Posted on: Friday, March 4, 2005

Ah Fook's must rise from ashes

By Lee Cataluna
Advertiser Columnist

It's about the chow fun under plastic wrap and the fish blood on the tile floor.

It's about the never-ending supply of thin-legged old men who spend the last years of their lives laughing with their buddies and spitting on the sidewalk like teenagers.

It's about the exquisite pain of walking past the refrigerated cases when you're wet from the ocean or chilled from War Memorial Pool, knowing that the suffering will be worth it when you get back to your warm car and scarf down that poke.

Ah Fook's is about all those things, those small details of Maui life, the smells and tastes and odd little traditions, and more.

That's why Ah Fook's must rise again.

The store, destroyed by a fire that raged through much of Kahului Shopping Center on Sunday, has served as a portal to the real Maui, the old Maui, the Maui that even 20-year-olds remember with sad longing.

There is hope.

Ah Fook's has survived tsunamis and break-ins, competition from mega-Mainland supermarkets and a changing population base that doesn't eat gobo or ogo or balut.

It even survived its own little crime wave.

In June 1962, a safecracker got into the store after hours on a Saturday night. The thief, thought by police to be a "professional" safecracker, used a hammer and steel punches to knock off the numbered dial and get at the tumblers. The safecracker got away with about $8,000.

A year later, it happened again.

But nothing, not time or tide or pressure of the global marketization of Maui, ever took Ah Fook's spirit.

At times, the little local store was even innovative in its own way.

In the 1950s, Ah Fook's became the first store on Maui, and one of the first stores in Hawai'i, to install automatic doors. A Honolulu columnist wrote:

"Imagine my surprise the other day when I walked into Ah Fook's Super Market in the Kahului Shopping Center and had the doors automatically open before me and then close by themselves when I got inside. ... Enterprising Jimmy Mizoguchi, veteran manager of Ah Fook's, got the automatic doors idea for his air-conditioned establishment after trips to the Mainland and Japan. He got them installed just in time for his market's seventh anniversary in the shopping center."

This year, Ah Fook's was celebrating its 50th anniversary at the Kahului Shopping Center, though the store existed at other locations for much longer than that.

If Ah Fook's can rise up after the destruction of fire, it will mean more to Maui than the fish counter and the boiled peanuts and the chow fun, more than the friendly old-time clerks and the customers who have grown up and grown old in those narrow aisles; it will be a sign that the best of what Maui used to be can still survive.

Lee Cataluna's column runs Tuesdays, Fridays and Sundays. Reach her at 535-8172 or lcataluna@honoluluadvertiser.com.