Oral History Project

Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project
Dennis Kawaharada

Interview of Dennis Kawaharada (DK), conducted by Donald Carreira Ching (DCC) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project via Zoom, on May 10, 2023. Dennis speaks of his childhood, his education, the history of anti-Japanese sentiment in post-WWII Hawai‘i, the emergence and development of an authentic local literature, and his time as managing editor of Bamboo Ridge and as the editor of Kalamakū Press. Dennis also recalls Stephen Sumida, Milton Murayama, Rodney Morales, Esther Mookini, Haunani K. Trask, and others.

The following oral history transcript is the result of a recorded interview with Dennis Kawaharada (DK) on May 10, 2023. The interview took place via Zoom, and was conducted by Donald Carreira Ching (DCC) for the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. This interview is the first session of two.

Dennis Kawaharada and Donald Carreira Ching have reviewed the transcript and made their corrections and emendations. This transcript has been edited for readability by the Bamboo Ridge Oral History Project. The reader should bear in mind that they are reading a transcript of spoken, rather than written, prose.

DCC: What was it like for you growing up and how did place shape your identity?

DK: I had a happy childhood, very well taken care of by my dad and mom. We lived in a multiethnic neighborhood in Kāne‘ohe and played games with the kids, climbed mango and guava trees, explored the streams and countryside. Once I started at Ben Parker Elementary, I made new friends, and we played at each other’s houses.

DCC: What neighborhood?

DK: Kea‘ahala Road, during the ’50s. I wrote about those days in “Mango Trees on Kea‘ahala Road,” an essay I published in Local Geography: Essays on Multicultural Hawai‘i, 2004.

DCC: Did you always live in Kāne‘ohe?

DK: I was born on Guam in 1951 because after the war, my father, who grew up on Maui and graduated from an engineering college in Milwaukee, couldn’t find a job here when he returned. He took a job on Guam with the Civil Aeronautics Administration, which is now the FAA. We spent two years there, then moved back to Hawai‘i. In 1954, my mom, who grew up in Hilo, got a job at the Territorial Hospital, now the State Hospital, on Kea‘ahala Road, so we moved there from Maui, where we were living with my dad’s family after we returned from Guam.

DCC: What was that like going from Guam to here?

DK: I don’t remember Guam at all. My mom kept some photos of those days. In one, my favorite, I’m sitting in a pool of seawater on a rocky beach, sucking on a clamshell.

DCC: Did you see a lot of changes as you were growing up in Kāne‘ohe?

DK: Kāne‘ohe was becoming a suburb of Honolulu, with more houses and less farms, pastures, and bushes. After we rented a house on Kea‘ahala Road for eight years, my mom got a better-paying job as chief dietitian at Children’s Hospital in Nu‘uanu, so my parents bought a house in a subdivision. I remember driving through the Pali tunnel and the Wilson Tunnel when they opened in the early ’60s to help with the commute to Honolulu.

While researching the history of Kāne‘ohe for my mom’s biography, I wondered why the tunnel was named after Mayor John Wilson, so I read Bob Krauss’s biography of him. Wilson was one of the Hawaiian leaders who was supportive of the Japanese in Hawai‘i, calling them “my American brothers” in the 1920s, when other politicians, including Prince Kūhiō, were accusing Japanese plantation workers of plotting to take over Hawai‘i for Japan. Wilson was a founder of the Democratic Party in Hawai‘i, at a time when the white oligarchy and Republicans controlled the government and economy. I’m surprised that Wilson isn’t more widely known in the Japanese community because he backed them up, as John Burns, the first Democratic governor of Hawai‘i, did later.

DCC: Was resentment against the Japanese something you felt when you were younger, or was that something you realized when you were older?

DK: I felt the resentment while growing up, but didn’t know the roots of it. I did research to learn about its historical roots. The anti-Japanese movement began after America and Japan signed a treaty allowing Japanese immigration to America. When Japanese immigrants began settling on the West Coast, nativists, farmers, workers, and politicians viewed the Japanese as inferior and unassimilable to the American way of life. In 1907–1908, the U.S. banned new Japanese workers from coming. Local governments on the West Coast passed alien land laws that prohibited the Japanese from buying or leasing land. In 1922, the Supreme Court ruled that Japanese immigrants weren’t eligible to become naturalized U.S. citizens. In 1924, Congress passed a total ban on Japanese immigration. The anti-Japanese movement was an extension of the Chinese exclusion movement that began in the mid-nineteenth century when Chinese workers began arriving; the opposition culminated in a total ban on Chinese immigration in 1882.

In Hawai‘i, initially, the Japanese were welcomed. King Kalākaua went to Japan to ask Emperor Meiji to allow the Japanese to come and settle and work on the sugar plantations. Before that time the Japanese government had banned its citizens from leaving the country, but Meiji realized Japan needed foreign capital to industrialize and militarize to defend themselves against colonization by the West, so he allowed his surplus workers to emigrate to Hawai‘i. Actually the Kingdom of Hawai‘i and Japan were in similar circumstances back then, fearing for the loss of their sovereignty, so when Kalākaua went to Japan he proposed that they form an alliance of Asian-Pacific nations to defend their sovereignties against the West and against America.

The anti-Japanese movement began in Hawai‘i when the Japanese plantation workers went on strikes for better pay and living conditions. White plantation owners and their allies began spreading rumors that the Japanese wanted to take over Hawai‘i. They were upset that the Japanese didn’t want to remain on the plantations or as servants of wealthy white and hapa-haole families. They also didn’t want the Japanese to compete with haoles or Hawaiians for jobs in the trades, business, government work, and the professions. The wealthy plantation owners viewed the economy as a zero-sum game—whatever the Japanese workers gained, those above them would lose.

