Sumo’s Unsung Hawaiian Hero

Author Mark Panek first met former professional sumotori George Kalima 26 years ago while researching his acclaimed biography of Waimanalo’s Chad Rowan, Gaijin Yokozuna. Bonded by their deep connections to the Land of the Rising Sun, the two became lifelong friends, with Kalima also contributing priceless cultural insight into Panek’s award-winning Big Happiness, a biography of sumotori Percy Kipapa. And Yamato is the author’s loving tribute to Kalima, who passed away in January at the age of 54.

---

Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki!

The song has such a catchy hook that they still play it on the radio sometimes, Braddah Iz’s honey-sweet voice ringing out across three full decades from the middle of that golden era of Hawai‘i’s connection with Japan’s national sport. 

The musical names fall so easily into that sticky uke-driven melody that you have to sing along. Even all these years later, those to-the-point lyrics nail the kind of story we all eat up: Local Boy, far from home, done good. We’re mesmerized back in time, right down to the final three words, ha‘ina-like, almost whispered in an if-you-know-you-know way that turns it into a song as much about the places as the names: 

Waimanalo. Nanakuli. Waianae. 

Represent! 

See, these particular Local Boyz Done Good: not just from Hawai‘i, but from roots Hawai‘i places, the kind where Gentrified Hawai‘i likely never has and never will even set foot, their misguided fears stoked by a generation of Pearl City grandmas who’ve never even held a meaningful conversation with a Hawaiian person. Places that the very same downtown-State-worker-Bishop-Square folks gathered around their TVs claiming Akebono as their own always enjoyed looking down on with a wink-and-a-nod recital of the usual tired stereotypes, if not simply pronouncing them right out loud:

Lazy, das why.

Then along comes Braddah Iz, right in the middle of his own peak mid-‘90s years, the Haunani-kay Trask years, the birth-of-Punana-Leo years, fresh off of the haunting Hawai‘i ’78 anthem that announced his inclusion in a decolonization canon stretching all the way back to the Kalakaua-penned Hawai‘i Pono‘i—Hawai‘i’s Own True Sons. Like Kalakaua’s mele, like the writing of Dr. Trask, or John Dominis Holt, the proud-to-be-Hawaiian man often credited with the very birth of the Hawaiian Renaissance, Israel Kamakawiwo‘ole’s E Ala E decolonization message was a simple one: 

We’re still here.

Waimanalo. Nanakuli. Waianae. 

To mid-‘90s Gentrified Hawai‘i, only then also beginning to claim Waianae grad Braddah Iz as their own in a fashionable Hawai‘i Theater sort of way, he’s saying, “How you like us now?”

And it’s not just the song’s poetic verses that capture so succinctly those ’Nalo values of gentle giants, deep family connections, pride in representing a tight-knit community. As in so many great Hawaiian songs, the deeper message lay in what is left unspoken, in an if-I-have-to-tell-you-you-wouldn’t-get-it-anyway kind of way. Take that ’Nalo-like “us-guys” two-beat pause that follows the hook: it’s pretty much inviting you to add more names as you sing along:

 Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki! 

And…? 

Old timers will sing out the name of Takamiyama, Jesse Kuhaulua, the first foreigner to win a sumo championship, way back in 1972. Castle grads will add Daiki, Percy Kipapa, only the 14th foreigner in sumo history to reach the paid ranks. Farrington will add Ozora. Kailua? Koryu. Up north? John Feleunga and Taylor Wylie, Wayne Vierra. Kaiser: Nanfu, Wakachikara, Sunahama. 

In all, you could squeeze another twelve names into that two-beat space, twelve Local Boyz who graduated high school and took a look around—this some thirty years before AirBnB and Gentrified Hawai‘i had utterly decimated such a young man’s prospects of ever making a life in his own homeland—and saw more promising futures getting repeatedly thrown to the hard clay, barked at in a baffling incomprehensible language, lost in a strange land thousands of miles from the most loving families anyone could ever know, basically fighting for their lives against guys who were raised in a Tokyo sumo stable.

