TRAVELLING IN STYLE : EXCELLENT ADVENTURES : The Ghosts of Pearl Harbor : Beyond the crowded sands and downtown glitz of Waikiki, Honolulu takes on a whole new life through the eyes of history

I WAS BORN IN 1946, FIVE YEARS after Japan’s surprise early-morning air attack on the U.S. naval base at Hawaii’s Pearl Harbor. My obsession with the event began while I was still in elementary school, and no Dec. 7 passed without a bulletin board filled with yellowed newspaper clippings about the attack or perhaps a visit from a veteran who had survived it. I was fascinated. I even found myself thinking about Pearl Harbor every time I dived under my desk or hurried to the basement for an air-raid drill, reasoning that if those poky Japanese propeller planes could appear without warning over Hawaii, then why not Soviet jets over Connecticut?

For those of us in the earliest of postwar generations, the war was immediate, its wounds raw, its issues simple. Our fathers or our older brothers had fought in it. The comic books we read and the movies we went to on Saturday afternoons were about the war. For us, bravery was defined by Omaha Beach, leadership by Winston Churchill, evil by the Holocaust. And treachery by Pearl Harbor.

Before I started spending time in Hawaii myself, though, I had considered Pearl Harbor solely a military affair. Newsreels, photographs and books encouraged this by concentrating on what had happened to military targets--and I found it easy to imagine warships spewing fire, lines of planes exploding on the ground, Marine officers, with tears running down their cheeks, emptying their revolvers at marauding Zeros. But what I had ignored--or at least never really had understood before--was that all this had happened on the edge of a major city, one that has since become America’s 13th largest, a city where 40% of the population in 1941 was of the same race as the pilots of those dragonfly planes.

With this new perspective, I spent six months on Oahu in the late 1980s, searching for the physical and emotional legacies of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in the place where it had happened. I wanted to see what kind of spin the attack had put on life in Hawaii and to find out how Honolulu--the only American city attacked by a foreign power since the War of 1812--had changed since Dec. 7, 1941.

Finding emotional legacies of the attack was easy. If I said the words “Pearl Harbor” to a Hawaiian resident, even one of Japanese descent, I usually heard something like, “They couldn’t invade us, so now they’re buying us,” referring to the substantial Japanese investment in the islands. Physical legacies were harder to find, at least at first. In 1941, Honolulu had been a compact little colonial city, a place where people woke to the songs of myna birds and drifted down to beaches to swim at sunrise, a place where children, even wealthy children, went to school barefoot. It was a city of short workdays, pink stucco and polo fields, of louvered windows, hibiscus hedges and open patios leading to open houses that were difficult to black out and impossible to lock, an architecture spectacularly unsuited to war. The Honolulu I encountered recently, though, was something more like modern-day Singapore--a dense island city where the automobile and a frenzy of construction had shrunk gardens, felled palm trees, quickened the pace of life. How could I find reminders here of an event (however significant) that had happened nearly 50 years ago?

The longer I stayed in Honolulu, though, reading diaries and newspapers from 1941 and interviewing eyewitnesses to the attack, the more the ghosts of Pearl Harbor started to come alive. I began seeing the city with a double vision, juxtaposing today’s Honolulu with the city as it had looked 50 years ago. I grew unable to visit a neighborhood without automatically comparing it to its past--and in so doing, I discovered that the entire island of Oahu is still surprisingly rich with physical reminders of Pearl Harbor--pieces of history that can still be found and visited.

I suppose my discoveries started several days after I arrived in Honolulu in 1988, when I drove to the downtown piers and took an elevator to the top of the Aloha Tower--the tallest structure in Honolulu in 1941. In those days, the tower was known as “The Gateway to the Pacific,” winking colored lights at harbor traffic and overlooking the joyful “Boat Day” crowds that came bearing armfuls of flower leis to welcome friends and relatives to the islands whenever the S.S. Lurline and other legendary liners docked there. (Few liners go there anymore, and those that do are hardly in the Lurline class.) Beneath me today, as I gazed out from the Aloha Tower, traffic on the Nimitz Highway threw up a continuous roar, cutting off the tower from the rest of Honolulu. A glass wall of office buildings blocked the view inland. But if I moved my head, I could just make out, between the twin white marble towers of the Amfac Building, a block of the old Fort Street commercial district, most of Chinatown and a few slivers of green mountain--floating glimpses of the city the Japanese had attacked. I felt as if my search had begun.

SOME LEGACIES OF PEARL HARBOR, I SOON learned, are out of sight--sometimes literally buried, like the Japanese midget submarine that was rolled into an excavation for a pier at the submarine base here in 1942, probably intended more as landfill than symbolism. In some Japanese-American neighborhoods, backyard gardens still conceal a treasure cache of swords, kimonos, framed photographs of Emperor Hirohito and the like, buried in a hurry by people anxious to rid themselves of anything too “Japanesey.”

