Category: Culture and heritage

I have wonderful news … our shop is again open! We have coffee to roast and sell. And the pickers are here today, getting the last third or fourth of our harvest, to be dry milled in 2024. In the next days we’ll have a good idea of our season’s harvest. It has been dark and drizzling before noon today, but the sun is coming out again.

Ten days of coffee festival activities are now over. There are so many things going on, we don’t go to all of them. Last year I decided to try one event new for me each year so I can get a feel for what it’s about. This year my new event was Kona’s Got Talent Showcase, which is held mauka (upland), not in Kailua. We almost didn’t go; inertia is so hard to overcome. We got over the hump by saying we’d go for at least an hour (this is often a trick I’ve used to get started on consulting projects for the day).

We saw more than these performers, but the Little Miss Kona Coffee participants (ages 7-12) were the cutest, so I snapped photos mostly of them. The winner demonstrated archery. We could use her help with our pigs. I apologize for the blurry photos.

At the Talent Showcase I learned that it was the late Fusao Sugai that insisted this event be held mauka. He and his family were honored at the event. The Sugai family is our direct neighbor.

For nearly thirty years, Sugai Kona Coffee farm owner Fusao Sugai supported the Kona Coffee Cultural Festival. With his passing earlier this summer, Kona lost a Kona coffee pioneer. Fusao’s community involvement was vast and the Festival honors his commitment to the community and Kona coffee.

Kona Coffee Cultural Festival 2023 Program

Saturday was the Ho’olaule’a at the Old Airport. It was great fun again this year. Great performances going on the whole time (9am-3pm), and a constant stream of locals and visitors milling about. Like last year, I helped Reiko teach how to make ti-leaf leis. We were only two (vs. three) this year, and we were constantly busy. There are always a few who are really delighted and so appreciative of learning how to do this … they make it all worthwhile. “I’m SO happy!! I’m SO happy!! Thank you SO MUCH!” I met a couple from O’ahu who stumbled upon the festival event along with their mainland friends/visitors. They said they had bought ti leaf leis to greet them, not knowing they’d have this opportunity to make them.

We were so busy teaching, neither Reiko nor I saw the displayed leis entered in the contest, which are these beautiful, ephemeral pieces of art. There’s a silent auction for them, so they had all gone to their new owners by mid-day. The photo for this post was a lei entry from 2022.

At the end, one of Reiko’s Japanese friends came by, who has been dancing hula for many years. She very quickly demonstrated one way to make the kupe’e lei, the greenery worn around the forehead, wrists, ankles, or as a hair ornament. It seemed straightforward until I tried to do it myself. What a disaster. She said she used to perform every Monday, and she’d have to make 20 kupe’e for that performance. And when there were competitions, others in her hālau weren’t as good at making them, so they’d cajole, “Auntiiieeee, can you make my kupe’e?” In other words, she’s had lots of practice over the years. She told me of many locations where she planted ti canes, including her condo complex, stealth at night. She needed a good supply of leaves. She told me that when she first moved to Hawai’i, she was fascinated by kupe’e and wanted to make them. She couldn’t speak English, and she’d just stare at it, and a dancer gave her her kupe’e, and she took it apart and tried to reverse engineer how to make it. Well, I have her example, and she told me, “YouTube!”

UH-CTAHR Extension had a booth right next to ours. Our Master Gardener classes were held at their extension office in Kainaliu. [By the way, if you’re local and reading this, you can apply for the 2024 Master Gardener class.] What was most interesting to me this time was the Coconut Rhinoceros Beetles (CRB), and the huge larvae, they had to show. Ewww. The newest scourge to reach this island, just a month ago: “On October 11th, a Waikoloa Village resident found five large CRB grubs, or larvae, in a decaying palm tree stump on the property.” They significantly damage coconut palms, destroying their look, and can kill the tree. It is always something.

The last event was yesterday, the Kona Coffee Recipe Contest with tastings, and the Big Island Showcase and Kona Coffee Expo. More performances, gratitude expressed, and the recipe and the coffee cupping contest winners were announced. Following are just a few visuals. I didn’t take a photo of the big ballroom with all the tables and all the recipe and coffee contest samples. I was too busy getting my samples.

Several weeks ago a college friend of my dad’s shared this article about the Kona Coffee Living History Farm, saying that some of the photos reminded him of photos I’ve posted about our farm. The history related in that article is the general setting of my great-grandparents’ and grandparents’ lives in Hawai’i. And it reminded me about their kuriba, the mill.

One day we drove down the road a few months ago and noticed the old Murata kuriba was finally smashed down. I don’t know why. I also don’t know why it wasn’t done decades ago. I wrote a little about the kuriba in “The Old Days on the Murata farm” and “More on the Old Days.” When I see these two photos, taken about four years apart, what strikes me is how much more lush the recent photo is. The 2019 photo was taken in January, the dry season.