In 1921 a Congressional hearing was held on the labor shortage in Hawaiʻi after Japanese and other workers left the plantations after the 1920 strike was broken. The anti-Japanese contingent representing plantation owners from Hawai‘i demonized the Japanese and claimed they were a political threat in the islands. It wanted Congress to approve a five-year exemption for Hawai‘i’s plantations to contract 30,000 Chinese workers to replace the Japanese workers. Not that the planters wanted Chinese to settle in Hawai‘i; they wanted to send the Chinese back to China after five years, during which time, they told Congress, they would recruit enough white workers to make Hawai‘i white.

The executive secretary for the Hawai‘i Sugar Plantation Association told Congress, “the Territory of Hawai‘i is now and is going to be American; it is going to remain American under any condition and we are going to control the situation out there. […] I do not think there is any contest as to who shall dominate; the white race, the white people, the Americans in Hawai‘i are going to dominate and will continue to dominate.”

Nothing came of that plan. Contract labor was illegal when Hawai‘i became a U.S. Territory, and Congress was loath to allow new Chinese workers into America after having banned them in 1882.

Then in 1941, Japan went to war with the U.S. over control of East and Southeast Asia. Japan had decided it had to build an empire to defend its sovereignty against European powers and prevent what happened to China from happening to Japan. After Japan delivered the first strike at Pearl Harbor, anti-Japanese hysteria in the U.S. was rampant and everyone of Japanese ancestry on the West Coast was expelled from designated national security zones, even though there was never a threat that Japan would invade the West Coast or Hawaiʻi. Japan didn’t have the resources to do that. It attacked Pearl Harbor to disable the U.S. Pacific fleet, so that it couldn’t interfere with its invasion and colonization of Asia.

J. Edgar Hoover, the director of the FBI, knew the relocation of the West Coast residents of Japanese ancestry was a waste of time and resources and opposed it. For several years before the war, the FBI had investigated the Japanese in Hawai‘i and on the West Coast and found no plots of espionage and sabotage to aid an invasion. But politicians like FDR needed scapegoats to blame for the Pearl Harbor debacle, which resulted from a failure of U.S. intelligence to detect the attack before it occurred, even though they knew the attack was coming.

In Hawai‘i, a multiethnic coalition supported the Japanese community and opposed mass incarceration on Moloka‘i or on the continent, which Roosevelt and other leaders were proposing. Like Mayor Wilson and John Burns, who was a captain in the police department at the time and in charge of investigating the Japanese community, the coalition members knew that the Japanese were loyal U.S. residents and citizens. The coalition later formed the Democratic Party that took over the state government after the war.

After Pearl Harbor, only leaders of the Japanese community, mainly first-generation immigrants, were arrested, without any evidence that they were disloyal. They were designated enemy aliens at mock hearings and sent to prison on the continent for the duration of the war. My mom’s father was among those arrested and imprisoned for four years.

My dad’s father was arrested and jailed, but released after seven months. The white manager of the pineapple cannery across the street from his restaurant vouched for his loyalty. The cannery needed him to keep his restaurant open to feed its workers breakfast and lunch. The U.S. marines from Camp Haiku also ate at the Kawaharada Restaurant. Grandpa had to report on his daily activities to the cannery manager.

The resentment I felt in the community while growing up was the residual of anti-Japanese sentiments that lingered into the ’50s and beyond. No one explained the history to me at the time, although I knew it had something to do with the war since we used to watch World War II movies on TV that demonized the Japanese.

DCC: Is there a specific moment where that was crystalized for you?

DK: Well, the resentment wasn’t from the majority. Most families were open and friendly, and it wasn’t a problem to go over to their houses to play with the kids; a few were resentful or standoffish. There was some resentment in public schools toward middle-class Japanese students who did well academically. In high school, the resentment was sometimes just talk; every now and then someone got beaten up, mainly for stuff like someone supposedly talking stink or giving the stink eye, or two guys competing for the same girl. Being stuck up or putting on airs could also get you into trouble.

My brother got punched out once, not at school, but at Ala Moana Park. He wasn’t one to back down. He bumped shoulders with a guy in the bathroom at school. Instead of picking a fight with my brother at school, the guy called on his bigger boys to track my brother down at the park and punch him out. That wasn’t very up and up, actually pretty chicken shit, as we used to say.

DCC: What was it like at Castle for you?

DK: If you hung out with the boys, it was okay. I hung out with some guys who surfed. We smoked in the bathroom at school and drank beer on weekends. Anti-haole sentiment was more prevalent than anti-Japanese sentiment. The haole were the minority, so they took more gas than the Japanese. One night when we were drinking, Chucky, who was part-Hawaiian, declared, “Fuck, I hate haoles, I smash their fuckin’ faces.” Ironically, his foster dad, a taxi driver in Waikīkī, was haole. After we drove to Kailua, we walked along the beach and came upon a group of haole sitting around a campfire. One of them invited us to join them. Chucky and two of the Japanese boys began flailing on three of them. The haole group retreated into a big house on the beach where one of them must have lived.

Later that night, when we were hanging out in a parking lot drinking beer, a couple of friends drove up and told us that a cop had stopped them, looking for a group of guys harassing people on the beach. We took the back roads home to Kāne‘ohe. Ironically, the three anti-haole guys eventually had haole girlfriends, and one of them married his girlfriend after high school, then got divorced.

Despite the adolescent antics, I got a pretty good education at Castle. There were college prep classes. In English, we read Beowulf, Chaucer, Shakespeare, D.H. Lawrence, James Joyce, Robert Frost, T.S. Eliot, and so on. Of course, I didn’t always go to class. If I read the books and wrote the papers, it was pretty easy to get A’s. And then outside of class, after school, and on weekends, we did things for fun and adventure.