Yes, hovering around the edges of the song is another name, a Japanese name: the legendary Yokozuna Takanohana. He drifts into your head during the brief recorded samples of morning sumo practice, bodies crashing, shouts of encouragement echoing out of your car radio, the Boyz hard at work preparing to take on a whole country, the very same Japan who’d just bought up all but one of Waikiki’s many hotels, who’d just paved the Windward Valleys with thousands of acres of new golf courses, who’d been known to show up at local homes with suitcases full of cash to buy them on the spot. 

Takanohana hadn’t traveled to a sumo stable from a thousand miles away. He wasn’t sometimes lonely, far away from family—he had simply walked downstairs one day to begin his legendary climb up the sumo ranks alongside his older brother Wakanohana, both of them trained right there since little-kid time in their very own house by their own father and uncle. As a rookie in sumo’s top division, Taka had caused the great Yokozuna Chiyonofuji—many say the best of all time—to call it quits. Won his first championship at a record-young age of 19. Won his second just eight months later.

So when IZ sings it out, They made history in a foreign land, the whole scene reforms in your brain like a Youtube video: the silence of ten thousand people holding their breath inside Japan’s Hall of National Sport, Akebono versus Takanohana, the two rivals who’d entered professional sumo on the very same day, both crouched and ready. 

They charge! Akebono rises with a kaminari-quick hand to the throat that sends Takanohana into the second row. The announcer screams it out again and again: 

Akebono-no yusho! Akebono-no yusho! 

And finally, that moment of incredible restraint: with this win, Akebono will become the first non-Japanese in the centuries-old sport to be promoted to its top rank of Yokozuna. Arms held in triumph? Flexing? Strutting all around the ring in look-at-me fashion? Not a chance. In fact, to look at him you can hardly tell who won. All Akebono can do is bow his head with the sort of humble dignity his cousin Nate Spencer had drilled into him whenever he’d drain a three-pointer in the driveway on Humuniki Street: 

Make like you do that all the time! No ac’! Stay humble!

That right there, the song knows, if only in its reverent tone more than its words, is what really made Hawai‘i proud. With lines like, Let’s all celebrate, and honor these mighty ones, or With dignity, they are Hawai‘i’s sumotori, Braddah Iz is hinting at what we all sensed the first time we watched a top-knotted Akebono solemnly conduct a formal TV interview in Japanese. Namely: success in this ancient honorable sport in this country so well known for politeness and protocol depended on far more than just throwing the other guy out of the ring—especially if you were already gaijin, a foreigner. You had to conduct yourself in the most stereotypically dignified way the Japanese like to think of themselves, even our very own nisei-sansei-yonsei Japanese right here in Nu‘uanu and Aina Haina and Manoa Valley and the rest of Gentrified Hawai‘i. 

You had to act Japanese.

How did sumo become Hawaiian, anyway?

And yet…

Here’s the thing about what Braddah Iz is saying in this Local Boy anthem, one with a Japanese title so much of ni-san-yon-sei Gentrified Hawai‘i needed translated: as much as sumo had thrived mid-last-century back on Hawai‘i’s sugar plantations, it never followed our nisei from Waialua to Mililani or Salt Lake, let alone back across an ocean to a brutally cold and unforgiving Tokyo sumo stable. Those national heroes of ours, famous idols in Japan—if our Boyz were making it up there, it wasn’t because they’d grown up staring at their great-grandpa’s katana mounted on the living room wall in Pearl City. 

It was because they’d been raised since little-kid time to go kiss grandma and then all the aunties and uncles the moment you arrived at the baby luau, and only then run off to play with your cousins. When both parents were working late, you cooked the rice and made sure your brothers and sisters got their homework done. If one of the uncles called for clean fish, clean yard, kalua one pig, bag smoke meat, pour one slab, set up tent? You showed up. You worked, all the while knowing Gentrified Hawai‘i always thought the opposite of you, your whole life.

The guys on Braddah Iz’s list did indeed embody the sumo values of patience, fighting spirit, hard work, and above all, respect, maybe better than anybody in Hawai‘i. But it wasn’t because they particularly cared or even knew about anything Japanese.