Normally we’re always driving by, and there’s no good place to pull over so I could take a photo. The recent photo (above, on the right) was taken a few days ago, when we walked along our road to attend the bon dance at Daifukuji temple. It was the first bon dance at Daifukuji since the pandemic, and the first one in the afternoon, not evening/night. (This is just a random photo of mine and not necessarily a good, representative one. See Reiko’s blog for more coverage, but she was busy dancing so probably didn’t take as many photos as she’d have liked. If you use Google Chrome, it’ll offer to translate the Japanese.) I loved seeing people all over the temple grounds. Youngsters, oldsters, locals, visitors, people dressed in kimono, yukata, happi coats, etc. Dancing, sitting on benches, on the ground, observing from higher up at the temple entrance. My friend and I took a wild guess, “300 attendees?” A true community event.

The temple is just 0.6 miles away, but it’s a curvy road, mostly with no shoulder. It’s pretty dangerous to walk just half a mile. Usually when we walk on any road, we walk facing traffic. With this road, we cross the road several times depending on the shoulder or lack thereof, and keeping in mind how visible we’d be to drivers. We have a section of guardrail on the road curve bordering our farm. It is not infrequent, every so many months, that accidents still happen where a vehicle meets that guardrail or the rock wall on the opposite side of the road.

It’s almost 3.5 miles to Konawaena school. One year in her school age years, Mom had to walk home from school each day; it took an hour. Back then the road didn’t have anything close to the vehicle traffic it now has. You hardly ever see children walking to school here anymore; it’s too dangerous.

When Mom and I were just chatting on the phone, she mentioned that when she was growing up, she and most of her peers didn’t celebrate birthdays, or maybe they did with just their families. Everyone was too busy with their family coffee farms. It’s interesting that the progeny of most of those families are now enjoying relative prosperity. Most no longer do manual labor. Few kids, if any, do manual work most of the day to help support the entire family. It’s a time of plenty, at least one car in every household (maybe one or more for each driver), fast food, mobile phones, the internet, social media, and inexpensive, frequent flights to and from the mainland.

Hawai’i has the highest life expectancy of all the states, at 80-81 years (different sources report slightly different numbers). It’s not uncommon to hear about centenarians or people in their 90’s. I think of Mrs. Teshima. In just the past week or two, several unrelated groups of visitors from California, all planned to eat at Teshima restaurant, a local institution, just south of Daifukuji. In the past few years, I’ve been eating there once or twice a week, usually for breakfast. From West Hawaii Today on 10/24/2013, “Mrs. Teshima, a well-known fixture in the Kona community who exemplified altruism, hard work and entrepreneurship, died Tuesday [10/22/13]. She was 106.” I found an article from this year, also from Images of Old Hawai’i, about Teshima’s.

For those of you who live here or who’ve been here, or been to Teshima restaurant, you might be able to follow my train of reflections. For the rest of you, maybe you’re reflecting on your own “old days.”

Time to celebrate Hawaiian culture with lei. Myself, I haven’t done anything special for the occasion, and in my limited goings about, I haven’t seen anything marking the day. But I know it’s celebrated and observed.

Today’s the appropriate day that they’re measuring the Guinness World Record attempt for longest lei. This article by Big Island Now was written back in February, but it tells a good story about this Guinness attempt. Reiko and I made our contributions last week when we went to Waikōloa Beach Marriott Resort and Spa and wove ti leaf lei for a half hour or so. It was fun. Reiko should have been the activity director. She talked story with the tourists learning lei-making, explaining the symbolism and importance of ti plants. The employee seemed rather introverted and shy. I contributed later by spreading the word a bit, so our friend’s guests went and contributed a few days later.

We didn’t get to see the hose reel with the lei, though. It has been stored in the freezer for months. Someone connects the daily contributions. We heard the reel has gotten really big and heavy. A friend saw it yesterday when it was brought out for display during Waikōloa’s Second Annual Lei Day celebration, but he didn’t take a picture. There’ll probably be something in the media in a day or two, I imagine. I read on the hotel’s Facebook posts that the “first official measurement” (new is the qualifier “first”) tallied just over a mile, two miles short to even tie the record. They plan to carry on.

We finished off April with 10 days of rain in a row (dry, April 29-30, though). I always wonder what tourists do when we have a lot of rain. I guess they can make ti leaf lei indoors, for one thing. Ten days of rain for us doesn’t mean it’s like that everywhere in West Hawai’i. There was a day or two, though, where it rained from before noon and it looked like rain was everywhere, which is unusual. On Friday we got four inches of rain from noon-4:30pm. When we reached the 3-inch mark, I exchanged texts with our friend who lives down the hill and less than six miles away. He only had 3/10 of an inch at that point. That is just so crazy to me. I visualized a cartoon of me sitting under my own personal storm cloud. We both got an inch in the following hour. Anyway, four inches is a lot of rain in a day for Kona, and April had almost 14″, which is a lot in a month. So the coffee land is looking a lot greener and the trees, plants, and weeds are all happily growing.

I’ve been wanting to write more about agroforestry, but that will be a future post. I’ll leave you with a related teaser. The most recent stay-informed email I received from our neighbor, the Hawai’i ‘Ulu Co’op, had this photo of our friend Berta quizzically examining an ‘ulu. The photo was a link to The ‘Ulu Co’op Story in 5 Minutes. She movingly opens the video with Hawaiian storytelling. We see her at Kahalu’u most times we’re there. I always learn from Berta, about marine life, ‘ulu, farming, the past, etc. She’s an amazing, knowledgable, generous woman. I’m sure she’s someone who’d appreciate a special lei.