Category Archives: Hawaii( ハワイ）

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) Most junior high and high school students of my era held part-time jobs. Some worked at supermarkets as bag boys, others worked at the local hotels as porters and such. In my case, in addition to working in the Hotel Maintenance Department, our local Nikkei kumiai asked me to take care of the Japanese Immigrant Cemetery on contract.   You might think that taking care of a cemetery would be the last job a person who can see ghosts would want to take, but I’d never seen a ghost there and it was close to my home, so I readily accepted.   The kumiai would pay me a flat fee per month for maintenance and would pay extra for whatever herbicide costs I incurred.   I would go to the cemetery after school and spray […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) When I was about four or five years old, I began to have a recurrent dream of a naked young woman in her late teens. The dream would reoccur at least once a week and there wasn’t a week that went by when I didn’t have the dream. In my dream, the woman was always sitting or standing by the same low waterfall and I could vividly see the water-worn stones in the water and around the waterfall. The dreams came regularly for years until one day when I was in 7th grade, my close friend invited me to go and stay with him for a week at his uncle’s place in Waipio Valley. In those days, Waipio Valley was extremely isolated and very few people got to go there, so I was quite fortunate […]