‘i connections all over Japan.

Hawai‘i-roasted Lion’s coffee, Kona coffee, and Hawai‘i macadamia nuts and chocolates were available in the first small grocery store we shopped at in Shinagawa station in Tokyo. And, of course, every train station travel agency displays plenty of flyers for Hawai‘i vacations. We’ve noted a lot of aloha shirts and Hawai‘i T-shirts–at least in August–and not just on yakuza types. We’ve seen T-shirts plus aloha shirt combinations for sale in Ito Yokado, a nationwide discount department store. (The layered look is quite popular with young people here.) T&C Surf Design stuff is ubiquitous. (I’ve even seen it on wooden geta.)

One of the most prominent restaurants in Ashikaga, right on main street near the JR train station, is a Royal Host franchise with a full-on Hawai‘i theme and hibiscus logo, as if were lifted right out of a Waikiki hotel oriented to Japanese tourists. It offers Kona coffee, macadamia chocolates, orchids and pineapple on the plate, a “Big Island” four-kinds of meat dinner, and even Loco Moco on the menu. Loco Moco is even mentioned on the banners out front. When we ate there one day, I ordered their cold noodles, which turned out to be a passable attempt at Korean-style nengmyon, complete with sliced apples, sliced boiled egg, (mild) kimchee, and a subtly sesame-flavored broth. They’re open from 8 a.m. to 2 a.m., and seem to attract regular customers of all ages.

But even more impressive are the chance encounters that turn up surprisingly deep connections.

The travel-happy owners of our favorite okonomiyaki restaurant in Ashikaga have been to Hawai‘i six times–and to Bali twelve times! The many Indonesian artifacts in their store prompted me to inquire.

Yesterday, my wife and I went up to the immigration office in Utsunomiya and stopped at a coffee shop called Akai Tori (‘red bird’) on the way back, just as we passed Futaara Shrine. The place was filled with Hawaiian collectibles from the 50s and 60s. The owner had been to Hawai‘i five times

The most poignant tale came from a widow running a small Ainu craft and souvenir shop at the small Kawamura Kaneto Ainu Museum in Asahikawa on Hokkaido, which has had an official visit from a Maori delegation, but none from Hawai‘i’s Kanaka Maoli. While we were poking around her neighbor’s shop, she began talking to our daughter, whose Hawai‘i connections prompted a sweet but sad story. Her husband had made many trips to Hawai‘i as an Ainu woodcarver when Shirokiya department store in Ala Moana shopping center held its annual Asahikawa food and crafts fair. He brought his family along a few times, and the son ended settling in Hawai‘i after marrying a local girl. His mother had attended his Hawaiian wedding and–too few years later–sadly returned to attend his funeral as well. He died in his 40s. His mother kindly dressed our daughter up in an Ainu robe and headband so we would take a photo, all free of charge–although we did buy the headband, which was embroidered by the widow herself.

Today’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin carries a long sad story by reporter Sally Apgar about the familial and financial legacy of Sen. Hiram Fong, the first Asian American U.S. senator.

In sorting through the personal papers of the late Sen. Hiram Fong Sr., daughter Merie-Ellen Fong Gushi found what she believes are clues to why her twin brother, Marvin, has spent the last eight years waging wars in boardrooms and courtrooms against his parents and three siblings.

A letter dated Dec. 6, 1985, written in Marvin’s spidery handwriting, was addressed to his father and began: “I have never in my life hated anyone, but I hate you.

“For 37 years you have degraded me, making me feel I was ‘good for nothing.'”

Marvin wrote: “I promise to hurt you as much as you have hurt me in 37 years…. I will publicly embarras (sic) you; I will destroy whatever is left of your precious name. It may be tomorrow, a year from now or in five years, just expect it in your lifetime. You only care about your name and money…. I will rejoice in your downfall.”

Marvin’s battles, played out publicly in at least three major lawsuits, ripped apart the family financial empire, drove his parents to declare bankruptcy as a strategy to protect their remaining wealth and resulted in Marvin and his wife, Sandra Au Fong, gaining ownership of Market City Shopping Center and control of the most valuable remaining family assets.

In a symbolic end to the Fong saga, the U.S. Bankruptcy Court trustee auctioned off the family estate on Alewa Drive for $1.68 million to a developer last week.

