'Ohana Festival brings cultures together
By Peter Boylan
Advertiser Staff Writer
Men donned kilts and waited for heaping plates of adobo while women wearing kimonos shared spaghetti yesterday at the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i's New Year's 'Ohana Festival.
Gregory Yamamoto • The Honolulu Advertiser
Many parts of Hawai'i's melting pot of ethnicities and cultures were represented at yesterday's festival, housed in the JCCH's South Beretania Street headquarters and at the Mo'ili'ili Field.
Sensei Hanae Miura, left, judged strikes as students with the Hawai'i Naginata Federation gave a fighting demonstration during the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai'i's New Year's 'Ohana Festival yesterday. Various cultural traditions were shared at the event.
During the plantation days, it was the Japanese who held the Oshogatsu (New Year's parties) that everyone wanted to go to, said Keiko Bonk, president and executive director of JCCH. It was custom, she said, for Japanese families to cook and clean for days leading up and into the new year.
Families from different regions in Japan cooked different dishes, a custom they brought to the plantations, Bonk said.
"Then the tradition was shared with all cultures," Bonk said.
Festival goers mingled around a rectangle of food booths, while volunteers doled out everything from lau lau and meat jun, to Okinawan stir-fry and okonomiyaki.
Okonomiyaki, by far the most popular dish of the day, is a combination of vegetables, stir-fried noodles and meat between a crepe and fried egg with nori. Lines for the dish, prepared by chefs from Hiroshima City in Japan, stretched half the width of the field.
"What is important about Hawai'i is that people get exposed to other cultures and they gain a better understanding (of the other cultures)," said former Gov. George Ariyoshi, as he sat with his grandchildren under the food tent yesterday. "It is everybody's culture that you have to bring together."
In addition to the food, crafters occupied clusters of booths, selling everything from traditional Japanese paintings to T-shirts with messages scrawled in kanji.
At the JCCH's main building, Jayme Sakaguchi, a 21-year-old University of Nevada Las Vegas student, squinted and smiled as she carefully worked on her ikebana skills. Ikebana is the Japanese art of flower arranging.
Bertha Tottori, 65, president of Ikebana International, said the practice of ikebana contrasts with the symmetrical practice most often used in Western flower arrangements. She said the foundation of ikebana is the triangle shape that the flowers must form while maintaining varying elevations in the arrangement.
At the main stage, organizations performed traditional Okinawan, Japanese, Filipino and Korean dances. On the field stage, local band Dusty 45's played to the lunch crowd in between martial arts demonstrations.
Reach Peter Boylan at 535-8110 or pboylan@honoluluadvertiser.com.
