During World War II, there were many soldiers and sailors filling the sidewalks, restaurants, bars and pool halls on Mamo St. But as night fell, black-out regulations meant that the once-bustling nightlife there came to a halt. Ernie Kurohara was almost 8 years old when the war broke out. Ernie lived on Mamo Street above the Kurohara Tailor Shop, which his parents owned. Curfew regulations meant he was supposed to stay inside. Ernie and his friends had other ideas. "We used to go from house to house, traveling via the roof", he recalls with a grin. "We were able to play", he says, but "the only way that we were able to travel was on the roof tops and hide."
On the morning that the 1946 tsunami hit, sixth-grader Ernie was on his way to Hilo Union School to do his duty as a JPO - Junior Police Officer. But he noticed a lot of commotion by the bay, so he and some of the other JPOs ran down to the mouth of the Wailuku River. "There were people telling us not to go further", he says, "but being boys, we just went down as far as we could." Ernie says the first two waves weren't that big, but before the third wave, the water was sucked out of the bay, and they they could see the fish flopping around. |
Then, he says, "all of a sudden, when you looked at the horizon, you saw the water just piling up and there was a huge wall, and the wave started to come back." Ernie and everybody else ran, but Ernie turned and witnessed the tsunami's destructive power as the wave smashed into the railroad station. "I saw that wave pick up the station and throw it right across the street!" he recalls. The Kurohara Tailor Shop escaped with minor damage from the 1946 tsunami.
However, the 1960 tsunami destroyed most businesses on Mamo Street, including the Tailor Shop. Before then the family had moved from their apartment over the tailor shop to a house on Kaumana Street, so they weren't on Mamo after midnight May 23rd when the tsunami hit. But the next day they saw the destruction. "We were walking over buildings, crushed buildings," says Ernie. The days and weeks after the waves, Ernie says that life in downtown was "chaos, it was crazy." But like everyone else, he and his family picked up and relocated. Ernie took over the family tailor business and eventually expanded to nine retail and tuxedo rental stores in Hilo, Kona and on Maui. |
