UNiVERSITY OF HAWAI'I LIBRARY AN ORAL HISTORY OF THE APRIL 1, 1946 TSUNAMI AT LAUPAHOEHOE, HAWAl'!: A CASE STUDY IN THE EDUCATIVE VALUE OF CONSTRUCTING HISTORY FROM MEMORY AND NARRATIVE A DISSERTATION SUBMlTTED TO THE GRADUATE DIVISION OF THE UNIVERSITY OF HAWAl'I IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN EDUCATION DECEMBER 2002 By Warren S. Nishimoto Dissertation Committee: Eileen H Tamura, Chairperson Gay Garland Reed Joarme E. Cooper Donna Grace Paul F. Hooper © 2002, Warren S, Nishimoto III To Michi Kodama-Nishimoto IV ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I am greatly indebted to many individuals, without whose help and support I could not have researched and written this study. A heartfelt mahalo goes to the members of my dissertation committee, chair Eileen Tamura, Gay Garland Reed, Joanne Cooper, Donna Grace and Paul Hooper, who willingly gave a great deal of their time and expertise to help me make sense out of my often disjointed ideas. In addition, I would like to acknowledge the following scholars at the University of Hawai'i who provided me with intellectual stimulation as both mentors and colleagues as I progressed in my doctoral studies: Linda Menton, Royal Fruehling, David Ericson, Allen Awaya, Yoshimitsu Takei, Edward Beauchamp, Ronald Heck, Craig Howes, Glen Grant, William Chapman, and Vicky Rosser. My many colleagues, past and present, at the University of Hawai'i's Center for Oral History, especially Cynthia Oshiro, Holly Yamada, and Chad Taniguchi, deserve special mention for helping me deal with the many complicated twists and turns associated with oral history research and interviewing. Michael Hamnett, director of the Social Science Research Institute, was unwavering in his support. I also would like to thank officials and present and former staff members of the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo, particularly Jeanne Johnston, Walter Dudley, Donna Saiki, Robert "Steamy" Chow, and Susan Tissot, for conceiving and supporting the oral history project which forms the basis of this study. v My brother, C.T. Nishimoto, helped me organize my thoughts and forced me to think things out before plunging ahead. My parents, Yoshiko and Tsuyoshi Nishimoto, parents-in-law, Arthur and Hideko Kodama, aunt Chiyo Iida, friend and jogging partner Brent Watanabe, sons Ben and Scott Nishimoto, and four-legged companion, Tygerr, all deserve warm mention for providing me with the emotional tools with which to undertake and complete my doctoral studies. And, most of all, I proudly acknowledge six individuals who played immense roles throughout my doctoral studies. Five of them, Marsue McShane, Herbert Nishimoto, Albert Stanley, Bunji Fujimoto, and Masuo Kino, were interviewees whose vast knowledge, generosity, and friendship I shall never forget. The sixth and most significant is Michi Kodama-Nishimoto, scholar, mentor, colleague, motivator, critic and loving partner both at home and work. I dedicate this study to her. Vl ABSTRACT The tsunami of April I, 1946 was the deadliest natural disaster in the history of modern Hawai'i. Of the 159 casualties in the islands, twenty-four died at Laupahoehoe, a sugar plantation community on Hawai'i island. This study presents and analyzes oral history narratives of five survivors and eyewitnesses. In one-to-one interviews, four students and one teacher of Laupahoehoe School recalled their early life experiences, as well as what they saw and heard that moming in 1946; how and why they reacted to the unfolding drama the way they did; and how the events of that day affected them to the present. The oral histories are examined through two lenses. First, as living historical documents, they reveal a human side of the tragedy, a side often overlooked by researchers pre-occupied with statistical and scientific explanations. Documenting people's life experiences and values, the oral histories provide us with knowledge and understanding of tsunamis from humanistic as well as scientific perspectives. Second, as case studies, the interview narratives reflect oral history's role in an emerging trend in social science research, in which the process of gathering data is almost as closely analyzed as the data itself. This study examines memory, or how and why we recall life experiences; narrative, or how and why we tell stories about what we remember; and history, or how and why we preserve these stories for present and future generations. Oral history involves an interviewee/narrator who, in a conversational, question-and-answer setting with an interviewer/researcher, recalls Vll details of hislher life experiences. The interviews are recorded, processed, preserved, and transmitted in various formats for posterity. This examination of oral history, or the "alchemy" of transmuting memory into history, demonstrates its educative role to all involved in the process: the interviewee/narrator, who has lived through and rememhers hislher life experiences; the interviewer/researcher, who collaborates with the interviewee/narrator to construct historical narratives; and present and future generations of scholars, students, and the lay community, who will utilize the narratives as primary accounts about the past. Vl11 TABLE OF CONTENTS Acknowledgments v Abstract va Chapter 1: Introduction 1 Chapter 2: The Beginnings and Evolution ofOral History 7 Chapter 3: Memory, Narrative, and History: Critical Elements in the Construction and Transmission ofExperience 16 Chapter 4: Interviewing Survivors and Eyewitnesses ofthe 1946 Tsunami on Hawai'i Island 29 Chapter 5: The Historical Context.. 