Fully half of them came from the same neighborhood in Waimanalo.

Two were raised in the same house.

Three, if you count Akebono, who often slept over at the home of his best friend since elementary, his 1979 Pop Warner State Champ teammate, his inseparable braddah all the way through high school: George Kalima.

Yamato.

Sing it with me: Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki.  

And Yamato!

Out of all twelve, it’s that Hawaiian man’s name that fits best into that two-beat space, in oh-so-many ways: Yamato. George Kalima. Kaiser ’87. After a post-grad adventure driving for UPS in California had turned out to be far from what it was cracked up to be (and who among us who knew George could imagine his tolerance for being mistaken for another LA Mexican, or for having to yes-man for your typical California Karen, or manager, or landlord, etc.), with no other opportunities in sight back in Gentrified Hawai‘i, George took a look at what Akebono was pulling off in Japan and thought, Why not? So at the the age of 19—yes, the same age that would see the great future Yokozuna Takanohana already winning a major top-division tournament—George decided to fly up to Tokyo to check out what this sumo thing was all about.

It would take another eight back-breaking years of pounding his bare feet into the rock-hard training room clay, but fighting as Yamato, George Kalima made a steady climb up another list, the banzuke, the ranked list of professional sumo’s eight-hundred-plus competitors, to become only the fifth non-Japanese in the centuries-old sport to reach its top division. 

By January of 1998, Akebono would have lifted the Emperor’s Cup another incredible six times, well on the way to a career total of eleven championships that would put him in the company of sumo’s all-time greats. In the midst of his own steady climb, Musashimaru was just a year away from joining Akebono at the very top of the banzuke as the second gaijin yokozuna in history. 

Only a few short weeks prior, Konishiki had stepped out of the ring for the final time, able, at least, to look back with a sense of pride knowing that if his own yokozuna promotion had been denied, it was because the tournament that would have clinched it for him had been won by, yes, Takanohana, by now the holder of 18 out of the 22 tournament championships he would go on to win, third-most of all time. 

Now try to imagine George Kalima, Yamato, standing beside the practice ring one morning a couple of weeks prior to the January 1998 New Year’s Tournament, when this very man, Yokozuna Takanohana, steps into the ring and begins calling in and easily wrapping up one opponent after the next, each man a top-division veteran who has faced the already-legendary Yokozuna multiple times in practice, in public exhibitions, in actual tournament matches. 

In a scene reminiscent of Akebono’s early years learning the unfamiliar sport when he used to cross Tokyo daily just to spar against his main rival—surprisingly, not an unusual training tactic in this tight-knit sport—Akebono and Musashimaru are both limbering up directly behind where Takanohana lines up for his charge, both preparing to be summoned into the ring once Taka is sufficiently warmed up. 

Then right there in our song’s two-beat space, you can picture the whole thing, what happens next: Yokozuna Takanohana stands from his crouch. He sweeps a bare foot across the white line painted on the hard clay, clearing it of sand. He slaps a hand hard on his white canvas practice mawashi with a loud pop, looks around among the dozen-or-so men standing around the training area, and then gives that barely perceptible Yokozuna nod to…

Yamato?

“Onegaishimasu!” is what George Kalima says with a deep bow, for as much as he like start smashing, he also knows it is a great honor to even be asked to step into the practice ring with any yokozuna, let alone one descended from sumo royalty. That, plus for eight years he’s been watching Takanohana handle the kind of deadly Akebono charges that could break your fucken neck, and then go on to march the big Hawaiian straight out of the ring, neva mind the 150-plus-pound weight disadvantage. Today, not only has Taka not lost all morning—he has yet to even break a sweat. The guy, George knows all too well, can fight.

