Whenever Ai Hironaka, the resident minister of Lahaina Hongwanji Mission, looks at the widely published photo showing the temple burning, he thanks the photographer. After driving his family out of the fires, he tried to go back and save the Amida Buddha statue, but the wall of heat and smoke held him off. He thinks the photo was taken soon after his retreat, at the moment he looked back and saw the roof of Waiola Church, also in the frame, burning. To him, the picture shows the temple fighting to save what he could not. “You must be in pain,” he tells the temple in the photograph. “You did enough to protect this place. You did enough. You can lie down now.”
All three of Lahaina’s Japanese Buddhist temples, the oldest built in 1926, burned in the August blazes that swept Maui. With their dwindling congregations, rebuilding seemed unlikely. The Lahaina Jodo Mission, after all, had only about 10 families who regularly attended services, and the number of Hawaii’s Japanese Buddhist temples, many dating back to the 1900s, has been declining in the past decades.
In Hawaii, it often feels like we’re on the verge of losing everything. On small islands, so much can be easily wiped out, whether by tiny thrips or large corporations. I think that vulnerability is why a perpetual air of nostalgia pervades Hawaii, why we still give directions using a mango tree that has long been cut down, why in Hawaii alone Longs Drugs keeps its name even though CVS bought the chain more than a decade ago. The past is never gone. We are trying to hang on to what we have already lost, as if it could prevent more from slipping away. But in the beginning of August, we lost Lahaina. In a matter of hours, we lost lives, we lost homes, and we lost some of our most precious anchors to the past. Among them were the Japanese Buddhist temples.
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History often focuses on how Christianity changed the islands, but in the early 20th century, Japanese Buddhism was also one of the main religions. Soon after laborers from Japan came to work on the sugar plantations in the late 1800s, the priests followed to bring spiritual comfort in the backbreaking conditions. Hironaka told me that the philosophy of the Hongwanji, a Buddhist sect, was that if the people asked for a temple, the organization would build it. By 1930, Hawaii had more than 170 Japanese Buddhist temples of various sects. But as the Japanese aged and their descendants turned to other religions, or none at all, attendance dwindled and temples shut down. About 50 now remain active.
The Lahaina Hongwanji’s membership, too, is a fraction of what it once was, and yet Hironaka said the Hongwanji will rebuild. People have asked, with skepticism, how many members will really come back. “Why don’t we make a place to go back to first?” he said. He sees the future temple as a beacon of hope, which Lahaina will need after the fire.
On the other side of the town, its grounds facing Baby Beach, the Jodo Mission was the most traditionally styled of Lahaina’s Japanese Buddhist temples. Established in 1912 and moved to its present site in 1931, the mission included a three-story pagoda and main temple that had been constructed using traditional Japanese carpentry, its wood beams joined without nails. A 12-foot-tall bronze Buddha cast in Kyoto survived the August fire.
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In the days after the devastation, the temple received a large donation to help rebuild. Maya Hara, the daughter of the Lahaina Jodo Mission’s resident reverend, told me the money came “out of the blue from someone we didn’t know, but whose family was instrumental in building the temple in the first place.” To Hara, it’s proof of a deep spiritual and ancestral connection to the temple, even among those who don’t attend. She said, “I think because of our role and our history and legacy, there’s a lot of nostalgia and wanting to preserve a certain kind of lifestyle.” And yet to think about rebuilding is daunting, even if the intention is there. No one yet knows when they’ll be able to return to the property, or how long the cleanup will take. Months? Years? Long enough, perhaps, for this moment to become a memory, solidly in the past.
Many descendants of the plantation workers talk about the plantation era fondly; modern menus and architecture throughout Hawaii still reference that period—this, even though the conditions were often brutal, bordering on slavery. This, even though these same plantations helped to overthrow the Hawaiian monarchy, even though their land-use practices ultimately left Lahaina vulnerable to wildfires. Nostalgia can be complicated that way. Now some Native Hawaiians are calling for a return to a further past, when people coexisted more closely with the wetlands that once dominated Lahaina. How far back do we go? How far back can we go?
The hardships of the plantation era did help create this place, and some of its most valuable and beloved aspects—including the temples, which during that time also functioned as sites for labor-union organizing and social halls for homesick immigrants. Nostalgia for the Lahaina that no longer exists is already creeping in: Hironaka said that when he hitchhiked back to his car and family after trying to save the statue, he discovered that his son had left to look for him. Fearing that his son was now lost in the smoke, he was turning toward town again when his son emerged. His son had spotted one of the caretakers at Waiola Church, right next to Lahaina Hongwanji, Hironaka told me, and that caretaker had said that Hironaka had already turned back. “That saved my son,” Hironaka said. “How important, the neighbor knows me, knows my family. This is the power of Lahaina’s community.”
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One of the islands’ oldest Hawaiian Christian churches and one of its oldest Japanese Buddhist temples burned together. And Hironaka hoped they would rebuild together—to create something new and valuable, from another hardship that now defines this place.
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