38 Chapter 6: "There's No Plan, There's Just Coincidence" Marsue McGinnis McShane 50 Chapter 7: "To Me, It's Survival ofthe Fittest" Herbert Nishimoto 88 Chapter 8: "Good God, What is That?" Albert Stanley ......... 109 Chapter 9: "What, No Water in the Ocean? April Fool!" Bunji Fujimoto 131 Chapter 10: "1 Was Sixteen But 1 Guess 1Knew What Mortality Meant" Masuo Kino 158 Chapter 11: Analysis ofthe Case Study: The Educative Value ofOral History 186 Chapter 12: Conclusion 215 Bibliography .. 219 IX CHAPTER 1 INTRODUCTION "On a Monday morning, was April 1, we got on the bus, same as usual As we hit the cliffabove Laupahoehoe' where we could see the [Laupahoehoe1 Point, the guys in the front of the bus started, 'Eh, no water in the ocean, no water in the ocean!' They all excited. 1 said, 'What, no water in the ocean? April Fool's, ' we're saying. We always sitting in the back, 'April Fool, April Fool!' 'No,' they said, 'not April Fool,' kept insisting. So we looked out, and sure enough, we saw the water pulling out. So we looked, and okay, it's funny, but nobody knew what it was. It was unusual, something different. "There were a lot ofstudents out in the park area and out by the edge ofthe ocean. I think some ofthem said they went walking down to the shoreline. Myself, I told some people, 'Let's go down, take a look. ' We went down to the middle ofthe school, the school playground. We were watching, the water pulled out quite a bit, and that preceded the next wave. Again, 1 wasn't able to see them, but some of the guys close to the edge ofthe bank were saying they could see fish flopping around in the rocks, where normally there's water. Us, we couldn't see that, but we could see that the ocean was kind ofbare. Where there's supposed to be water, you could see only rocks. Then the waves started coming back in after it receded out so much. To me, wasn't anything to panic about because it wasn't a rolling kind ofhuge wave that you see or imagine later on. "The guys who were close to the edge of the water were standing there watching. And 1 guess they realized before us that the wave wasn't normal, it was too big. So they started running. We knew we were in trouble, we better run. Fortunately, we were close enough to high ground that we just turned around and ran. In running, 1 heard a cracking sound in the back, that was the baseball-we used to call it the grandstand, the bleachers. And the big thing was cracking and the thing just collapsed. 1 remember one face running in front of that, he was one of the basketball players. They used to tease him all the time, big guy, slow, see? But later on they were teasing him. 'We never see you run so fast. ' But he was running, he was making it. That's one face 1 remember that morning." 'Diacritical marks such as macrons and glottal stops will be used for all Hawaiian words and place names in this study. Exceptions are made for written direct quotes and titles of publications not containing the marks. I This account of the April I, 1946 tsunami at Laupiihoehoe, Hawai' i island, was remembered and told by longtime resident Bunji Fujimoto in a tape-recorded oral history interview which took place on July 10, 1998. Fujimoto was taking part in an oral history project I designed focusing on personal recollections of survivors and eyewitnesses of the deadliest natural disaster in the history of modern Hawai' i. 2 The result of the collaboration between Fujimoto and me was a historical narrative, constructed for the educative benefit of present and future generations who most likely have never seen nor heard of a tsunami. Although Fujimoto survived the deadly waves, his younger brother, Toshiaki, was one of 24 people in Laupiihoehoe, and of 159 killed in the territory of Hawai'i that morning. Fujimoto was one of five individuals interviewed in this study. In their seventies at the time of the interviews, the five--four students and one teacher of Laupiihoehoe School--were asked to recall many and varied aspects of their life histories: childhood, schooling, and work experiences prior to the tsunami; who and what they saw and heard the morning of April I, 1946; how and why they reacted to the waves the way they did; and how the events of that day affected them to the present day.