Yamato goes into his crouch and waits for all four hands to hit the clay, his mind focused on one thing only, something nobody’s ever pointed out to him, something he’s picked up all on his own, just by watching, watching in the way Uncle Martin told him he’d learned slack-key from the greatest of all time, Pops Pahinui. Watching in the haumana way his sister ‘Ipo learned ‘ukulele from Aunty Kealoha as a little girl, hula from her kumu. Watching in the way so many have always learned so much in Waimanalo: you don’t ask questions. You pay attention, and then you do. 

Yamato has been watching for eight years now, so he waits, ready to explode, but with a sense of calm and a clear head, because he knows he’s the only one who’s found it: the one weak point in the great Yokozuna’s game.   

They charge.

In an instant, Takanohana is blown back out of the ring, slamming into the paneled wall right between where Akebono and Musashimaru are warming up. As shocked as they all are, out of great respect to the Yokozuna the room remains quiet. Even Yamato offers nothing but a respectful bow of the head, as if what he just pulled off was some kind of lucky shot.

Having awakened Takanohana, once again Yamato gets the nod, everyone looking on a bit more intently now, each man wondering which of an endless supply of techniques the Yokozuna will use to sit this guy down and move on to his next opponent.

Again, all four hands hit the clay. Bodies slam. Again, Takanohana is blown straight into the paneled wall. Now breathing heavily, he holds out his hand for a towel. He takes his time wiping the sweat from his face, from his arms, from each hand, before handing it back. Again: the nod to Yamato—and is Takanohana now the one thinking about honor? About his own obligation to his exalted rank? Here in a roomful of his fiercest competitors, men he is usually halfway to defeating by reputation alone? Surely now is the time to set things right.

They charge. Once again Yamato executes in the instant, again shooting his left hand inside of Takanohana’s right and lifting both of their arms high in the air to set the Yokozuna off balance, in the same moment pushing with his mighty legs, his own right hand locked vice-like on Taka’s belt, one-two-three steps forward and yes: straight out of the ring.

Over and over and over again, George calmly repeats the strategy. Nobody can believe it: Yamato is toying with one of the top three sumotori of all time, going back hundreds of years. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees his stable boss, Magaki Oyakata, a former yokozuna himself, barely able to contain his excitement. 

He squats in position one more time, again waiting for Takanohana, who is now clearly fret-ting. The Yokozuna towels off again in effort to slow his labored breathing. Right there behind him in George’s line of sight stand Akebono and Musashimaru, both of them now thrilled enough with what they’re seeing to bend the training area protocol just a bit, if not all the way back to the Kaiser High football field: “Go right through him, Hawaiian!” they’re saying, each man gesturing with both hands: “Come straight through to us!”

Straight through to us!

Even in the moment, the symbolic meaning of the command isn’t lost on George. Sure, they want to see another solid charge right here in the practice area. But they’re saying so much more than that. Everyone in the room, in fact, is starting to become aware that they’re witnessing a breakthrough performance. For a full decade now they’ve only ever seen Akebono trade wins back and forth with Takanohana. Musashimaru: same. George himself has never seen anyone eke out more than a couple of consecutive wins against the Yokozuna before ultimately getting schooled. So he knows on some level that when the Local Boyz say it out loud—Come straight through to us!—they’re also talking about the banzuke: Come all the way up to the top, Yamato, and sit here with us. Sit right here and go down in history alongside Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki. 

The two men charge again, Yamato and the Yokozuna. They charge for the eighth and final time. It is the final time because Yokozuna Takanaohana, now exhausted, and maybe embarrassed by yet another loss, is over it. His mighty chest heaving, he accepts the towel handed to him and stands off to the side, clearly having had enough of getting thrown into the wall by this Hawaiian from Waimanalo.

The author and George Kalima, 1998

Curious about George

“See, they gotta go for his right arm,” was how George finally explained it a couple of years later. 

I’d heard versions of the story from our friend Dave, and later from Akebono, but humble as he is, I had to pry the details out of George himself. “You just gotta get your left under his right before he can grab the belt, then lift up, and he cannot do notting.” He even had me help him demonstrate the move in a slow walk-through of a sumo charge that left my own right arm dangling in the air above my head, the big man having shot his left hand just underneath mine to immobilize it while gracefully sliding forward, Baryshnikov to my Herman Munster. 