Many more reminders of the attack--and of 1941 Honolulu--are in plain sight, though, accessible to anyone knowing where to look. The obvious place to begin is the memorial to the USS Arizona, a soaring white form that appears to float in Pearl Harbor over the battleship’s wreckage, a tourist site so popular that two- and three-hour waits are not uncommon. Pearl Harbor also holds aircraft skeletons, pieces of blasted superstructure, the wreck of the target ship Utah--and, to this day, a thick sediment of oil, grit and shell fragments contaminated with high levels of copper, lead and zinc from Japanese bombs poses a continuing ecological threat.

Just next to Pearl Harbor, at Hickam Field, is the old Hale Makai barracks, once the largest military barracks in the world. Here 35 U.S. airmen who were eating breakfast were killed by a Japanese bomb when the attack began at 7:55 a.m. The barracks are now offices for the headquarters of the U.S. Air Force in the Pacific, but their exterior remains untouched. Lines of bullet holes run up walls, stopping at windows, and bomb fragments scar interior courtyards. Some years ago, one base commander ordered the holes filled, the walls repainted--but veterans protested, and he backed down. The building is now a historical monument, and relics are on display in its lobby, among them a rusty piece of a P-40 airplane, a bullet taken from a hangar door, the Protestant chaplain’s communion set and the flag that flew on Dec. 7. Hickam is a working air base, so visitors must first call the public-affairs office to make an appointment.

The best view of Pearl Harbor is probably that from the Aiea Heights, north of the city. In 1941, these slopes were covered with cane fields and scattered bungalows, and Japanese spy Tadeo Yoshikawa, sometimes dressed as a Filipino cane cutter, sometimes as a tourist in a bright aloha shirt, came almost daily to observe which warships were in port. The military families living here had a spectacular view of the attack. Officers stood on their lanais in their pajamas. At first, some of them later said, they imagined that they were witnessing an elaborate American exercise but later watched in horror and sorrow as the warships of the Pacific Fleet burned and sank. Today, the cane fields are gone, and a carpet of roofs covers most of Aiea, but as you drive higher toward Keaiwa Heiau State Recreation Area, the houses thin out, and you see Pearl Harbor spread out below, still headquarters of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and looking much as it did in 1941.

THE PEARL CITY TAVERN ON THE KAMEHAmeha Highway, a favorite gathering place for sailors before and during the war, still has a ‘40s feel about it, though there have been additions to the place since then. The food and decor are a mishmash of American and Japanese style--a sushi bar sits near the vinyl booths found in most American roadside diners--and create their own peculiar atmosphere of Japanese-American reconciliation.

Farther north on the Kamehameha Highway is Wahiawa, in the center of the island. In 1941, this was a rural area of sugar mills and plantation towns. Now it is disfigured by condominium villages and strip malls. A World War II-era fighter plane sits there, at the entrance to Wheeler Field. One might imagine it is one of the handful that managed to take off from this field on Dec. 7 to battle the Japanese--but the marker at its base explains that it’s a dummy, built in the 1960s for the movie “Tora! Tora! Tora!”

Less than a mile beyond Wheeler Field is Schofield Army Barracks, an “open base” one can enter without prior arrangement. It is probably the most beautiful army base in the nation and will be familiar to anyone who has seen or read “From Here to Eternity”--whose author, James Jones, was quartered there in 1941. Its beautiful quadrangles are virtually unchanged, and with their continuous verandas and lush planting, they suggest a turn-of-the-century resort more than a military encampment. A small museum contains exhibits pertaining to the attack on Pearl Harbor, and a red circle on its outside wall identifies a hole purportedly made by a Japanese bullet. Whether or not Schofield actually came under attack on Dec. 7 is a matter of some controversy. What probably happened is that a few Japanese planes fired off some rounds on their way to and from Wheeler Field.

At lonely Kahuku Point, on Oahu’s northern coast, Army privates Joseph Lockhard and George Elliott saw a large blip on the screen of their mobile radar station an hour before the attack. Elliott immediately called the Ft. Shafter command center and reported the blip as “very big . . . very noticeable” and “out of the ordinary.” The duty officer assumed that it was a flight of American B-17s expected that morning from California and called back to say, “Well, don’t worry about it.”

Bellows Air Force Base, in the windward town of Waimanalo, definitely came under attack on Dec. 7. Its runway is no longer in use, and the public is allowed to enter on weekends to use its beach, one of the finest and least crowded on Oahu. This is where Kazuo Sakamaki, the captain of a disabled Japanese midget submarine, was washed ashore on the morning of Dec. 8 and promptly taken prisoner by a Japanese-American soldier serving in the Hawaii Territorial Guard. Sakamaki reportedly returned to Oahu several times after the war, in a vain search for the burial site of his lone crewman. Somewhere along the beach there is supposed to be a marker commemorating the captain’s capture, but I have not been able to locate it.

BACK IN WAIKIKI, THE LAU YEE CHAI Restaurant in Waikiki Shopping Plaza preserves some of the artifacts and atmosphere of its earlier namesake. During the ‘30s and ‘40s, this was the self-proclaimed “Most Beautiful Chinese Restaurant in the World,” popular with the military and Honolulu society. It was the site of a gala Harvest Moon Festival on the evening of Dec. 6, 1941. The original Lau Yee Chai was torn down in 1965, and its famous carp pools and bogus backyard volcano are gone forever. But in 1980, its murals, mahogany screens and Chinese art were taken out of storage and used to furnish this nostalgic re-creation.

