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Graveyard near 'glass beach' is a fitting memorial

By Carl Heintze

On the south coast of Kauai, the most northerly inhabited Hawaiian island, on a bluff above the sea, is a graveyard. It is filled with the single stone columns of Japanese Buddhists, a few gray marble headstones of Christians and some unmarked graves.

Below the bluff on which it lies is what was once the Kauai dump. For years, old automobile engines and auto parts were dumped there off the bluff into the ocean. They lie where they fell rusting and made almost attractive by the constant motion of the waves.

To the right of the dump is a small cove into which Kauaians once threw broken bottles and old crockery. Over the years, the erosion of the sea has worn these pieces of glass into thousands of what seem to be jewels, but which are really bits of old bottles of all kinds. They glitter in the sun and shine in the sea.

And behind the cemetery and the little cove stands a collection of oil tanks and an electric plant and the remains of what once was a sugar cane field.

I often think of this place that has, so far as I know, no name here at home on the mainland.

It's somehow symbolic not only of what's happening to Kauai--and Hawaii, in general--but all life, and death. The past is being forgotten, the past is being junked, even as the auto parts were and some beauty is being created from the broken remains of life like the thousands of broken bottles turned into "gems."

In many ways it is the most lonely of graveyards. But then all places of the dead are lonely. The first time I saw it, it also seemed abandoned. Its stones were overgrown with grass and weeds. It was, indeed, so overgrown I did not realize it was there.

We had come to the cemetery by accident.

Through friends we had heard of the "glass beach," and we went looking for it to take away some glass "gems" as souvenirs. We walked the little cove and climbed the dirt road that runs along the cliff above the rusting auto parts and for the first time saw the tops of the stone columns of the graveyard rising out of the grass.

We began to explore and soon found one or two graves that had been cleared of grass. On them, in the Asian tradition, remembrance pieces of fruit had been left. We wandered about through the place. It seemed abandoned and forgotten.

But the next year when we went back to Kauai, as we do every year, we paid another visit to the cemetery. This time it had been completely cleared of its grass and weeds. It was much easier to see the stones; there seemed to be more offerings of food. It was impossible to know who was buried in the cemetery just a mile or two away. Because I cannot read Japanese, I could not discover who was buried there. But I could speculate.

The history of Kauai offered some clues.

At the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century, Japanese men were imported to Hawaii to labor in the cane and pineapple fields. They crossed the Pacific in search of a better life, sometimes as lonely contract males. Later many of them sent for "picture" brides, women who arrived first as pictures and then themselves to be married to men they had never seen before.

Almost none of them ever returned to Japan.

All of them worked hard and most of them never returned to the land of their birth. Many of them prospered. Indeed, some of their descendants have come to govern Kauai County, to become wealthy, to hire workers for their own companies.

In World War II, some of their sons served in Europe as members of the 100th Infantry Battalion and the 442nd Infantry Regiments, those famous units to which Japanese-Americans flocked to battle in Italy and France. Some of these men did not return.

Many of them are buried just a mile away near Hanapepe in the Kauai Veterans Cemetery, in what had become their native soil.

But I think not of them, but of those in the little cemetery by the wrecked auto parts and the glass beach. I think of how lonely it must have been to cross the Pacific to this island, to live out one's life far from home, to work, often desperately hard jobs, and to have sufficient faith to know they would, in the end, find a new home in the middle of the Pacific.

Graveyards are, of course, not for the dead, but for the living. But it seems to me this particular cemetery is for us all. It is a symbol of how incandescent life can be. It is a fitting memorial to those who have left their mark upon one of the most unlikely places on Earth.