Back then, you had to wonder why Yamato had to tell me the story not in the back changing room of Japan’s Hall of National Sport after hoisting his own third or fourth Emperor’s Cup, but in the kitchen of the Roppongi restaurant he’d opened only a couple of years later. 

Once he’d given me all the details, I went right on prying that story out of George for the next twenty five years, especially whenever I detected some at-least-he-wen’-try whiff in the air when guys were sitting around the cooler at some wedding or baby luau and the topic of sumo came up, or if I was introducing him to somebody for the first time. As full of respect as everyone always was that George had simply gone to Japan and been able to build a full and successful life, the blinding glare of a spotlight directed at Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki could leave some of them feeling as if George had somehow fallen short.

“See, it’s the right arm,” he’d eventually say, almost pained, at first, to have to deliver a tale where he himself is the hero. But then guys would start leaning in: “Ho!” and “Ho, nah!” so that by the third charge, George’s story would be rolling, everybody locked in, George himself beginning to light up with pride, yet with his face beaming in a way you could only describe as bashful. He’d start acting the whole thing out, too: 

“Come through all the way to us, Hawaiian!”

Inevitably somebody would wonder aloud why nobody had ever written a song about the great Yamato, why that television and those magazines had left him out. Sometimes he would give them those details, too, about the sudden exit from sumo that had followed on the heels of his triumphant day sparring with Yokozuna Takanohana. All eyes around the circle would widen, jaws would drop, heads shake. First it was pneumonia, contracted just before the start of the January 1998 New Year’s Tournament, one that saw a severely weakened Yamato losing match after match, but stepping into the ring anyway to try to avoid getting sent all the way back down the banzuke, since sumo rules treat absences as losses. Hospitalized for over a month, George nearly died in there, saved only by the last-ditch effort of slashing a hole in his side and inserting a tube so that the water in his lungs could shoot out with garden-hose force. The Osaka Spring Tournament happened without Yamato, who was credited anyway with a 0-15 record that sent him to the bottom of juryo, sumo’s second-tier division. Still not even close to full strength when he finally made it back to practice, Yamato posted another losing record in May that sent him down further. 

Plans for a strong showing against these lower-rankers in July were met with the oncoming car that struck George when he paused to push two of his sumo-stable-mates out of harm’s way, saving their lives, but leaving him once again hospitalized and unable to compete, once again saddled with a winless record, and once again, a demotion down the ranks so far that even if he fully recovered, a return to where he would even be allowed to attend practice with the likes of Takanohana would take six months at the very least. 

Two months later at his sumo stable’s post-autumn-tournament party, we all took a turn mounting a hotel ballroom stage with the golden scissors in that tearful ceremony where a top-division sumotori’s topknot is cut off, ending the career of Yamato for good at the age of 28.

At Kalima’s 1998 retirement ceremony. His dad Haywood Kalima takes a cut of his son’s topknot.

Magaki Oyakata makes the final cut.

Don’t cry for me, Takanohana

On its face, you can’t deny it’s a sad story, one you’d think would fill Yamato with bitterness. You’d think the guy would never want to talk about sumo at all, let alone go into detail about how his career had fallen off a cliff. But not George. For the next twenty-five years he was always happy to wow everybody with stories about what it was like to train with Akebono or Musashimaru, or how much Konishiki had helped all of the Boyz along the way in such a big-brotherly way, all the while never once mentioning the fact that he himself was right there on their level unless, as I said, you dragged that Takanohana story out of him. 

For years George would go on to find great joy in following the next generation on TV, in discussing the intricacies of each guy’s tendencies with whomever was around. Even that song, the one that leaves him out completely: you’d watch his face light up whenever the uke was getting passed around, hear him sing it out with deep pride in that sweet Kalima voice of his:

Akebono, Musashimaru, and Konishiki! 

