Densho Digital Repository - Katsugo Miho Interview II (Densho ID: ddr-densho-1022-2-9)

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MN: And just so that we don't leave any pukas in the record, I'm going to keep you still in your childhood. And I remember at one time, off-tape, you were telling us that your family served meals at the Miho Hotel that weren't served elsewhere. Like your father and mother were instrumental in serving namako?

KM: Namako, yes. My dad and I, we used to go harvesting and picking cucumbers, sea cucumbers, down at the breakwater. The Pier 1 breakwater had... and I don't know how he found out about it, but these things have to have clear water and things. So I used to go picking with him. And then my mother started to feed special guests the namako. Not to everybody, but then it started to get to everybody want to get a taste of the namako and became very common... not common. The other thing that my dad also, so-called, introduced was that, out in Paia, and it has to be a certain, where the wind surfing is now very popular, that beach.

WN: Hookipa.

KM: Yeah, Hookipa. There's a spot over there that, I don't know how my dad discovered, but nori grows on that rough wind-blown, strong waves. Because there have to be a combination of fresh water, underwater, usually underwater, underground river, fresh water that mixes with the salt water and certain conditions allow for this Japan-type nori to grow on the rocks. But to get there is a scary thing because I used to go and scrape off, you have to scrape off the nori from the rocks with a scraper. Usually we used to go before New Year's because it was an additive for the ozoni, this fresh nori. In Japan, how they would cultivate it, the nori would grow on the strings and you just scrape it off the strings. But that grew in Hookipa, in that area. Only one spot on Maui, as far as I know. Unfortunately, a whole bunch of other people found out about it years later. I don't know if today there's still any more nori over there because they overcultivated it. But it was really good nori.

WN: It's like an algae then, yeah?

KM: It is, that's what it is. Seaweed is algae, basically.

WN: But the fresh water mixing with the salt water.

KM: They had to have certain combination of this fresh water, and the waves. It has to be wet and dry at certain times.

MN: So your family would serve namako, the seaweed that you would go and get. And what other services did they give to the clientele? The meals were served?

KM: Well, basically, it was Hiroshima dishes because my mother was from Hiroshima. But I don't know how they were able to get the ingredients, but that's where these so-called salesmen from Honolulu would come to sell to the Maui merchants like Onishi Store and whatnot, Kobayashi Store. Sumida, Fujii Junichi, were Japanese products. Those days the basic Japanese ingredients were from these stores.