In 1950, Hiram Fong Sr., the ambitious son of poor Chinese immigrants who graduated from Harvard Law School and became the first Asian-American elected to the U.S. Senate, built that house high on a ridge overlooking the sea and downtown Honolulu. Fong, a Republican, served from 1959 to 1977.

As a businessman, Sen. Fong made and lost millions. He lived his last weeks on a bed in the living room of that once-elegant house, which, like his fortune, declined into ruin.

“This whole thing with Marvin is like ‘King Lear‘ or something out of the Bible,” said Hiram Jr., the oldest son, in a recent interview at the house, which is now crowded with moving boxes.

Referring to Marvin’s 1985 letter, Hiram Jr. shook his head sadly and said, “He accomplished what he set out to do in the letter.”

Junior, as he is nicknamed, is trained as a lawyer and served briefly in the state Legislature and on the City Council before trying his hand at various disastrous business ventures, including a failed floating restaurant and a Laotian gold mine.

As the firstborn in a Chinese family, Junior was the anointed son destined to follow in his father’s footsteps.

Today, Junior, 65, who has languished in involuntary bankruptcy since 2001, is living at the family home until the sale is complete. For several years, Junior, who chain-smokes and reads westerns by Louis L’Amour, chauffeured his father every morning to his office at Finance Factors, one of the companies he helped found.

Several afternoons a week, he drove his father to St. Francis Medical Center for dialysis treatments. Junior and his sister Merie-Ellen, known as Muffy, who lives on Maui and works in her husband’s landscape business, have been the chief caregivers for their parents. Before Sen. Fong died, he asked the two to take care of their mother, Ellen Lo, who now lives in a care home.

In February, Junior was evicted from the family’s dilapidated former Kahaluu vacation home by its new owners, Finance Factors. Junior unsuccessfully represented himself in the eviction proceeding held in Kaneohe District Court against a team of lawyers from Finance Factors.

Asked what he will do when the family home is sold, Junior joked, “I will buy a van to live in and park it in Finance Factors’ parking lot.”

In an interview, Marvin, 57, said sadly, “My father was never fair to us. He always took Junior’s side.”

In court documents, Marvin, who was the “baby” of the family, refers to Junior as “the preferred son” who his father bailed out of a series of failed investments, taking on loans until the banks turned him down for more and the foreclosures began.

In documents filed in his father’s bankruptcy case, Marvin wrote that his father and Junior began their downward slide in the 1970s when the two co-signed loans “on a disastrous investment in the Oceania floating restaurant” and lost about $1 million. In the same court documents, Marvin said, “Since then, and in part because of that catastrophe, Fong Sr. has willingly and actively participated in Fong Jr.’s downward spiraling mishaps and wrongdoing.”

There’s lots more to the story. The sage advice of Lear’s Fool comes too late.

Have more than thou showest,
Speak less than thou knowest,
Lend less than thou owest,
Ride more than thou goest,
Learn more than thou trowest,
Set less than thou throwest;
Leave thy drink and thy whore,
And keep in-a-door,
And thou shalt have more
Than two tens to a score.
(Act I, Scene IV, Lines 31-140)

The version of Lear that I grew up on was entitled “Like Meat Loves Salt” in the Grandfather Tales collection by by WPA-funded folklorist Richard Chase, whose Jack Tales are my favorite “reading aloud” stories. I remember trying to tell one, I think it was Jack and the Varmints in Tok Pisin during fieldwork in Papua New Guinea.

P.S. “Learn more than thou trowest” seems to mean “Take in more than you believe”–exceedingly sage advice for anyone in these days of information overload.

The wonderfully whimsical February 30 blog is back in action with a series of new posts, among them a note about putative Huns claiming minority status in the Magyar-majority state of Hungary.

My understanding is that the link between the Huns and the Hungarians is purely accidental. Yes, Attila’s Huns set up camp in Pannonia, the land which is now Hungary, and yes, the names sound similar, but this is mere linguistic coincidence. The general consensus is that the term “Hungarian” comes from the Turkic onogur, perhaps meaning “ten peoples”. Attila’s Huns were active in Pannonia in the mid-fifth century, after which they disintegrated; the Magyars didn’t turn up until the year 895, so there’s a big gap to fill.