I always wondered how he did it. Of course those eight-plus years daily pounding his bare feet into the rock-hard clay had to have something to do with Yamato’s unmatched ability to accept the tragic outcome of walking away from sumo right at the moment the mountaintop was in his sights. In sacrificing more than a quarter of his entire life to make his steady climb up the ranks, thousands of miles from his beloved Waimanalo, he could at least walk away ingrained with those deep sumo values of patience, humility, and the fighting spirit to be able to look ahead to the next step.

But there had to be more to it. To hear him sing out those three names with such joy, and never a trace of envy—you couldn’t find a better image to capture us-guys, that collective modern-day ahupua‘a feeling that was the whole point of Braddah Iz’s whispered ha‘ina in the first place: Waimanalo, Nanakuli, Waianae. You got the sense that George didn’t even have to swallow any bitterness, so absolute was his real pride in the accomplishments of others. Right there in his beaming face you could see the complete embodiment of ha‘aha‘a. You could close your eyes and picture Yamato on his first triumphant visit home from Japan, his hair sculpted in that traditional samurai topknot, a professional athlete whose matches were eagerly watched on Japanese national television—only to have Uncle Haywood Kalima, his dad, immediately send him up a ladder to help clean the gutters of the family’s Huli Street home.

Also wrapped up in all of this was the simple fact that one night up in Nagoya, laid up in yet another Japanese hospital bed following yet another brush with death, George had made one of those life-altering decisions you sometimes make with such conviction that you never look back. It wouldn’t be easy, his exit from the once-you-in-you-in fraternal order of this monastic syndicate known as the Japan Sumo Association. His oyakata—the revered sumo elder and coach who ran, and lived in, Magaki Beya, the training facility where Yamato had spent the better part of his twenties learning the strict and often unspoken intricacies of the sumo code—George’s boss, he knew, had big plans, among them a made-for-TV wedding that would bring untold amounts of sponsorship money into Magaki Beya, but only once Yamato was able to return to the upper ranks. 

To get out now, George would have to plot his moves, chief among them flying his parents up to sit in on the meeting where he planned to break the news to boss. It was all so involved, in fact, that anybody might half-expect Yamato to just give in and do all he could to get back in the ring instead, give this sumo thing one more try. But that notion would be missing the detail that way up there in the cold and hopeless loneliness of another fluorescent-lit hospital room, George was making the kind of decision you don’t make alone.

No, you make it with the woman of your dreams. 

In George’s case, it was a hula dancer named Naoko, who had been by his side ever since that night years prior outside an Asakusa concert hall when a low-ranking Yamato, as part of Akebono’s entourage, got to attend one of those Hawaiian music concerts where talent like Makaha Sons or the Brothers Caz get flown in to perform with one of the hundreds of hula halau then spread around Japan. George had been happy enough that night for the rare fragrance of home wafting around the plumeria-scented theater, until, ’Nalo-raised as he was on the edges of the Pahinui ‘ohana, with his younger sister ‘Ipo already completely immersed in hula’s then-growing revival back home, Yamato’s trained eye caught this one dancer standing out from the rest as much for her stunning beauty as for her fluid, natural movements: a subtle wave of the hand, a deeper bend of the knee, and above all, that beaming expressive face that made you feel as though she were dancing for you alone—right away George could tell that this one woman had studied hula not in some Tokyo dance studio on Hawaiian Night, but back home in Hawai‘i, somehow, with an actual kumu hula.

The strict realities of the sumo code dictated that any sort of relationship had to be conducted in secret, at least until Yamato could rise up into sumo’s paid ranks and remain there long enough to move into his own apartment and out of the Magaki Beya room he shared with up to a dozen fellow low-ranking sumotori. So for the next five years, George and Naoko would meet like a couple of Shakespearian teenagers: whenever he had the chance to sneak out. Even to speak on the phone—and if you knew George, you know how he loved to settle into a phone call—even this required him to head down the block to the nearest green payphone.