The only Waikiki hotels surviving from 1941 are the Moana Surfrider, the Halekulani and the Royal Hawaiian--which were, in any case, the only major hostelries here in prewar years. Adm. Kimmel, commander of the Pacific Fleet, ate dinner on the Halekulani’s terrace the night before the attack. The Moana has recently undergone a major refurbishment, which has left it looking better than it ever did. The Royal Hawaiian has turned much of its famous garden into a concrete shopping center, but its public spaces and the guest rooms in the main building have been carefully preserved. One Pearl Harbor survivor told me that walking down these corridors gave him the spooky feeling that he was walking back into 1941. Many naval officers attended a dance here on the evening of Dec. 6. When, at midnight, the band struck up “The Star-Spangled Banner,” a young intelligence officer named Edwin T. Layton, who believed that war was coming soon in the Far East, later recalled that he had had to stifle a sudden impulse to shout, “Wake up, America!”

DOWNTOWN HONOLULU IS still--depending on your point of view--either blessed or cursed by Hotel Street, a raunchy strip of taverns and pool halls. Here, on the evening of Dec. 6, as on other evenings, sailors bought fringed satin pillows saying “I Love You Mother o’ Mine” and photographs of bare-breasted women holding up patriotic slogans. They squandered money on skee-ball and pinball, sat under naked bulbs as Filipino tattoo artists pricked their skin, drank too much and then sobered up with coffee at cafes such as the Black Cat, the Bunny Ranch and Swanky Franky, the latter of which made so much money selling hot dogs to servicemen that it became the foundation of Hawaii’s well-known postwar Spencecliff restaurant chain (purchased by Japanese interests in the 1980s).

Hotel Street runs through a downtown neighborhood that resembles its 1941 photographs, with narrow streets fronted by low stucco and granite buildings and shaded by tin awnings--but the area is becoming gentrified. Antique stores and boutiques coexist with the dives and strip clubs that still exhale their halitosis of cigarettes and beer. The only 1941 restaurant remaining on Hotel Street is Wo Fat--the oldest eating place in Honolulu--which preserves the kind of garish decor that was once de rigueur for Chinese restaurants in America.

The Japanese consulate is about a mile up Nuuanu Avenue from Hotel Street. The compound and main building look much as they did in 1941, although there have been some additions, including memorial trees planted after the war by members of the Japanese imperial family. North of the consulate on Alawa Heights is the Natsunoya Teahouse, which advertises itself as the oldest such enterprise in Honolulu. Formerly called the Shuncho-Ro, it was the favorite restaurant of Japanese spy Tadeo Yoshikawa, the place where he became notorious for his heavy drinking and geisha courting.

Yoshikawa claimed to have spied on Pearl Harbor from a telescope installed on the second-floor balcony. The teahouse is still a sprawling two-story wooden structure sitting on a bluff overlooking Honolulu. Its cream-colored rooms are tired but clean, with worn linoleum and tatami mats smelling faintly of dirty socks. All but one of the 1941 geishas have been pensioned off, and the balcony from which Yoshikawa allegedly observed Pearl Harbor is now enclosed in glass. The trees in front of it have grown taller, blocking some of the view. Nevertheless, you can see in a minute that Pearl Harbor is simply too far away for to be spied on with a telescope. Spying was a pretext: Agent Yoshikawa must have come for drink and romance. If he were to return now and survey Honolulu from this balcony, he would see the Lunlalilo Freeway, the skyscrapers of downtown Honolulu, the glittering jets full of vacationers, the thick forest of Waikiki hotels. But if he turned back into the teahouse, he would find himself in a familiar setting--a ghost of 1941 Honolulu on the eve of war.

GUIDEBOOK: PEARL HARBOR SIGHTS

The USS Arizona Memorial: Located off Hawaii 1 at the Arizona Memorial/Stadium exit at Pearl Harbor. Tickets for the shuttle-boat trip to the memorial are distributed daily on a first-come-first-serve basis, beginning at 7:30 a.m. For further information, telephone (808) 422-0561.

Hickam Field: Visits can be arranged by telephoning (808) 449-6367 or (808) 449-9386.

Hotels, restaurants, etc.: Lau Yee Chai Restaurant, Waikiki Shopping Plaza, Fifth Floor, 2250 Kalakaua Ave., Honolulu, (808) 923-7311; Natsunoya Teahouse, 1935 Makani Drive, Honolulu, (808) 595-4488; Pearl City Tavern, 905 Kamehameha Highway, Pearl City, (808) 455-1045; Wo Fat, 115 N. Hotel St., Honolulu, (808) 537-6260; the Halekulani Hotel, 2199 Kalia Road, Honolulu, (808) 923-2311; the Sheraton Moana Surfrider Hotel, 2365 Kalakaua Ave., Honolulu, (808) 922-3111, and the Sheraton Royal Hawaiian Hotel, 2259 Kalakaua Ave., Honolulu, (808) 923-7311.