It was Medieval historians who first made the link between the Huns and the Magyars, trying to integrate legends about their ancestral origins into the genealogies found in the Old Testament.

And a followup about ancient Huns in the Pacific:

Being classified as an official minority in Hungary is not as difficult as it might seem. According to a 1993 law, all you have to do is prove your countrymen have resided in Hungary for at least 100 years and have their own pre-existing cultural, religious or linguistic character. And then you have to collect 1,000 signatures within two months.

Certainly the signature part will be no problem. “This would be easy to collect, as we pyramid-building Huns have distant relatives even in Hawaii,” Novák said, noting the theory that the Huns sprung from a since-vanished island near Hawaii called Ataisz roughly 5,000 years before the birth of Christ.

Maybe French Frigate Shoals (Kanemiloha‘i) should be renamed Ataisz the Sunken Hun Homeland.

UPDATE: The story only gets weirder. February 30 has uncovered the Arvisura, a sacred history of the Huns.

The Arvisura history begins with the sunken ancient homeland of Ataisz, which land is similar to Plato’s written description of Atlantis, but is still not one and the same. According to the saga, or legend (“rege”), it is from here (Ataisz) that the Huns came to be in Ordosz by way of Mesopotamia, where, in 4040, before recorded time, they formed the association of the 24 tribes. The “Palocok Regevilaga” [‘legendary bollocks’–tr.] concisely describes the 24 Hun tribes’ lives nation by nation, from about 4040 b.c. all the way to King Matthias, including Maria Theresa. This enormous span of masterwork takes into account thousands of years in listing in chronological order all of those events which brought into being today’s world that surrounds us, although in a way, or to some extent (nemikepp), from a different foundation than we were able to learn in school.

This map confirms that Ataisz stretched from South Point and Poipu in Hawai‘i to just about the duty free shop at Nadi airport in Fiji.

Sunday’s Honolulu Star-Bulletin reports on a new undersea discovery in waters off Hawai‘i.

During test dives Thursday, the Hawaii Undersea Research Laboratory’s Pisces submarines found the remains of the Imperial Japanese Navy’s I-401 submarine, a gigantic underwater aircraft carrier built to bomb the Panama Canal.

“We thought it was rocks at first, it was so huge,” said Pisces pilot Terry Kerby. “But the sides of it kept going up and up and up, three and four stories tall. It’s a leviathan down there, a monster.”

It is not the first World War II-era “monster” that the HURL scientists have found. Last year, off Pearl Harbor, they located the wreck of the gigantic seaplane Marshall Mars, one of the largest aircraft built and used as a transport plane by the U.S. Navy. Two years earlier in the same area, the HURL crew also found the wreckage of a Japanese midget sub that was sunk on Dec. 7, 1941.

The latest HURL discovery is from the I-400 “Sensuikan Toku” class of submarines, the largest built prior to the nuclear ballistic missile submarines of the 1960s. They were 400 feet long and 39.3 feet high, could reach a maximum depth of 330 feet, and carry a crew of 144.

Each carried three fold-up bombers inside a watertight hangar, plus parts to construct a fourth airplane. The bombers, called Seiran or “Mountain Haze,” [but see note below] could be made ready to fly in a few minutes and had wing floats for return landings. Fully loaded with fuel, the submarines could sail 37,000 miles, one and a half times around the world. Three were captured at the end of the war, as well as a slightly smaller test design called the I-14.

Their first mission was called “Operation PX,” a plan to use the aircraft to drop infected rats and insects with bubonic plague, cholera, dengue fever, typhus and other diseases on American West Coast cities. When the bacteriological bombs could not be prepared in time, the target was changed to the Panama Canal.

I-400 and I-401 were captured at sea a week after the Japanese surrendered in 1945. The commander committed suicide and the huge submarines’ mission was never completed.

For much, much more on the sub’s mission, see this site.

NOTE: The Combined Fleet website consistently translates Seiran (晴嵐) as ‘Mountain Haze’, ignoring the meaning (‘clear, not cloudy’) of the first character, but staying truer to the usual Chinese meaning of the second character. However, the Smithsonian’s National Aerospace Museum’s website translates it as ‘Clear Sky Storm‘, which captures the most common Japanese senses of both characters (hare ‘clear skies’ and arashi ‘storm’) and strikes me as a more natural name for a surprise attack submarine-carried bomber, perhaps implying something like ‘Bolt from the Blue’.