DCC: Do you want to share some adventures?

DK: Well, one was shoplifting, which I did for a couple of years during intermediate school, to get comic books and porn magazines—until I got caught. My dad made me apologize to the family for bringing shame on it. But he wasn’t one to hold grudges. My shoplifting enterprise stopped, and he never brought it up again.

In high school in the late ’60s, we got into marijuana, LSD, mescaline, and amphetamines. It was recreational. No one got addicted or anything. Other than that, it was surfing and going to town for dances on weekends. There were dances held for teens at YMCAs, YWCAs, and the Young Buddhist Association in Nu‘uanu. My brother had a social club and he used to take me with him and his friends when girl clubs invited them to private dances, almost every weekend during the school year. My brother was two years older than me, and after he graduated, my friends and I formed a club so we could get invited to socials. We traveled all over the island, as far as ‘Ewa Beach, Wahiawā, and Waialua, to meet girls. When the socials got boring, we hung out outside in our cars and drank a case of beer that one of the guys stole from the supermarket where he worked.

DCC: Favorite surf spot?

DK: Tennis Courts, at Ala Moana Park. Not the best waves, but we could park and hang out all day on Saturdays or Sundays or during the summer, and eat plate lunches at the concession stand. Once my brother started driving, we sometimes left home at 3:00 or 4:00 in the morning and got to the beach at dawn to surf, when it wasn’t crowded or hot. On the way, we stopped for breakfast at the 24-hour Columbia Inn. When we got older, in my junior and senior year, my friends and I took a day off from school every week, usually Fridays, and came to town. Back then, pool halls were hangouts. We shot pool and smoked, pretending we were Fast Eddie in The Hustler. Nobody wanted to be Minnesota Fats because we were all pretty skinny kids. It was all fun. I wrote about those public school days in “Tribal Mix,” an essay in Local Geography: Essays on Multicultural Hawai‘i published in 2004.

DCC: So, you have one brother, do you have any other siblings?

DK: A younger sister. But she was too young, and a girl, so she couldn’t do the stuff I did with my brother. She couldn’t handle being at a public school. She got hijacked and threatened, so my parents had to send her to St. Andrew’s Priory.

DCC: So, you’re the middle child, how was that?

DK: It was great. My brother and I really got along. He took care of me when I went to Castle. I hung out with his friends in my freshmen and sophomore year. One of his friends took me in his ’57 Chevy on my first night-time date, with him and his date in the front seat and me and my date, two years older than me, in the back seat. We went to Kailua Drive-In to watch a movie.

DCC: And you and your brother are still close?

DK: After college, he and I went into different careers. He became an engineer. But we’re still good friends and have dinner every Sunday, something we did every Sunday with my mom for decades after she retired, until she passed away.

DCC: Was he also interested in the arts?

DK: Yeah, he wanted to go into Arts and Sciences, but couldn’t get in because he didn’t take two years of a foreign language at Castle, which was required back then. Castle offered only Latin and maybe French; he took one semester of Latin and hated it, so didn’t take a second year, and ended up in engineering. But he was interested in history and art and read books on local history and Japanese American history. So, that’s probably when I first started reading and learning about local history, by borrowing and reading the books he was assigned, and that eventually led to me getting involved with local literature.

DCC: Do you think being in Kāne‘ohe shaped your journey and trajectory toward that as well?

DK: Yeah. While I read only Western literature and history at Castle and ended up majoring in British and American literature later, the experiences growing up were more seminal in shaping my identity. Later I started looking for stories about people growing up in Hawai‘i. But I also could see my experiences in whatever I read. In my mom’s biography, I write about how her daughter turned out to be an ingrate, like King Lear’s two daughters. My mom worked three jobs to send her daughter to pay for a dental degree at Tufts and an orthodontic certificate at Harvard, but ended up having to disinherit her. Unlike in Shakespeare’s play, though, the ending was more tragic for her daughter than for her, at least in my opinion.

So I’ve always appreciated literature of any kind, whether it was local or not. One reason I became a writer was that I was inspired by Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. I got into Stephen Dedalus’ vision of sitting in a room alone and creating literary works. Interestingly, I reread A Portrait recently and was a little surprised that it wasn’t as interesting as I thought it was when I read it in high school. I was bored by some of the tedious theological discussions and college banter with his friends. But when I first read it, it was so exotic and different from what I was familiar with, I got curious about Dublin and the Catholic religion and Greek mythology, and so on.

What stayed with me was the way that Joyce explored what shaped his character’s life, how Dedalus’ identity was influenced by family, social status, church, school, nation, and so on. Exploring what shaped people’s lives became a lifelong interest for me, so all the things that Joyce explored about Stephen Dedalus in Ireland, I wanted to explore about the people in Hawai‘i.

DCC: Did you realize that when you were younger?

DK: No, I realized it later, in graduate school at the University of Washington and while I was working with Bamboo Ridge.

DCC: Do you remember where that point was when you were in college and you sort of were like maybe I don’t wanna study this anymore, or maybe I want to go into something else or look at something else or explore where I came from?

DK: Well reading was never an either/or thing for me. I wanted to add on to what I already knew, find out new things. Going away to the UW, I realized how much I missed Hawai‘i. I was homesick that first year and gravitated to other Asian Americans students from Hawai‘i there and began reading Asian American, Hawaiian, and local literature. Stephen Sumida was there, toward the end of his PhD course work, so I hung out with him a bit. He eventually wrote a dissertation on local literature and published it as a book [And the View from the Shore: Literary Traditions of Hawai‘i –Ed.].

DCC: Do you remember when you first met him?