Five years later here she was: at his bedside when they brought him back from the brink of death by draining all that water from his lungs. And there she stayed, visiting daily for the next several weeks, soon his only visitor after his sumo brothers had packed up and headed for the Osaka March tournament he would miss, a tournament the two of them would watch daily on the grainy television mounted above his hospital bed, the world marching on without Yamato as he fought for his life in there. Naoko’s was a promise so deep that she intended to remain by George’s side for life, even if they did make him marry somebody else. So of course after the July car accident, she resumed her bedside vigil in the Tokyo hospital where Yamato was eventually transferred, spending hours with him if for no other reason than to give him something to look forward to, her alone.

Kalima with his dad, Haywood, taken right after Kalima’s final match in 1998.

Kumu Sumo Summation

The last time I got to see George it was twenty-five years beyond any doubt that he’d made the right move in picking love over certain unprecedented success in Japan’s National Sport. We were part of the crowd at ThumbsUP!, the popular Hard-Rock-Cafe-looking Yokohama live house known for having once hosted Braddah Iz himself back in the day. In between performances up on the stage—a uke shredder from Kamakura, a wonderful pianist who made the place sound like Edith Kanaka‘ole Stadium, all preceding the headliner we’d come to see—George would go into great detail on, say, the plant-based diet he’d researched and how the change had improved his weakened kidneys, or a type of water he’d found, the weight he’d lost since I’d last seen him only six months prior, since, hey, we’ve gotta be around to see our mo‘opunas. Then he’d go on about how he was looking forward to a visit from his cousins, and then the big concert his production company had planned for June, the details of acquiring visas for the performers, arranging accommodations, promoting an event they hadn’t been able to hold since pre-COVID times. 

Even when the conversation turned, as it inevitably did whenever we got together, to his latest scheme to try to move back to Hawai‘i, George was nothing but hopeful. Looking back, especially with his acceptance of the now-weakened kidneys, his contentment had to be rooted at least in part in the knowledge that for twenty-five years he’d been playing with house money, lucky to be alive at all.

If this was something George Kalima never actually said out loud, it was a sentiment written all over that beaming face of his the moment the ThumbsUp! stage was graced by the headliner: a big and strikingly hapa-handsome young man they introduced as Keali‘i‘okalani Kalima. You could see every one of those God-gave-me-an-extra-twenty-five years in George’s look, just as clearly as you could hear them in the sweet falsetto sound of the voice pouring out of his son up there, big-bodied like his Waimanalo cousins, that twinkle in his eye telling you he actually knew how lady-killa his own striking face was, but that he was way too humble to ever say so out loud. 

Even without knowing the details, it would be hard not to guess just by watching this young Hawaiian pluck out that sweet slack-key accompaniment on his guitar that George and Naoko had sacrificed years they could have spent together with their son by sending him off to board at Kamehameha to study from the disciples of Robert Cazimero himself, and thus step into a line stretching through the legendary kumu hula Aunty Ma‘iki Aiu Lake into the places where Hawaiian music is rooted. 

If you guessed that that voice had been polished to perfection in Concert Glee Club, that you were listening to one of the few repeat winners of Kamehameha’s annual song contest, or that this singer had stayed in Hawai‘i to major in music at UH, you’d be spot-on. You might even be able to glean from the wholly professional ease with which young Keali‘i completely embodied each mele, rather than just sing it, or the way the room seemed to disappear around him when he went to that place where his song was set, or how the words rang through him nahenahe, so naturally and without any apparent effort, that just as the great Yokozuna Takanohana had been raised as a child in a sumo beya, Keali‘iokalani Kalima had taken his first steps inside a hula halau. 

You see, that too had been a major factor in that life-altering decision George and Naoko had made after weeks of conspiring together in his Nagoya hospital room. Ever since that first night in Asakusa they had been sharing each other’s dreams: his to open a Hawaiian restaurant, hers to pass on her extensive knowledge of the art of hula. By then George of course had learned that his initial impression at simply watching Naoko dance had been accurate: she had indeed studied under the direction of renowned Kumu Randy Gnum, who had given her the name, Pohai. More: her kumu had also planted the seed that she could one day start her own hula halau—and not just some kind of hobby-satisfying dance studio, but an actual halau. 

