Interview with June Utako Hanabusa
June Utako Hanabusa is a 73-year-old life-long Wai‘anae resident. June has excellent memories of her childhood years: raising pigeons, chickens, rabbits, parakeets, and pigs; selling chickens, pork, and eggs; growing vegetables in the yard. Her family took care of the public bath (for the plantation workers) using plantation-supplied water and heating it with vast amounts of alien kiawe that seemingly grew everywhere in Wai‘anae.
One of her most vivid memories of growing up in Wai‘anae was working with her family in making charcoal. The abundant kiawe would be cut down and hauled to the charcoal fires at a certain beach in Ma‘ili. Under very controlled burns, the wood would be transformed into one of the primary fuels (the other was kerosene) for cooking food and heating water in the old days. June wore old clothes for the filthy, dusty, ear-clogging, eye-watering task of cramming chunks of charcoal into burlap sacks. It was another way of making money for the family, but it was one that June hated the most.
Reference Cited
Coastal Zone Management (CZM) Hawaii. 2004. Record of a personal interview regarding life growing up in Waianae between Lehua Lopez-Mau, Ethnographer, and June Utako Hanabusa, Waianae Resident. March 20.
