Souvenir Stories, Hawaii

I travel with a book. The book weighs 25 pounds, it has 125,284 names listed, in three columns, across 1000 chronological pages. Families come to stamp names in this book as a way of remembering loved ones.

Each town this book visits is different. The people are different, the buildings are different, the food is different. My task is to take visitors through the process with the book and release them back to the wild. Each day I volunteer I spend 12 hours walking 17,721 steps in a 2,000 foot route pushing 50 families through this pipe.

I use a metric of success called T.T.C. (Time To Cry) measuring how quickly a family will cry as I complete my task. In Mānoa a lady arrived in tears, sobbing all the way through. She was a very good T.T.C. However, most Hawaiians are “laughers” they combat sadness with jokes. It ruins my T.T.C. score. It also makes it hard to churn them through the pipe.

The pipe consists of phases: sign in, get your list of names, get your parking validation, wait for orientation, get oriented, wait for book, stamp name(s) in book, sign memento cards, leave. Laughers want to joke at each stop. Jokes require setup, punchline, reaction, (optional) commentary. This adds multiplication to the pipe. The bigger the family, the louder the pain, the more jokes. More hanging out before they can start. More comments during orientation. More photos with the book. More stories at the memento cards.

Crying people do not futz. Tears have a singular phase that requires no further explanation. Jokes hold in the air waiting for acknowledgement.

“Why do you always look so angry?”

“If I smile they think I want to answer questions, and this whole thing slows down.”

In Japan in 1868, Tokugawa shogun overthrew Meiji and began to modernize Japan. One of the side effects was higher taxes, and the "Gannenmono" came to Hawai'i looking for work.

Hawai'i's population was 40% Japanese when the bombs fell. In cities like Los Angeles and Seattle Japanese Americans were herded into horse stables, their homes sold, and their belongings thrown away.

In Hawai'i there was no place to incarcerate half the island, so they rounded up religious leaders, politicians, and people of importance and put them in camp with Japanese POWs. After the war, some Japanese Americans burned their heritage. Anything that made them seem un-American became calcined. It takes a long time for a hurt like that to heal.

One survivor was telling me about using mallets to pound mochi. He says he still does it, but slower now. He is older than my father in-law. At home we use a machine to steam the rice and turn it into dough. This man, maybe in his 90s, still uses a wooden mallet, rhythmically turning the rice by hand before the next mallet drops. In Japan there are 3,500 mochi-related deaths a year. I imagine him smoking a cigar and laughing as he makes mochi–mocking death.

Every store in Waikiki seems to have two names. One in English and another in Katakana. Baskin Robbins is "サーティワン" (31) because of all those flavors. A sign for Hertz Rental car says "レンタカー" (rental car) because Hertz is not a bragging point.

At Fujiyama Texas, they have two menus. Kushi-Katsu for dinner and set plates for after midnight when you are too drunk to both make decisions and remember them. Here they have hand calligraphy kanji messages posted on the walls like paper amulets trying to keep out evil spirits. Each with auspicious phrases like "we serve authentic Japanese mustards" and "raw octopus with wasabi available here" secrets written in kanji that the wide-eyed tourist need never know.

The curio shop at JCCH houses donated items. Figurines carved from coconuts in Okinawa. Ornate sets of plates and glasses, in an age of IKEA. Display sets of Girl's Day dolls (Hina-ninjyo) waiting for little girls to put down their phones. Grandmother's beautiful ceramic hashioki for sale in a country of forks and steak knives. Tea sets available for a generation that drinks tea from boba straws. Silk Yukata in every color and pattern waiting to become a bathrobe. Daruma with one eye filled to mark the start of a goal and the other eye left eternally blind.

On the last day there was an art fair. Tables laying full with variable interest:

• $75 mahjong set—the kind with the nice two toned thick tiles that from the side look like sushi. 1970s. Never used. Original pleather case. With Instructions.
• $5 sakura mochi waffles with a fried exterior crunch into a jaw massaging chewy delight. Neon pink. Served in a brown paper coffee filter.
• $9 for real matcha tea whisked using a real bamboo chasen held by a real teenage hand. Strawberry jam sleeping at the bottom of a clear plastic cup. Topped with oat milk foam.
• $10 unboxed Minecraft Lego mini-figure. Iron golem with the vine painted on it. Moderate use. Ziplock bag.

No art.

Poke, the national food of the islands, is served atop five pounds of rice. Loco Moco is a hamburger patty with a fried egg and gravy on three pounds of rice. Every meal comes with rice by the pound. The bus fare was paid in rice. Our hotel pillows were bags of rice. It rained all week because god was rinsing his rice.

Waited in line two hours for shave ice in Waikiki. No regrets.

When you volunteer, people bring you food. The softest dango the world has ever known, it feels like a cloud and melts in the mouth. Malasadas from Leonard's bakery, Hawaii's Statue of Liberty, malasadas welcome all and bring hope to the weary. Co-Co puffs from Liliha Bakery, reality bending shu-pasteries, with a hat of buttery caramel goodness, layers of textures and flavor ensuring each bite is a different journey. Everything here is addictive.

Got into an argument about calling it "shaved" ice and not properly saying "shave" ice. The man points to the sign on the street: shave Ice. I point to the sign in the window: shaved ice. The battle was lost on both fronts.

Slept for 30 hours.