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The Honolulu Advertiser
Posted on: Monday, September 2, 2002

Festival showcases Okinawan food, culture

Drummers of the Hawai'i Taiko Kai perform at the Okinawan Festival in Kapi'olani Park. The two-day festival attracted about 50,000 people.

Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

A tourist from the East Coast stuck his head into the Culture Tent at the Okinawan Festival in Kapi'olani Park and bought a book to put into the school library when he got home.

"All I know about Okinawa is World War II," he told Hideko Masaki, a volunteer docent at the Okinawan Village in Waipahu.

The visitor was referring to America's bloody three-month battle with Japanese forces in 1945.

But for most of the 50,000 people at the festival this weekend, the name Okinawa meant andagi and pig's feet soup and children in the striped leggings of the pankaru costume beating drums.

Okinawans arrived in Hawai'i in 1900 to work on sugar plantations, and by 1925 some 20,000 had settled here, forming the basis of a community estimated at around 45,000 today.

Most of the people who lined up 23 deep for Okinawan doughnuts and the frankfurter variant called an "andadog" were of Okinawan extraction, festival coordinator George Tamashiro said.

But there were many who came to the festival for their first taste of the culture, and a glimpse of the influence Okinawans have had in the state.

Family names alone — such as Tamashiro, Kaneshiro, Arakawa and Teruya — hint at the success of children of plantation workers who became, for instance, well-known sea food merchants, a county prosecutor, country store proprietors or founders of a supermarket chain.

The small restaurant business on O'ahu became an Okinawan stronghold, according to Howard Takara, who is studying the families and clanfolk associated with such names as Zippy's, Flamingo, Wisteria, Likelike Drive-In, KC Drive-In and Victoria Inn.

"In my clan alone, the Oroku Azajin Club, we've identified families associated with 68 different restaurants beginning in the 1930s," Takara said.

Festival coordinator Tamashiro said it took about 4,000 people to put on this year's 20th annual festival, representing 51 clubs in the Hawai'i United Okinawa Association.

Most of the clubs are based on ties to a particular village or region of Okinawa, Tamashiro said.

This year's festival is expected to gross $500,000 from food and other booths, compared with $19,000 at the first festival, he said.

The association and the member clubs will net about $120,000 from the effort. Half goes to the clubs for their operations, and half to the association, partly to run the Okinawan Village.

More important, Tamashiro said, the numbers suggest Okinawan culture in Hawai'i is alive and well.

Reach Walter Wright at wwright@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8054.