The Funatsu Aviation Instrument Museum’s website gives a guide to the naming conventions of Japanese naval warplanes. Fighters were named after strong weather (-fuu/-puu ‘-wind’, -rai ‘-thunder’); (high-altitude) bombers after constellations (-sei ‘-star’); reconnaissance planes after clouds (-un); attack (dive?) bombers after mountains (-san/-zan); patrol planes after seas (-kai); transports after skies (-kuu); trainers after plants (-giku ‘chrysanthemum’, -gusa ‘grass’), and others after scenery. This is helpful except that Seiran appears under the Other category in one listing, and under the Attack Bomber category elsewhere.

In 1999, the U.S. Geological Survey published Circular 1187, entitled Surviving a Tsunami–Lessons from Chile, Hawaii, and Japan. It opens with a warning to people living in Cascadia.

Some areas around the margin of the Pacific Ocean are located near subduction zones similar to the one that produced the 1960 Chile earthquake and its tsunami. One of these areas is Cascadia–southern British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California.

Recently, it has been discovered that the Cascadia Subduction Zone, like the subduction zone off Chile, has a history of producing earthquakes that triggered tsunamis. The most recent of these earthquakes, in 1700, set off a tsunami that struck Japan with waves about as big as those of the 1960 Chilean tsunami in Japan. However, modern Cascadia has had little experience with tsunamis and almost no experience with tsunamis generated close to home. Because of this, people in Cascadia need to look elsewhere for guidance about tsunami survival.

Perhaps the most basic guidance for people in Cascadia comes from the account on the following page. Many people in Cascadia may think that “The Big One”–an earthquake of magnitude 9–will kill them before its tsunami rolls in. So, why bother to prepare for such a tsunami? In the account, all the people in and near the town of Maullín, Chile, survived the biggest earthquake ever measured. The deaths in the area came later, during the tsunami that followed the quake.

Testimony from survivors of the 1960 tsunami in Hilo also demonstrate that survival depends at least as much on public education as it does on mechanical warning devices.

There was plenty of time for evacuation in Hilo, Hawaii, as the Chilean tsunami raced across the Pacific Ocean on May 22, 1960. At 6:47 p.m. Hawaiian time, the U.S. Coast and Geodetic Survey issued an official warning that waves were expected to reach Hilo at about midnight. Around 8:30 p.m., coastal sirens in Hilo sounded and continued to sound intermittently for 20 minutes.

When the first wave, only a few feet high, arrived just after midnight, hundreds of people were still at home on low ground in Hilo. Others, thinking that the danger had passed, returned to Hilo before the highest wave of the tsunami struck at 1:04 a.m. on May 23. One of those who came back too soon was 16-year-old Carol Brown.

Carol was at her family’s house on low ground in Hilo when the warning sirens sounded. Carol’s parents took valuables to a relative’s house in Papa‘ikou, a few miles northwest of Hilo, while Carol and her brother Ernest checked on a niece who was babysitting outside of town.

Later, Carol and Ernest returned to Hilo after hearing on the radio that tsunami waves had already come into town and were only 7 feet high. On the way back, they met a police officer who told them that the danger had passed. Carol and Ernest went to a sister’s house in a low part of town. Around 1:00 a.m., they began to hear a low rumbling noise that soon became louder and was accompanied by sounds of crashing and crunching. Moments later, a wall of water hit the house, floating it off its foundation. When the house came to rest, Hilo was dark because the powerplant had been knocked out by the same wave.

Carol and her family survived the 1960 Chilean tsunami without serious injury. However, 61 other people in Hilo died and another 282 were badly hurt. These losses occurred, in part, because the warning sirens in Hilo on the evening of May 22, 1960, were interpreted differently by different people. Although nearly everyone heard the sirens, only about a third of them thought it was a signal to evacuate without further notice. Most thought it was only a preliminary warning to be followed later by an evacuation signal. Others in Hilo were unsure of how seriously to take the warnings, because several previous alerts had been followed by tsunamis that did little damage.

Read the whole thing. It’s well written and chock full of informative graphs, maps, photos, and testimony from survivors in Chile, Hawai‘i, and Japan. It also includes a long list of survival tips.