"People who have only known Mamo Street for the last 10 or 20 years might wonder why we're celebrating a place that was, until recently, considered a bit seamy and steamy," says Donna Saiki, director of the Pacific Tsunami Museum. "But old Mamo Street before the 1960 tsunami was a lively little community where families lived above their shops and restaurants. This is the Mamo Street we will celebrate at this year's story festival."

Just a couple of blocks long, Mamo was a colorful, aromatic boulevard of shops selling noodles, flowers, live chickens, fish, comic books, crack seed and more. There was a drugstore, tailor shop, barber shop, liquor store, appliance store, pool halls, bars and two movie theaters — one that showed only Japanese movies and featured live Japanese entertainment. No wonder that Howard Ogi, whose parents owned Ogi Noodle Shop, says Mamo Street was like "the Times Square of Hilo."

Over the past several months, a number of people who lived and worked on Mamo Street have been interviewed for the Pacific Tsunami Museum's archives, and most of these Hilo residents will be at the festival. The museum's board of directors will share the stories of people such as Ruth Fujimoto, who played piano for famous Japanese singers who came to perform at the Yamatoza Theater; people like tailor shop owner Ernie Kurohara, who, as a boy during WWII, used to scamper across the rooftops with his friends after curfew; and people like Ayato Sakaki, whose parents owned a barber shop, and who spent his evenings staring out the second floor window of the family apartment at all the activity below—plantation workers, neighborhood families, military men—everyone there to shop or just have a good time.

The April 1, 1946, tsunami caused flooding to the shops along Mamo Street, but it was the 1960 tsunami that forever changed life on the street. All the buildings on the east side of the street along the block fronting Kamehameha Avenue were reduced to splinters. Today, this open space is part of the Hilo Farmers' Market.