Korean centennial draws volunteers to clean up cemetery

By Vicki Viotti
Advertiser Staff Writer

The Pu'uiki Cemetery in Waialua, once the target of vandals, will benefit from a major cleanup effort today in honor of the Korean centennial in Hawai'i. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

"I feel good when I go home," he said, glancing around the weathered tombstones, some 80 or 90 years old. "I feel peace when I'm here."

Choo is one of a band of devoted volunteers who have worked for years to reclaim the little graveyard from the brush and weeds and years of neglect.

Today, they will be joined by dozens more, including members of the Hawaii Korean Chamber of Commerce, the Korean American Coalition of Hawaii, the Honolulu Korean Jaycees and other organizations to spruce up one of the remaining overgrown sections of the cemetery.

The cemetery contains about 750 graves and is the final resting place of some of the earliest Korean immigrants brought to Hawai'i to work on the Waialua sugar plantation.

Today's cleanup project arose because of the celebration of the centennial of Korean immigration to Hawai'i.

The centennial committee brought Korean artist Bou Chan Park to the cemetery last fall to install the memorial sculpture that stands amid the workers' graves. One committee member was Andre Lee, chairman of today's project.

"We thought we had to do something," Lee said. "It looked neglected and forgotten. That was the sad part, really: to see that ancestors had names, to see the struggles that they went through, and then they're forgotten."

In fact, there are some who have remembered.

"There's one family who comes here every week from Makaha," Choo said, pointing toward one end of the cemetery.

A memorial was erected at Pu'uiki Cemetery in honor of Korean workers at the Waialua Sugar plantation. The cemetery is the final resting place for many immigrants brought to the Islands to work. Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser

"I found (haole) koa taller than I was," he said. "After about a year, we had a pile of rubbish 20 feet wide, 40 feet long and 4 feet high."

Keeping the weeds at bay has proven to be an unending burden.

In past years, crews from Schofield Barracks have worked to drive back the wall of weeds, Choo said, but it has come back.

More recently, Choo has been joined by people like Mike Miura, another descendant of Pu'uiki departed, in making routine maintenance visits, and now most of the worst weeds are gone.

Choo's great-grandmother, Hannah K. Gilman, was part Hawaiian; Miura's family is Japanese.

The plantation was home to various ethnic groups — Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Portuguese, Hawaiian — and so is Pu'uiki.

The Gilmans owned about 50 to 75 acres, Choo said. Their holdings once included the graveyard site, but it eventually was acquired by Waialua Sugar, he added.

It has been tough finding information about the cemetery, even for professional researchers.

Nanette Napoleon, a historian of O'ahu graveyards, searched plantation archives but was unable to learn much.

"In the early days, if cemeteries weren't associated with the church, mostly they went unrecorded," Napoleon said. "(Pu'uiki) was associated with Waialua Sugar ... but no official cemetery association took it over. And now sugar is out of there."

Choo has managed to track down a listing of the burials made by one family about 30 years ago and plans to identify as many of the plots as possible. Some of the graves went unmarked at the outset; others had stones that toppled and shattered.

But today, the volunteers simply intend to clear the remaining brush and continue the efforts to beautify the graves. At 12:30 p.m., they will adorn each tombstone with a lei, Lee said.

"When you walk through there, you feel kind of sad at how the communities have forgotten their past," he said. "Hopefully, this way we can bring back the respect."

Reach Vicki Viotti at vviotti@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-8053.