A school lost to the 1946 tsunami, and the marble that names its dead
Laupāhoehoe Point is a low cape of old lava on the northeast coast of the Big Island, 24 miles up Route 19 from Hilo. The name means lava tip, for the angular point that ancient pāhoehoe flows built out into the sea, and in 1946 the community's school stood on it.
Early on 1 April 1946 a great earthquake struck under the sea near the Aleutian Islands of Alaska and sent a tsunami across the whole Pacific. It destroyed the Scotch Cap Lighthouse on Unimak Island, killing all five of its keepers, then crossed the ocean to Hawai‘i, where about 159 people died, 96 of them in Hilo. At Laupāhoehoe the water swept over the school on the point. It drowned 24 people there: 16 schoolchildren, four teachers and four other residents. The body of one boy, the only child of Susumu Sakamoto, was never recovered.
The memorial came from the community itself. The Rev. Kakusho Izumi, presiding minister of the Papaaloa and Honohina Hongwanji missions, went door to door through the neighboring villages collecting donations from families of every ethnic background and religious belief. A gravestone cutter in Hilo, a friend of his, carved the names of the dead into marble, and the county built the platform the stone stands on. For more than 70 years the names stood there with no word of how they came to be carved.
Decades earlier, Izumi's daughter, Tomo Izumi Mohideen, had promised a visitor from the mainland that the memorial would get a plaque. Mayor Harry Kim approved it, and in October 2019 a new plaque explaining the monument's purpose and history was set just below the names, before a gathering of about 40 people. The marble and its new plaque still stand on the point.
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