typical rough waters off Laupahoehoe Point
All the information I had about the 1946 tsunami and the Laupahoehoe tragedy was passed on verbally to me as a child, and it wasn't until much later that I actually looked at anything written. What surprised me was how much of the stories I was told was confirmed by the reportage, and more importantly, how more vivid these oral accounts were because of the way they were told.
It made me appreciate all the more the oral history projects and other efforts to gather first-hand accounts of what happened on April Fool's Day in 1946 in Laupahoehoe. When younger generations of people conduct these projects, it helps them understand by immersing them in a time and perspective that might otherwise be more difficult to appreciate. In cases like the Laupahoehoe tragedy, certain aspects of these incidents go unspoken as survivors may prefer to cope by not talking about their experiences.
I got my hands on a book about a homegrown oral history project done by students at the Laupahoehoe School with survivors of the tsunami fifty years later. Hearing the survivors tell their stories in the vernacular with the details that they alone noticed made it all come alive.
Besides the accounts of the survivors, the book also has essays and poems done by third and fifth grade students, many of them descendants of the survivors, as well as the telling black-and-white photographs of Laupahoehoe taken before and after the tsunami.
More rigorous oral history projects have been done, but one that intrigued me was a post-graduate dissertation (that was further developed later by the Center for Oral History at the University of Hawaii) by Warren Nishimoto that included a remarkable narrative by Marsue McGinnis, the only teacher to survive after being swept out to sea by the tsunami.
In it, she tells of how she survived by clinging to a door, and during all the hours she spent out on the ocean, she only encountered other people a few times, three boys who were dropped a raft by a plane but too far away to be noticed by them, a boy who tried to swim out to a passing ship and was never seen again, and the two boys found clinging to a tree. Most victims must have drowned in the initial maelstrom. As McGinnis stressed, being lucky not to have been seriously injured by rocks, trees, and other debris was more important than being a good swimmer.
Another thing I noticed in the oral history accounts was how so many of the survivors knew each other and how this crossed ethnic groups in the community. Not only stories about the tsunami but little details about life in Laupahoehoe, the pigs being raised in the school farm, the Chinese woman who worked as a postmaster named after a Hawaiian midwife living nearby, the Buddhist temple serving the Japanese community, etc., gave context and color making the community come alive.
The information in these oral history projects is amazing, and it's interesting to see the specific details people chose to remember. I found the minutiae not only helped animate the stories but also made them easier to relate to. Even though I grew up in Hawaii, 1946 in rural Hawaii was an age apart characterized by a lifestyle that I only experienced in those intermittent visits to my grandfather's farm on the Big Island. I wonder how my children would react to these stories as they are even more removed in time and place.
All the more reason, then, that these histories that capture such a vivid sense of the local culture be documented and stored carefully for future generations.
Sources referred to and links for sources if available
(Disclaimer: Images of publications contain affiliate links.)
Center for Oral History, TSUNAMIS REMEMBERED: Oral Histories of Survivors and Observers in Hawai'i, Social Science Research Institute, University of Hawai'i at Manoa, April 2002.
url: (link to pdf) (Note: Much of the material is also related to an earlier dissertation for post-graduate studies by Warren Nishimoto, one of the principal interviewers.)
Center for Oral History (web site), Historical Events, Tsunamis Remembered, University of Hawaii at Manoa.
url: http://www.oralhistory.hawaii.edu/pages/historical/tsunami.html
Hazlett, Richard W. and Hyndman, Donald W., Roadside Geology of Hawaii, Mountain Press Publishing Company, 2002.
Hebenstreit, Gerald T., Tsunami Research at the End of a Critical Decade, Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001.
Laupahoehoe School, April Fool's... The Laupahoehoe Tragedy of 1946, An Oral History, Obun Hawaii, Inc., 1997.
(Note: At this writing, this book is still available at the Pacific Tsunami Museum in Hilo and the Laupahoehoe Train Museum in Laupahoehoe which is where I picked up my copy. Both museums are well worth spending time to visit, and the Laupahoehoe Train Museum will not only give you your fill in train memorabilia but also provide a backward glance into the time and culture of the plantation towns like Laupahoehoe.)
Pacific Tsunami Museum, 130 Kamehameha Ave., Hilo, Hawaii.
url: http://www.tsunami.org
Westervelt, William Drake, Hawaiian Legends of Volcanoes, Ellis Press, 1916.
url: at The Internet Archive
And articles in the Honolulu Advertister and Star-Bulletin (both now Honolulu Star-Advertiser).
© Lawrence Taguma All rights reserved.