DK: Probably at a party at the house of a friend, another Japanese American guy, Wilfred, who was from Kohala, on the Big Island. There were others from Hawai‘i, like Elizabeth, a graduate of McKinley High School who was also in the graduate English program; we met there and hung out together. Elizabeth didn’t like Hawai‘i and didn’t want to return. She had been wandering around the continent, hitchhiked across Canada, and settled in Seattle.

At the party in Seattle, Stephen wanted to do a slideshow on a journey he made on a freighter in the South Pacific and ended up stuck on a small island until the steamer came back. The slide show went on and on. He was like the rhapsode of Beowulf, who begins, “Listen!” then goes on to deliver an epic tale.

We went on a winter road trip to Vancouver with Wilfred and Norm, another guy from Hawai‘i. We hung out in Gas Town and drank hot butter rum. The most memorable thing about that trip was a visit to the zoo. When we were walking past the bat cage, I noticed a bat hanging upside down from a branch licking his own dick, which was long enough to reach from his crotch to his mouth. Amused, I turned to Steven to point it out, but he had already noticed it and said, “Yeah, he giving himself some licks.”

Stephen introduced me to Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for is My Body, which Milton published on his own press, Supa, in 1975, about growing up on a Maui plantation. Maybe the most memorable image was when he described plantation housing as “a pyramid of shit,” with the Japanese and Filipinos living at the bottom. In the late ’80s, when I was living in San Francisco, I met Murayama and had dinner with him and his wife at their Diamond Heights home. They had just gone fishing for spawning grunions, which we had for dinner. He grew up in a plantation camp in Pu‘ukoli‘i, four miles north of Lāhaina. Milton volunteered for the U.S. Army in World War II and served in the Military Intelligence Service, using his Japanese language skills to help America win its war with Japan.

DCC: Did you see any Joyce in Murayama’s novel, for example, in the use of language?

DK: Well, both writers wrote about the places where they grew up, with local characters and dialect; Milton used pidgin dialogue. It was odd, though, that he changed the pidgin, apparently to make it more understandable to white readers or an American audience. Instead of using “wen’” for the past tense in Pidgin, he uses “been.” But we didn’t say, “We never been do anything that bad,” we said, “We never wen’ do anything that bad.” But it was probably the first book I read that captured a sense of growing up local, and probably the pidgin dialogue had something to do with that. Although I didn’t grow up on a plantation, the people and places Milton described seemed familiar.

DCC: That’s still happening. So, I want to rewind, how long were you at University of Hawai‘i before you went to the University of Washington?

DK: I graduated from high school in 1969 and took about five years to get my Bachelor’s at the UH.

DCC: So you were at the UH in the mid-70s, correct?

DK: Until spring ’75.

DCC: So, you were there when some of the changes were happening with teaching Asian American literature?

DK: The UH English department didn’t start teaching Asian American or local literature until the late ’80s. Local writers began advocating change after the 1978 Talk Story conference, which featured local literature. The conference was organized by Stephen Sumida; Arnold Hiura, who was from the Big Island, and who also went to the UW, but he graduated with a Master’s before I was there; and Marie Hara, a teacher and writer in Honolulu. Darrell and Eric started publishing Bamboo Ridge that year and promoting local literature.

Before that, in 1976, Richard and Mark Hamasaki established ‘Elepaio Press, which featured works by local and Indigenous writers, poets, photographers, illustrators, musicians, and so on. Over a decade earlier, in 1964, John Dominis Holt established Topgallant Press and published his “On Being Hawaiian.” He continued to publish his work—a novel, short stories, a play, a long poem, works on the monarchy and featherwork. But of course none of that was taught at the UH.

Richard recalls that around 1980, the director of Ethnic Studies, Franklin Odo, approached Darrell and Eric to see if they wanted to teach a course in the literature of Hawaiʻi for his department, but they declined. Richard and Hawaiian poet Wayne Westlake agreed to teach it and designed the course. As far as I know, it was the first local literature course at the UH, offered in fall 1981, in the Ethnic Studies department. The English department refused to approve the course unless it was called “Ethnic Writings of Hawaii,” apparently because those who opposed the course thought that while locals could write, what they wrote wasnʻt literature. When Westlake moved to the Big Island in 1982, Richard continued to teach the course on his own until he was hired to teach English at Kamehameha Schools in 1987. Sometime after that, the English department began teaching a course called Ethnic Literature of Hawaii.

DCC: So, what was it like for you at UH, did you feel that the UH should be teaching local literature?

DK: Not at all. While I was there in the ’70s, I was planning to get a graduate degree in British and American literature from the UW. There was an Ethnic Studies department at the UW that taught a course in Asian American literature back then, and I knew about it because I hung out with poets like Garrett Hongo. I didn’t take the course, but I read the works that were assigned.

While I was at the UH, I did take creative writing workshops, and I guess you could say I sort of began exploring an identity through writing.

DCC: Do you remember how that was received when you turned in creative writing assignments where you were writing about life in Kāne‘ohe, or whatever it is that you were writing about?

DK: I didn’t write about growing up in Kāne‘ohe. I tried to insert local people into situations or plots with themes that were “universal.” So it wasn’t really local literature at that point.

DCC: Do you remember a story you wrote?

DK: I remember a play I wrote about a group of young people gathering on a rooftop and they start jumping off one by one because they’re unhappy with their lives, and the last two are a couple and they fall in love and they don’t jump. It was an allegory, like Waiting for Godot, not realism. The building I imagined as the setting for the suicides was Kuykendall Hall, where the UH English department was located. Does that make it “local” literature? I don’t think so.

DCC: Did you ever turn it in?

DK: I did. It helped me realize that I wasn’t much of a playwright.

DCC: So, you went five years at UH, then you went straight into the PhD program at UW?

DK: I went into the master’s program.

DCC: Do you remember what you pitched as your proposal?

