Posted on: Sunday, February 6, 2005

OUR HONOLULU

By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

All women are aware that men succeed because of their wives. Gladys Yoshimura is a firm believer in this wisdom and she offers her mother, Mrs. (Kane Yanagihara) Otani, as an example.

Kane's husband, Matsujiro Otani, was the highly successful founder of what is now the United Fishing Agency. He rose from a poor immigrant to a tycoon of the fishing industry. His son continued in his father's footsteps and bought a home next to Lowell Dillingham on Diamond Head.

The tale of Matsujiro Otani goes like this. He landed in Hawai'i at age 18 with 25 cents in his pocket and began selling fish door-to-door from baskets slung over his shoulder. With the profits, he bought a team of horses and expanded the business by selling fish from a wagon.

However, a fireball spooked his team one day and it ran away. Otani's daughter, Gladys, and his granddaughter Emogene can't explain the fireball. In those days, there were a lot of cesspools in Honolulu generating methane gas. Maybe gas from a cesspool ignited spontaneously. That would explain the fireball.

In any event, Otani decided he'd better sell his fish from trucks instead of by horse and wagon. Before long, he was the biggest fish dealer in Our Honolulu.

Gladys approaches Otani's success from another angle — her mother, Kane Yanagihara, the financial foundation for Otani's expansion from horse and cart to trucks. So let us tell you about Kane.

She was born in Kaka'ako and her mother was a midwife, according to Gladys. Midwifery must have been a good business to be in, similar to doctoring today, because Kane's mother belonged in the upper middle class in Kaka'ako. She owned land and sent Kane back to Japan for education at age 2.

But Kane cried all the time, so they sent her home to Hawai'i when she was 10. The family engaged in various profitable endeavors like selling shave ice to immigrants coming off the ships. That's how Kane met Otani; he was coming down the gangplank and she sold him some shave ice.

They married and Kane provided her husband with a truck after his horses spooked from the fireball. She must have been a first-class businesswoman because Gladys said she acted as banker for the tanomoshi (an informal savings-and-loan cooperative) to which she and Otani belonged. However, Kane never took any credit.

Gladys is much the same way. Another thing about her is that she loves sea turtles. When a fisherman brought in a sea turtle, Otani bought it for her, paying a little more than it would bring in the market. She would put the sea turtle in the trunk of her car and drive to Kewalo Basin where the turtle would head straight for the water.

Daughter Emogene remembers being picked up at Punahou in her mother's Lincoln Continental with a turtle in the trunk.