So the moment Yamato’s topknot was cut, the two of them charged into their new life together, first with a memorable beachside Waimanalo wedding, and later the following year with the grand opening of Kama‘aina’s, the Roppongi restaurant immediately known for its gourmet loco moco, Mom’s roast pork, and the Yamato Burger.  

If the young couple did have time to travel home in the midst of all this, every waking moment was focused on one singular passion: hula. Together George and Pohai would study with other kumu hula, taking in all they could of the ancient art’s unspoken intricacies from Aunty Mapu Yasue, who had performed at the very first Merrie Monarch festival, or Loea Charles Ka‘upu, among others. If Pohai learned the many-hours process of crafting uli‘uli—the feather-adorned hand-held implement so vital to so many kahiko chants—George would make one as well. Together they would make the necessary pilgrimages to the locations where important mele are set. Pohai would learn as much ‘olelo Hawai‘i as Yamato knew Japanese.

Her dream to legitimize herself would finally be realized when Loea Charles Ka‘upu deemed her ready for ‘uniki, an extremely complex type of graduation ceremony so deeply bound to Hawaiian that for a Japanese hula student to even be selected—to Yamato it was so exactly comparable to a Hawaiian being promoted to yokozuna that somebody should have written a song about Pohai, too.  

You could see all of it on George’s face that night in Yokohama, all twenty-five years coming together in the single image of what he was witnessing with such pride in that moment: his son, born in Japan, raised in Tokyo, but somehow raised in Waimanalo at the same time: summers visiting home as a kid, the days drifting by with his cousins at Kaiona Beach Park, fully a third of his life from high school through college spent away from Mom and Dad just to make sure he knew he was, above all, Hawaiian—it all shone through in the utterly humble way Keali‘i acknowledged the crowd’s applause, the deferential way he introduced his bass player, and above all, in how he welcomed to the stage his kumu from Halau Na Mamo O Pohai Kalima.

That, of course, completed the scene: Yamato’s wife joining his son on that Yokohama stage to help interpret his mele with her steps, her flowing arms, her expressive beaming face, her very being. The mele itself, Lei Pua Melia—it was transporting George back in time, fifteen years earlier to when his wife danced this very same mele to become Japan’s first May Day Queen. More: it was as if George were watching Naoko dance for the very first time, another fifteen years further back in that Asakusa concert hall so long ago, except there was so much more now, a lifetime of accomplishments together, all of them culminating in this very moment: mother, son, and oh-so-proud husband and father. 

Right there, that’s what explained it all, George’s utter contentment and gratitude with the way things had turned out so many thousands of miles, so many, many years removed from his beloved Waimanalo. You could finally see it: Yamato didn’t need his portrait hanging from the rafters of Japan’s Hall of National Sport. He didn’t need some newspaper tribute, or a song written about him, or even for you to drop his name into that two-beat space. 

He didn’t even have to move back home. Right there in ThumbsUp!, of all places, Braddah Iz’s whole ha‘ina, the entire sentiment of his whispered Waimanalo, Nanakuli, Waiananae—you could see it come alive with each graceful step made by George’s wife, each honey-sweet note pouring out of their son. All the way up in Yokohama, emphatically, ha‘ina-like, you could actually hear the unspoken part: We’re still here.

Ha‘ina hou: We’re still here!

George Kalima and Pohai on stage.
Photograph by Yoshinobu Kuahara.

Pohai Kalima performing the hula for Pua Melia as their son Keali‘i sings at ThumbsUp! in October 2023.

George Kalima

Photograph by Yoshinobu Kuahara.

---

Author Mark Panek first met former professional sumotori George Kalima 26 years ago while researching his acclaimed biography of Waimanalo’s Chad Rowan, Gaijin Yokozuna. Bonded by their deep connections to the Land of the Rising Sun, the two became lifelong friends, with Kalima also contributing priceless cultural insight into Panek’s award-winning Big Happiness, a biography of sumotori Percy Kipapa. And Yamato is the author’s loving tribute to Kalima, who passed away in January at the age of 54.

Photographs courtesy of the author and Yoshinobu Kuahara.