Tag Archives: ハワイ島

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) I went to a public high school in Hawaii. Our schools are quite different from Japanese high schools which tend to offer either a college prep or vocational curriculum.   For example, I took 4 years of agriculture classes, 4 years of auto mechanics, 2 years of sheet metal and welding and 1 year of photography in addition to college prep classes like French, biology, math, literature and so on. I also took the driver’s education course to get cheaper car insurance (the driver’s license age then was 15.)   I played on the school basketball team for a half-year, which was my biggest mistake in high school, since it took up so much time and kept me from practicing the judo and karate that I enjoyed.   As for school clubs, I was in […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) My best friend and I both had to work the day after our high school graduation, so we couldn’t attend any of the many graduation parties that our classmates held afterwards. The two of us decided that we’d celebrate on the two days I could get off from my part-time job. My friend worked on his dad’s farm and their peak harvest would be over by then.   We borrowed his dad’s 4WD truck and rented a cabin in the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. We arrived there in the afternoon, grilled some steaks and killed the bottle of whiskey he’d swiped from his home.   Early the next morning we headed out to the slopes of Mauna Kea to play in the snow near the summit. We parked near the summit and got out and […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) In my youth, when coffee farming was still going strong in Kona, most farmers processed the fresh red coffee beans, which were referred to as “cherry” coffee due to their color, to the dried stage termed “parchment” in accordance with the paper like covering surrounding the coffee beans in order to get more money for their product. The coffee beans which had had their outer pulp removed were dried on the roofs of the coffee farmer’s houses. The corrugated iron roof was mounted on rollers and a support frame on stilts extended beyond the roof to hold it up while it was away from what would normally form the ceiling of the house.   A husking machine was used to remove the pulp from the red coffee beans and the slimy beans were put into […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) I wrote about the misfortunes that befall visitors who steal rocks from Pele in “Leave the Rocks in Hawaii!” Well, there’s another gentler and kinder side to this Hawaiian goddess that just about everyone in Hawaii knows about.   Here is an account that I heard from many local people. Having watched the business thrive from when I was in elementary school, I have no doubts as to its accuracy.   It seems that the owner of a small retail business (I’ll omit the name here, but I’m sure that anyone in Kona would know the business if I mentioned it) was driving home at night from Hilo to South Kona. Somewhere around Manuka, he saw an old woman in a white dress walking along the deserted highway. Wondering what the woman was doing out […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) One of the things you never, never want to do is to try to take rocks (including sand) off the Big Island. Each year the Hawaii Volcanoes National Park receives packages and letters from people who have been foolish enough to do so, begging them to return the rocks. Many of the letters describe the misfortunes and bad luck that plagued the thieves after they took the rocks home with them. Broken bones, traffic accidents, loss of jobs… The reason for this is Hawaii’s Volcano Goddess Pele. She hates it when people take her property out of her territory and curses the luckless soul stupid enough to steal from her. 石をハワイに残しましょう！   ハワイ島では絶対にしてはいけないことは、石（砂も含む）盗みです。 毎年、ハワイ火山国立公園には石泥棒から石の入った小包が続々と届けられます。石と共に、石を盗んでからの不運な骨折、交通事故、失業等々の説明文も…殆どにはお詫びと石を元の場所に戻す依頼が含まれています。 不運の理由は『ペレ』というハワイの火山の女神です。彼女は自分の国から石を盗み出すのが大嫌いで、泥棒に呪いをかけます。 By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) Books published by AELS (AELS出版書籍) 魔女学院＆光塾：魔女ガールズの冒険 原作＆翻訳：ビレー　ハモンド 日本語編集：伊庭野れい子 Majoh Gakuin & Hikari Juku – Japanese […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) The Hawaiian dish called the “Loco Moco” made it to Japan a few years back. I was surprised to find a shop in a mall food court specializing in it. The taste was pretty close to what I was used to eating in Hilo, where the Loco Moco is said to have originated, but it wasn’t quite the same. The gravy was an attempt at gravy that didn’t quite make it. The original Loco Moco gravy was thick, viscous and had a heavy-duty, almost fatty taste.   Basically it’s one or two scoops of rice with a hamburger patty and a sunny-side up egg on it drowned in gravy. It’s quite filling and the original required a pretty good stomach to handle the oily gravy. We used to joke, “I gotta loco mocate my bowels […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) Hawaii is full of haunted buildings and places. One of them is the UH Hilo Hale Kanilehua (“House of the Sound of the Rain Falling on the Lehua Blossom”(1).   Way back in the 1970s my cousin was a resident there when it was still a women’s dorm as were several classmates from my high school.   Gossip about the ghosts there was widespread and there was a story about the dorm being built on the site of a house where a young boy had died. My cousin and friends told me about the voices they would hear in the middle of the night. One of them was a child’s whisper and the other was a woman who sometimes screamed. According to them the halls in the dorm were unnaturally cold and poltergeist phenomena such […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) If you’re part of the younger generation, you might be surprised to hear that there were authentic Japanese furo baths in Hawaii in use up until around the early 1980s.   When I was growing up, most of the older homes had a wood-heated furo, which would be called a “Goemonburo” in Japan. One of the after-school chores my sister and I faced was to wrap the wood piled up in the coffee orchard in burlap coffee bags and to carry it home for furo kindling.   The furo at my grandparents place was located in a separate building enclosed with corrugated roof iron. The furo itself was a redwood rectangle with a copper bottom floor surrounded by concrete, which formed the fire chamber under it and supported the furo (hint: think of a wooden […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) Public water didn’t become available in some areas until the 1960s and even then, the remote areas still weren’t served by a water line. Most families relied on catchment rain water collected in wooden tanks built on stilts, which was probably to help them survive Hawaii’s earthquakes. Some of the water was used for flush toilets but in general, most houses had dry toilets located a short distance from the main home, often with a fig tree planted near it (which is often the case in the country in Japan as well).   Even the elementary school I went to had a row of dry toilets located above the school, although the kindergarten had a flush toilet. This changed during my elementary school years when the school got hooked up to County water.   The […]

By Billy Hammond (Copyright AELS) I’ve always been able to see ghosts and spirits, but usually they’re pretty obvious and have features that alert me to their ethereal states. The following case was an exception.   I was a freshman in college driving home late at night from Hilo to Kona for the weekend. It was probably close to midnight when I reached the turnoff to Hakalau about fifteen minutes out of Hilo. There was a lone streetlamp lighting the turnoff and I saw an old man wearing khaki clothes and what appeared to be black riding boots standing in its light. He was wearing a pith helmet. I recall thinking at the time, “This old guy’s out really late at night. He probably has dementia and wandered off. I hope somebody comes and gets him soon.”   I continued driving […]