DK: I didn’t have to propose anything to get in. There was a thesis and non-thesis track. I took the non-thesis track, which required me to take a selection of courses in British and American literature, then pass area exams in the areas I chose.

In my last quarter, I was homesick so decided to come home to write a final independent study paper to complete my degree. It was a study of Alexander Pope’s eighteenth-century poem “The Dunciad.” I completed my degree while living in Hawai‘i, and then I had to figure out well, okay, now what am I going to do. I ended up getting hired by the UH continuing education program to teach ENG 100 at Barbers Point, where most of the students were in the Coast Guard or Navy. We read essays from a standard composition reader, with nothing local in it. I remember assigning James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son.” I got into that essay, which was another road into ethnic literature. I saw a few parallels between what he wrote about growing up Black in America and my experiences being of Japanese ancestry.

After that, I decided to go back to the University of Washington for a PhD.

DCC: So, why did you decide to go back?

DK: Teaching the Eng 100 course was a good experience, and I thought I could do that, it’s not that hard, so why not get a PhD and maybe teach English in college? While I was at the UW, I got to know the Asian American community better; at that time, there were a lot of Asian American writers in Seattle. Frank Chin was there; so was Shawn Wong, who, along with Frank, Jeff Chan and Lawson Inada, had edited and published an anthology of Asian American literature in 1974. I went to Asian American plays and poetry readings. When the Asian American community held a Day of Remembrance for the Japanese who were sent to relocation camps during World War II, I went along on a pilgrimage to an assembly center in Puyallup where the Japanese Americans were rounded up to be shipped off to detention centers for relocation.

The Asian American writers in Seattle were publishing not just contemporary literature, but writings of the previous generation, too, so I read Nisei writers like Toshio Mori, John Okada, Hisaye Yamamoto, and Wakako Yamauchi.

I should also mention that because I was homesick, I was listening to Hawaiian music by Gabby Pahinui and Sunday Manoa, and went looking for books on Hawaiian culture in Suzzallo Library. The first book I found and read was David Malo’s Hawaiian Antiquities.

DCC: Did you want to talk about some of the relationships with the people you met up there?

DK: I hung out with the poet Garrett Hongo because we had something in common—his dad grew up in Volcano on the Big Island and my mom grew up in Hilo. Garrett grew up in L.A. We met for lunch sometimes at his favorite hot dog shop on University Avenue or in the International district for Japanese or Chinese food. He published a poetry collection in 1978 with Lawson Inada and Alan Lau, titled The Buddha Bandits Down Highway 99, which included his poem “Cruisin’ 99,” about a road trip along Highway 99 in California searching for Identity and Enlightenment. The three poets published the book on their own press, called Buddhahead, which was slang that mainland Japanese Americans used for guys from Hawai‘i. “Cruisin’ 99” was included in his collection Yellow Light: Poems published in 1982 by Wesleyan U Press. It was my favorite poem by him.

Garrett was also into Asian American theater, and friends with Wakako Yamauchi, the playwright from L.A. Her play And the Soul Shall Dance was produced in Seattle. He introduced me to her and other theater people. I met the actress Amy Hill at one of the parties and danced with her. Recently, when I saw her on Magnum P.I., I thought, “Wow, we got old!”

I had a graduate assistantship at the UW, which paid a stipend for teaching a composition course every quarter, so I supported myself, and it allowed my mom to pay in-state tuition for me. All of the graduate students in the English department, except me, were white. I signed up to teach in the Equal Opportunity Program for minorities. After the first quarter, most of my students were Asian Americans, mainly of Chinese, Filipino, and Vietnamese ancestry.

My supervisor was Colleen McElroy, the first Black professor in the English department at the UW, hired in 1973. She was a poet and told our mutual friend Garrett that she was hired because the English department needed someone who was black. Colleen was very funny, with a mock self-deprecating sense of humor, but really, back in those days, that’s what the UW English department was like. In 1976, when I started there, a second Black professor was hired, Charles Johnson, a philosopher, novelist, and historian of Black literature, who later took vows in the Soto Zen tradition.

DCC: So, when do you start to think about and develop what would become your dissertation, The Rhetoric of Identity in Asian American Literature?

DK: Not for another decade. I came back to Honolulu in 1979 without a PhD. I wasn’t interested in British and American literature anymore. I didn’t have a set career goal and wasnʻt planning to finish my degree unless I found something interesting to write about. I took some odd jobs in Honolulu, then ended up as a lecturer teaching composition and business writing in the UH system.

I also checked out freelance journalism. I did a couple of interviews with Japanese American artists, and wrote articles about them for the Hawai‘i Herald, a Japanese American newspaper. I wrote a longer piece called “Images of Local Culture” which the paper published in May 1983. It was my first attempt to define what was unique about Hawai‘i’s multiethnic culture and what was valuable and worth perpetuating in it. The paper had an illustrator named Arthur Kodani and included with the article one of his cartoons, which didn’t really fit what I wrote. I wrote about how “Differences are not only tolerated but encouraged,” not about blending cultures in a melting pot.

I also wrote about aloha ‘āina, which back then was what for many was the heart of local culture, and quoted from a Haunani K. Trask newspaper interview about how Native Hawaiians had an “ecologically harmonious culture” for protecting the land and sharing its bounty to ensure the health of the people. A coalition of activists of all ethnicities were battling the spread of subdivisions, shopping centers, and hotels in places like Nukoli‘i, Makua Beach, Sand Island, and Waiāhole-Waikāne.

DCC: What were you writing at the time?

