<Begin Segment 12>

JH: That particular day is worse than World War II, I think, as far as Hilo is concerned. He was going to open on April 1, 1946. I never knew where that shop was. Because when my uncle came down with the car from where he lived, which is Kaumana Five Miles on the Big Island, he had, he looked... you can't help but see the bay because you're coming down. And he told us that the bay was completely empty, no water. So he stopped by where our old library was, which is next to this bridge, Wailuku Bridge is what we called it. Got out of the car and went to watch. Then the first huge tsunami came in and took away this railroad bridge. They used to use this bridge transport for sugar cane. So that bridge got washed out. And Hawaiians are superstitious. I mean, they have a lot of tales, but there's this huge rock in Wailuku River, and the Hawaiians always say, "If that rock gets covered, there is a lot of big trouble that's gonna happen." Well, that first wave covered it. So my uncle got into the car, came to where we were, and I'm washing dishes 'cause I'm getting ready for school, I was in the fourth grade. And my mother was standing -- I remember her first language was Japanese even though she's Nisei. So he came walking around the corner, 'cause we were living in the basement. And then she took one look at him and she says, he looked funny, she said. But what he said was, "Tsunami ga kita." And I'm looking at him and I'm saying, "What's tsunami?" And he's trying to describe it to my mother, "Good April Fool, no?" [Laughs] So we got in the car, and they were going to drop me off at school. But as we went down from my, on Lei Street and turned where my elementary school was, you could see this pond called Wailoa pond. And there were rooftops everywhere with people standing on it. So I said, "Uh-uh, I'm not getting off." So we went into Hilo town, and he parked the car across from the police station thinking that, "Oh, well, it'll be safe for us there." So we stayed in the car while they just dashed every which way. He must have gone to see whether his shop was still there. And no, everything was washed away.

MA: So the tsunami came and basically destroyed the town?

JH: It was three big tsunamis. They had little ones in between, but the third wave was the largest. Because we were in town, and facing the ocean, my sisters and I were like this watching out of the rear window. And I remember seeing this bus that was kitty-corner, and this guy goes in there. And then there's this house, two-story business underneath, living quarters upstairs, and he was shouting to all these people. Because Hilo opens early and shuts early, so it must have been about eight o'clock in the morning. Everybody's standing right here around the, and up like this and they're yelling at each other. And as they're doing that, I notice that this huge wall of water was coming. I'd never seen anything like that. So it lifted the house up, and the house floated away Telephone pole fell down, it went over that bus, and I always end up telling everybody that was the first marathon I ever saw. And they all ran uphill, and women wore heels in those days. I never saw so many people running up that hill. But that was the one that did the most damage, that third one.

MA: And so I imagine it pretty much destroyed large parts of Hilo, right?

JH: Oh, it took away the waterfront portion of Hilo, yeah, all of it. And then I had spent the weekend at this place called Shinmachi, which means "new town." It was like a Japanese tenement area. Lot of Japanese people lived there, and they had shops in front. One side's the ocean, the other side's Wailoa River and the pond. So I would have been there had it not been a weekday. Because I went to see my surrogate big sister's family, who was very close to us, the Odachis. And the three of us were there. My youngest sister was only three years old, so Mrs. Odachi said, "Why don't you stay over?" And then she thought about it and she said, "Nah, there's not going to be anybody there. Everybody's going to school."

MA: So did your family friends, were they okay?

JH: They were all okay. Luckily, when the wave came, the first wave came, it swept them into the Wailoa pond. And the pond isn't that deep; I didn't realize that the pond was not deep. I thought it was very deep. Now, the youngest in the family was a boy, and he couldn't swim. Mother couldn't swim, but they lived in that Tennrikyo temple. And then they had a bachelor that lived underneath, because her husband had died. And when that wave came in, there were people waiting outside, across from the ocean, and noticed that the ocean was getting, there was no ocean, in other words. And they saw fish flopping all over the place. So being April 1st, though, they never thought about it. They ran in, and then tried to warn their parents and tell them, "There's no water in the bay." And then the first wave came. So we lived with the tsunami survivors, because my father's business was taken away. So we lived with them in this old Japanese school, language school, called Dokuritsu Gakkou. And the classrooms were our apartments. And I got to learn a lot about what had happened to all of 'em. It was really sad. And there were others that had temporary housing near what we called Hoolulu Park. It was for horse racing or for other uses, recreational use. There were barracks around there that soldiers had used before. So a lot of the Shinmachi people managed to get a barrack home there, including the Odachis.

<End Segment 12> - Copyright © 2009 Densho. All Rights Reserved.