I’m ashamed to admit: We sometimes buy our groceries at Whole Foods. It’s ridiculously expensive, but just so dang convenient. I can pick out all my groceries online — click, click, click — and then swing through the parking lot an hour later, where a cheerful employee loads up my trunk with products from around the world. But when we need something quick, a carton of milk or an avocado, we drive a few minutes up the road to our funky little Haʻikū neighborhood market: Hanzawa’s.
When I’m at Whole Foods I could be just about anywhere — San Francisco or Seattle — and the brightly lit store with neatly stocked shelves would feel much the same. But when I’m at Hanzawa’s, the cardboard boxes of local bananas, the deli case of musubi and mochi, and the barefoot dude with dreadlocks searching the shelves and reeking of marijuana tell me I am most definitely on Maui.
It’s one of the oldest surviving mom and pop plantation-era stores on the island — along with Morihara’s in Kula and Hasegawa’s in Hāna. These dusty old stores with fading paint and vintage signs are so much more than convenience stores. Their creaking walls tell stories of Hawaiʻi’s past — stories that can help us understand Hawaiʻi’s present. And they might have some lessons to teach us about Hawaiʻi’s future, too.
Taichiro Hanzawa came to Maui from Fukushima, Japan, in 1904 to work on a Maui sugar plantation. He was part of a massive wave of immigration that happened in the islands between the 1850s and 1930s, as hundreds of thousands of laborers from China, Japan, Korea, and the Philippines were brought to Hawaiʻi, many as indentured servants arriving already in debt to plantation owners for their passage, room and board.
Many of these workers came to escape poverty and turmoil in their homelands, but then found themselves trapped in tough conditions working on haole-owned sugar plantations far from home: 10-to-12-hour days of hard, hot labor in sugar fields and mills, unsanitary barracks, whippings, and even imprisonment for acts of resistance.
When Hawaiʻi became a U.S. territory in 1900, labor contracts and immigration patterns shifted with changing laws, but power remained firmly in the hands of plantation owners. Labor strikes were common in the islands during the early 1900s. Some workers escaped and fled to the U.S. continent, and many left the plantation after their contracts ended. A few went back to their homelands, but some had nothing to go back to. So they stayed in the islands and found other ways to survive.
In 1915, Taichiro left the plantation and opened Hanzawa’s Variety Store in a converted house to serve the growing community of Haʻikū. Not long after, his brother Tetsuji left Japan and joined him on Maui to help out. In many ways the store anchored the town, back in the days when many people arrived on foot or on horseback. The brothers supported local farmers by selling their produce, and local fishermen, ranchers and bakers by putting their products on the shelves.
The Great War was already underway in Europe, Asia, Africa and other parts of the Pacific when Taichiro opened his store, but even after the United States joined the Allied Powers in 1917, daily life in what was then the U.S. territory of Hawaiʻi was mostly unchanged. The Hanzawa brothers and their families kept their heads down on Maui and continued growing their business.
Then, one morning in 1941, Hawaiʻi’s bubble of safety popped. Fighter planes from the Imperial Japanese Navy swept the islands, dropping bombs on U.S. naval ships in Pearl Harbor, killing more than 2,000 American soldiers and sailors and throwing the islands into chaos. The U.S. government declared martial law in Hawaiʻi — there were curfews, blackouts, food rations, the media and personal correspondence were censored, habeas corpus (the right to a legal court trial) and civilian courts were suspended, and Asian residents of all backgrounds were regarded with mistrust by many.
In the midst of this rampant xenophobia, the Hanzawa brothers, both born in Japan, were arrested on suspicion of disloyalty, and along with 2,000 other Hawaiʻi residents of Japanese ancestry, they were imprisoned — without charges or trial — in American detention camps.
This happened all across the country; in total about 120,000 Japanese people living in the U.S. were sent to camps, including more than 70,000 who were full American citizens; mixed-race children and white spouses were also imprisoned. The Hanzawa brothers were sent to large detention camps in New Mexico, where they lived in overcrowded conditions for more than three years while their wives and children worked to keep the store open on Maui.
At that time, it was estimated that Hawaiʻi residents relied on imports for 63% of their food, and an active war in the Pacific severely disrupted the supply chain (today the amount of imported food is closer to 90% — an alarming fact). Locally owned stores like Hanzawa’s became a lifeline for the community by providing access to homegrown goods.
In 1945, the U.S. government dropped two atomic bombs on the brothers’ home country of Japan, obliterating two cities and killing more than 200,000 civilians — an act of such ferocious horror that leaders around the world condemned this as a crime against humanity that should never be repeated. The war was declared over, and the Japanese prisoners being held in American camps were released.
When the Hanzawas returned to Maui, the store was still standing — it had survived, and thrived, through the war. They added a gas station in front, still the only gas station for miles. The store burned down in the 1970s and was rebuilt, and the next generation of Hanzawas eventually took over. In 2010, the family leased the store to their neighbors and then in 2012 it was sold to a local business partnership, which has preserved the original look and function of this historic Haʻikū community market.
Many of the elders from the generations that lived through this tumultuous time in Hawaiʻi — including my father and my grandparents, who lived in Honolulu during the war — are no longer around. First-hand stories of that era are fading away and being forgotten. But the events that unfolded in the islands during those years feel particularly relevant to me now: xenophobia, the scapegoating of immigrants, detentions without due process of the law. The deployment of federal military troops in U.S. cities, the erosion of free speech and pressure to censor the media. Questions of food security in the islands in the midst of global conflicts and crises.
All of this played out in the story of Hanzawa's Variety Store back then, and has important implications for us now. Many people here think Hawaiʻi is a safe little bubble, that things happening "out there" in the world won't affect us here. But history tells us otherwise.
On Friday afternoons, after picking up my kids at school, we often stop at Hanzawa’s for ice cream — it’s become a kind of kick-off-the-weekend tradition. My kids head straight for the ice cream freezer, but I head for the cardboard boxes of local bananas and avocados.
I support my local market and island growers because I want to make sure they survive and thrive — because someday we might find we really need them. In a tight economy competition is tough, and it would be heartbreaking to see this community relic replaced by a 7-Eleven or some other generic chain store. I could buy my avocados and bananas at Safeway or Whole Foods — it might be cheaper or more convenient — but most of those were shipped all the way from Mexico, Colombia and other places. At Hanzawa’s I know they’re fresh and island-grown, no cargo ships needed — they came straight down the road from Hāna.