DK: I was writing poetry and published a couple of poems in the Bamboo Ridge quarterly. I wrote a children’s story with Pidgin dialogue, set in Kāne‘ohe, and that led to “Would you like to edit a special issue on children’s literature?” So I did. At that time, like Eric and Darrell and the others, I was thinking about how to establish a local literature. In the introduction to the issue, I wrote, “I wondered why so many of the human truths we learned in our schools were taught through remote experiences, so few through island experiences in stories for local kids, with local settings, characters, and actions.” Now, though, thinking back on the young boy in my children’s story, he was based on the braggadocio Falstaff in Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1, so I was still trying to adapt Western literature to local settings.

Editing that special children’s issue led to serving as managing editor for Bamboo Ridge from 1984–1986.

DCC: When did you first hear of Bamboo Ridge or what Bamboo Ridge was doing? I mean, you knew some of them from when you were at UH then Talk Story happened, but you were in Washington, so how did that connection happen?

DK: I don’t recall meeting anyone from Bamboo Ridge when I was an undergraduate at the UH. I met Stephen Sumida in Seattle, but none of the Bamboo Ridge writers and editors were there. When I got back from the UW in 1979, however, there was a lively local writing scene that emerged after the Talk Story conference in 1978, with events sponsored by Bamboo Ridge and the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council, and readings by Asian American writers visiting from the continent, and parties at the houses of supporters of local literature, like at Bev Lum’s house in Mānoa. I somehow ended up in the Bamboo Ridge group.

DCC: I’m curious about your poetry now, do you still write poetry?

DK: No, I write only nonfiction prose now. I felt poetry took too long to write. I would spend months on a poem and end up with something relatively short, like not even a page, so I thought, this is not that productive, maybe writing prose is easier, so I got into writing articles for the newspaper and essays. Now, though, writing my mom’s biography, which turned into a very long piece, I think about writing lyric poetry again, because it’s so much shorter, less taxing on memory.

DCC: Why were you drawn to poetry at first?

DK: When I was at the UH, I took a couple of poetry workshops from Peter Nelson and just the notion of being a poet seemed romantic and exciting, maybe kind of a carryover from reading Wordsworth, Keats, Byron, and Coleridge, and also European poets like Baudelaire and Rilke. With the Bamboo Ridge group, I began trying to write poetry about personal experiences and local themes.

DCC: Poetry became an avenue for you to explore those parts of yourself?

DK: Yes, the poems and the children’s story I published were what might be called local literature. The themes and the imagery and everything were based on experiences I had growing up in Hawai‘i.

ORDER

The fields seemed chaotic to him—
butterflies flitting among the flowers,
bees zinging by like bullets,
dragonflies zipping at crazy angles,
grasshoppers with springy legs
leaping out of reach.

He captured them, one kind at a time,
and put them in his death chamber—
a mayonnaise jar with a paper towel
soaked with Black Flag inside.
He watched each go frenzied, then wind down
like a little toy running out of spring;
when it was still; he spread it out to dry.
Then he impaled the soft corpse,
the small tension in the pin
sending an imaginary pain through his chest.
He placed each new specimen
in line with the last:
neat rows like cars in a parking lot.

From Bamboo Ridge #21, Winter 1983

EASY GAME

The first summer we camped without my dad,
Sam, Lloyd, and I baited hooks like tiny knives
and swung them into the blinking eyes of reef pools
appearing and disappearing in the wash of waves.
We felt snug tugs of life,
pulled up rock fish, butterfly fish, mamo,
one after another, like small hands flapping.

It was an easy game, like the carnival Fish Pond,
where we paid a scrip and won a prize,
the clothespin dangling from the end of the pole,
tossed behind the curtain always coming back
with a toy—a hollow plastic fish,
a rubber knife painted silver, a black gun.

With thirty small fish in a burlap bag
and poles over our sunburnt shoulders,
we marched back to camp.
Bored, we circled the dead campfire
with its soft bones of kiawe wood
and teased each other and napped.
No one wanted to eat the fish;
the sun licked the burlap bag all afternoon,
and the corpses began to stink.
Nothing to do but seal the festering odor.
We dug a pit and dumped them:
curled and stiff, they hit the sand
like a deck of worn playing cards.

From Bamboo Ridge #33, Spring 1987

DCC: How did you feel writing about all of that, were you really energized at that particular point?

DK: Yeah—what I started writing in the Bamboo Ridge study group helped me write about a local identity, about who I was.

DCC: Is that when you were like this is when I’m going to do my PhD dissertation?

DK: Not quite yet. Around that time, I met the San Francisco poet and playwright Genny Lim, when she came to do a reading for the Hawai‘i Literary Arts Council, which by then was pretty much run by Bamboo Ridge. Genny and I got along, and she invited me to stay with her and her two young daughters in San Francisco. So I moved there for a couple of years.

By that time, I was on a tenure track at Kapi‘olani Community College, so I took a leave of absence without pay. Genny was friends with Elaine Kim, who was the director of the Asian American Studies program in the Ethnic Studies department at UC Berkeley, so Genny set up an interview for me with Elaine, and I got a lectureship for a couple of years.

I taught an Asian American literature course in the first year, then in the second year switched to teaching a multicultural literature course, which got me into Native American, Black, and Chicano literature. The course put Asian American literature in the context of other ethnic minority literatures in America, and I got interested in how the experiences of the different minorities were similar and/or different.

DCC: So, how does that lead you to your dissertation?

DK: Before I left for San Francisco, I was working with Franklin Odo on an anthology of Japanese American literature of Hawai‘i that Bamboo Ridge was going to publish—hole hole bushi [plantation songs] and writings in both English and Japanese by immigrants and their Nisei children. Reading Hawai‘i Nisei writers like [Milton –Ed.] Murayama and Kazuo Miyamoto, and having read what the Japanese Americans on the West Coast wrote, which I read at the UW, I could see some interesting comparisons and contrasts.

Since I taught only one course a semester at Berkeley, which paid as well as working half time in the UH system, I had time to do more research. That got me thinking about writing my dissertation. As part of my training for teaching at the UW, I studied rhetoric from a professor who was into Kenneth Burke, and I liked Burke’s rhetorical approach to literature, so I decided, yeah, I could write a dissertation on the similarities and differences in the rhetoric of Japanese American literature in Hawai‘i and on the West Coast. I contacted Malcolm Griffith, a professor of American literature at the UW whose course I took when I was there, and he agreed to supervise the dissertation and put together a reading committee.

I should mention my mom’s role in all of this because she really wanted me to finish my dissertation. Thankfully, she wasn’t the type of mother who constantly nags her children to do things, although I could tell she was waiting impatiently for me to finish. It had been almost eight years since I left the UW. But she knew that I meandered a lot and went on detours to follow interests and do things I wanted to do.

DCC: What did your mom do?

DK: She was a dietitian. She started as an assistant at the Territorial Hospital in Kāne‘ohe and eventually became Director of Dietary Services at Kapi‘olani Medical Center. We were very close, and for her last thirty years, after she retired, we lived in the same building, four floors apart. I lived in an apartment she gifted to me after I began earning enough money to pay the mortgage, maintenance, and property tax. I took care of her with my brother as she aged, until she passed away at ninety-five. She was very, very supportive of everything that I did. She was very happy that I finished the dissertation.

I didn’t attend the graduation ceremony or pick up my diploma because I wasn’t interested in those sorts of things, but Mom told me to have the UW mail the diploma to me. When it came, I gave it to her because I thought she wanted it for all for the support she gave me—she paid for it! But she had it framed, then gave it back to me. She also asked me to print a copy of the dissertation so she could read it. She kept it on her bookshelf, where I found it after she passed away.

DCC: She was a big influence on you growing up?

DK: I didn’t think about it during my life with her, but after she passed away, while writing her biography, I realized how much of an influence she was. From her, I got my love of learning, love of reading and writing, love of travel, exploration, and geography, love of art, and so on. She also taught us by example to contribute to the well-being of the community. She was a dedicated member of the Hawai‘i Dietetics Association and served two terms as its president, working to improve the health of the people of Hawai‘i through good diets and food, and in general, to make the world a better place for people.

Since she was interested in literature, I shared with her Bamboo Ridge publications I thought would interest her, like Susan Nunes’s collection, A Small Obligation and Other Stories of Hilo, published in 1982. Mom grew up in Hilo and knew Susan’s mother’s family, the Shinodas. Susan’s grandfather, Yoshio Shinoda, was the principal of the Hilo Independent Japanese Language School where my grandfather sent Mom and his other five children. He also gave graduation speeches there. Mom recognized some of the people and places in Susan’s stories, and shared with me her memories of growing up in Hilo.

I also gave Mom a copy of Poets Behind Barbed Wire, published in 1983, because I knew that her father had been imprisoned during the war. She shared it with her older brother, Hiroshi, who told us that one of the poems was about my grandfather and him. After Pearl Harbor, Grandpa was arrested and interrogated about his business activities in Hilo. The U.S. government designated him an enemy alien at a mock hearing in Hilo, then sent him on a steamer to Honolulu, to be incarcerated at the Sand Island detention center, then shipped to the continent for four years of prison. [See The Life and Times of Gunichi Kuwahara, “5. Pearl Harbor Scapegoats, Part A: Arrests and Interrogations, 1941–1942.”]

My uncle Hiro, who had just been drafted by the U.S. Army in Feb. 1941, was on the same steamer to Honolulu, on his way to induction at Fort DeRussy. He spent four years in the U.S. Army, in a construction battalion on O‘ahu. In 1944, he applied for parole for Grandpa, and the parole was granted, but under the condition that he not come back to Hawai‘i until the war was over, so he ended up staying in prison until 1945. [See The Life and Times of Gunichi Kuwahara, “6. Pearl Harbor Scapegoats, Part B: Wartime Imprisonments, 1941–1945.”]

Hiroshi became eligible for the draft in 1940 while he was at UC Berkeley, and after he renounced his Japanese citizenship he was drafted. He was born before 1924, when the Japanese government required immigrants to register their children as Japanese citizens, even though the children were also U.S. citizens by birth in America. After 1924, to make life easier for children born overseas, the Japanese government rescinded its requirement to register the overseas children as Japanese citizens, and also allowed those who were dual citizens to renounce their Japanese citizenship.

Sailing on the same ship
The son
A U.S. soldier;
His father,
A prisoner of war

Muin Ozaki, Poets Behind Barbed Wire

The poem is misplaced in the anthology, under the section, “On the Ship to the Mainland.” The scene is on the steamer from Hilo to Honolulu. Muin Ozaki, who wrote the ironic poem, like my grandfather, had been arrested as an enemy alien, and was on his way to the U.S. Army detention center on Sand Island. Ozaki’s crime was having been a teacher at the Hilo Independent Japanese Language School, for which Susan Nunes’ grandfather was the principal. The school was shut down during the war.

Ozaki knew Grandpa and Hiroshi from the school. He recalled in his memoir that father and son were on different decks and weren’t allowed to speak to each other during their transit to Honolulu.

DCC: So, what made you decide to write your mom’s biography?

DK: I admired her a lot and wanted to find out as much as I could about how she became the person she became. I began writing The Life and Times of Matsuko “Mitzi” Kawaharada after she passed away in 2020, to remember her and thank her for the lifetime she gifted me, which was beyond anything I could have made up or imagined while I was growing up.

Mom graduated in the first UH dietary studies class [now Food Science] in 1948. Her mentor, Carey D. Miller, the department chair, was a pioneer in the study of multiethnic diets and foods in Hawai‘i. She came from the Midwest, but believed that the UH dietetics program should teach local students about the foods and diets of Hawai‘i, and she wrote books and articles on the diets of the different ethnic groups here and also studies on local fruits and their nutritional value—kalo, mango, coconut, and so on. That was in the ’30s and ’40s. Miller was decades ahead of her time. She was teaching about local foods and diets long before professors in other departments like the UH English department realized that there might be some value in situating what was taught, and teaching Hawai‘i’s students about what they might recognize as a part of their daily lives. Miller Hall, which housed the dietary studies program, was named for her.

While writing my mom’s biography, I made the connection between Miller’s and Mom’s interest in local diets and foods and my interest in local literature. During the last fifteen or so years of my teaching career, food was my metaphor for literature. I got into telling local kids that they need to feed their heads, which was a phrase I got from a song [Jefferson Airplane’s “White Rabbit” –Ed.] of my hippie, acid-dropping days at Castle High, and adapted to a new purpose. I found a graphic for it online to use in my syllabus:

I was shocked when I began regularly asking my students on the first day of class to write a list of what they read before coming to college, and a few wrote that they didn’t like reading and never read a book. I thought perhaps they hadn’t found anything they wanted to read, so if I offered them something that was recognizable, like local literature, some of them might get interested. What I wanted them to do is to find an interest that would take them deeper into it, requiring more research and reading. But it’s hard to predict what might interest individual students. Some local students got interested in local literature; others didn’t.

I set my assignments up to give students a range of stories to read—local stories, Hawaiian stories, American and European stories, Asian stories, and so on—so they had a choice. That part of my syllabus was more of a menu than a list of required readings.

DCC: Did you have any students that went further with local literature? Did they become writers?

DK: I don’t know of any who became writers, but in class the best stories and essays were usually about growing up in Hawai‘i. Remembering how encouraging it was to see my writing in the Hawai‘i Herald and Bamboo Ridge, I posted the best essay from each student online at a KCC website.

DCC: Did you come across their writing in Bamboo Ridge at all?

DK: No, but a couple of students let me know later that they were majoring in English. One student contacted me years later about getting a copy of an essay she wrote about her father. I had the HTML file that I posted online, so I emailed it to her.

My most memorable student was Kaleo Wong, who was in the first class of a Mālama Hawai‘i program that I started with Hawaiian Studies professor Pua Mendonca in the ’90s. That program offered core courses in all the disciplines, including English composition and literature, featuring readings on local topics in history, literature, natural and social science, etc. Kaleo later joined the Polynesian Voyaging Society and trained as a captain and navigator and also got a job in conservation of native plants and animals.

DCC: I wanted to ask about your dad, if there’s anything to share about your dad?

DK: Well, he passed away the year after I graduated from high school, so the time I had with him was way shorter than the time I had with my mom, but he definitely influenced my life. He was very different from Mom—more a hands-on, outdoor person. He was an all-star halfback at Maui High. In the ninth grade, he had been at Lahainaluna School for vocational training in agriculture, but he got kicked out for drinking. After he graduated from Maui High went to the UH, but got drafted toward the end of World War II. He never went into combat, but he was trained in carpentry, and was sent to Japan with the Occupation forces for a year to build barracks and warehouses. He eventually got a college degree, and a job as an electronic technician, but that wasn’t his real interest in life. His true passion was for building boats and fishing.

He moored his boat at He‘eia Kea Pier and went fishing in Kāne‘ohe Bay. He took my brother and me with him. I was okay fishing in the lagoon, but when we went beyond the reef and sandbar, I got seasick, so I didn’t pursue fishing with him, but he taught us how to swim by dropping us into the deep water at He‘eia Kea Pier and had us dog paddle back to shore. Swimming and fishing eventually led my brother and me into bodysurfing, boogie boarding, and surfing. I have a love of the ocean from my dad, and still swim in the old boat channel at Ala Moana Park today.

In 1992, I joined the Polynesian Voyaging Society [PVS] after getting interested in the origins of the Hawaiian people and culture, how they discovered and settled the islands. In 1993, Pinky and Nainoa Thompson hired me to write about voyaging traditions and voyages, and to develop curriculum materials and maps for students to follow the voyages. They sent me on short interisland voyages in Tahiti, the Marquesas, Alaska, and Japan. It was an unlikely calling for someone prone to seasickness. I wore a medicated patch to manage my seasickness. I trace my voyaging interest back to my experiences building boats and fishing with Dad.

In the ’90s, the Thompsons, Nainoa and his parents Pinky and Laura, adopted Mālama Hawai‘i, “taking care of Hawai‘i,” as the mission of PVS. The phrase was used by state senator Kenny Brown to guide for the state of Hawai‘i. Mālama Hawai‘i was a broader version of aloha ‘āīna in that it suggested both the people and the land. Descendants of ali‘i, Brown and the Thompsons were committed to taking care of all the people of Hawai‘i and the land that sustained them. For the Thompsons, the voyaging canoe and the crew were metaphors for the islands and the people. They welcomed everyone who wanted to help the canoe sail and taught the crew to take care of each other and to conserve resources for the voyage. I wrote about my experiences with PVS in “Crossing Seas,” an essay in Local Geography: Essays on Multicultural Hawai‘i, published in 2004; and in “Twenty-five Years with the Polynesian Voyaging Society,” which summarizes that quarter of the century as a note in my mom’s biography. While I was a Hōkūle‘a crew member, Mom became a member of PVS and followed the voyages of Hōkūle‘a through the media coverage.

Kenny’s Mālama Hawai‘i vision inspired the Mālama Hawai‘i program that we established at Kapi‘olani Community College in 1995.