For Maui: Lessons in Recovery and Hope from Japan 

Local leaders in the Kibou for Maui Project share what they learned in Japan about dealing with disaster – both before and after it happens.

In May 2024, 15 business, community and government leaders from Hawai’i traveled to Japan for the Kibou for Maui project. Kibou means “hope” and the program – funded by Japan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs – aimed to support Maui’s recovery by sharing some of Japan’s expertise in disaster relief and urban resiliency.

Over four days, the cohort visited Japan’s Tohoku region, the site of 2011’s Great East Japan Earthquake and the resulting tsunami and nuclear disaster.

“The Japanese people are very resilient,” says Kim Ball, owner of Hi-Tech Maui, which has four Hi-Tech Surf Sports locations on the island. He was part of the Hawai‘i delegation and knows a thing or two about resilience himself – he and his family lost three Lahaina homes in the August 2023 wildfires. “I don’t want to say the Japanese are used to disasters, but they have had a lot of calamities hit their island nation,” he says.

One of the worst occurred on March 11, 2011. A 9.0 earthquake triggered a tsunami that reached up to three miles inland and triggered radiation leaks and disabled the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Station. This triple disaster caused nearly 28,000 reported deaths and missing persons, as well as $210 billion in damage.

Feeling Understood

“I used to have this mental block, like no one could understand (what we’d been through), but of course they understood,” says Maui County Councilmember Tamara Paltin, who represents West Maui and was among the delegates. She says understanding the magnitude of what Japan went through helped persuade her “to stop making comparisons. It doesn’t matter if it’s 80 people or 101 people or 20,000 people. To the individuals affected, a disaster is a disaster. If it’s horrific, it’s horrific.”

Program delegate Maui Mayor Richard Bissen says that after the trip, he felt renewed optimism.

“I’m confident that we will recover. That was my biggest takeaway, and it was reinforced, at every turn, in every presentation. The loss of life and the amount of devastation they had, what it’s taken to get to where they are now, is just Herculean, really. But it puts things in perspective.”

Rebuilding Thoughtfully

During the trip, the group toured facilities such as a university and a hospital, and new businesses that developed in the disaster’s wake, including a hydrogen production plant; a textile factory that creates fabric for both fashion houses and aerospace uses; and a hydroponic lettuce farm created in a former elementary school.

Ball, who serves on the Lahaina Advisory Team, sees an opportunity for similarly creative economic development on Maui. “Everybody on the west side is looking for alternatives,” he says. “Obviously, tourism is what turns our wheel, but additional things so that we wouldn’t have to rely quite so heavily on tourism.”

In Japan, he says, “the private sector has led recovery efforts, whereas in the U.S. we expect the government to take the lead and then the private sector to fill in the gaps,” says Ball.

Another delegate, Kūhiō Lewis, was impressed by Japan’s forward thinking in education, housing, mental health and infrastructure. Lewis is the CEO of the nonprofit Council for Native Hawaiian Advancement.

“Japan builds for the future; they don’t necessarily build for today,” he says. “We are spending billions of dollars on Maui for a lot of temporary stuff. What could that mean, utilizing those resources to think about the future? So, when you look at Lahaina, it’s a lot of ‘in the moment,’ it’s not necessarily thinking holistically about what our needs are for the generation that is yet to come. … As leaders, we need to be mindful of how the decisions we’re making in this moment can support, positively, the future.”

Community input is vital, notes Paltin. She learned that in Namie, a town on the coast of central Fukushima, all households were surveyed as part of the disaster recovery.

Different Japanese prefectures, or provinces, had different approaches to recovery, she explains. “In some prefectures, they wanted a buffer, with nothing built near the ocean; other areas wanted to rebuild, but they did a rebuild higher than what the tsunami affected, with efforts to mitigate. That largely depended on community feedback, and you don’t want to do anything without community buy-in.”

Disaster Sciences

The group learned about the disaster training degree at Tohoku University. Similar programs could be developed at Hawai‘i colleges, say the attendees we spoke to, who believe disaster preparedness and response training could become a workforce development opportunity for the state.

At Tohoku University, they’ve aggregated some of the standard challenges and common outcomes of calamities and studied them within an emerging field of disaster sciences, explains Paltin. “To create a disaster sciences program here, if we could have that type of data sharing, a shared data platform, analysis of what goes right or wrong in the aftermath of a disaster, it would serve not only the state, but also the next step could be to create programs on this throughout the country.”

Having that type of training and expertise, agrees Ball, “means we could be boots on the ground right away, no matter what has happened.”

Mayor Bissen says he has invited the Tohoku University team to visit Maui so they can share the program’s concepts in depth. “They’re a very resilient community and nation,” says Bissen. “They probably every three to five years face another disaster. I hate to say it, but they expect it. I think that that should be our mindset, too.”

In a rapidly changing climate, he notes, it’s not a matter of if but when a natural disaster will happen.

“Pre-disaster preparations are top of mind,” says Bissen when asked about rebuilding for resilience. “Whether we are talking about practicing evacuation routes, reducing fuel sources, or constructing fire-retardant, wind-resistant buildings.”

For example, he mentions a potential evacuation drill in Pā‘ia, along a route that used to be for sugarcane haul trucks. “They are private roads, closed, but during an emergency we’d have another route out of Pā‘ia. Having a backup to the backup to the backup.”

Another possibility is burying utilities, he says. “It is something that Lahaina has asked for, for a long time. It may be cost prohibitive, but at what point do you learn the lesson and say ‘let’s not put up a wood pole’ anymore? Newer subdivisions in Hawai‘i have solar on the roof and power underground.”

“Kibou means hope and if we’re going to give kibou to our people, we have to give it to our people with demonstratable action,” says Bissen. “To be able to say, hey, look, we have power lines underground, the tall grass has been cut down, there’s a fire break put in, sensors put into the fields.”

In addition to learning from past disasters, both at home and abroad, Paltin notes that “global partners are key, too. Japan had its first treaty with the nation of Hawai‘i in 1871, so there’s a long history of friendship and exchange. We were told that part of the reason for the program was the aloha Hawai‘i gave to Japan in the immediate aftermath of their earthquake and tsunami.”

A Continuation of Culture

Lewis found that despite the challenges Japan has faced, “their culture has thrived. It’s the underlying spirit of their people that allows them to be resilient. I think you see that on Maui, too. Hawai‘i is very ethnically diverse, much more so than Japan. But what grounds us is that culture, the Hawaiian culture, the spirit of aloha, the connection to land. You see that sense of connection to the place in Japan. They’re not just about money; it’s about way of life.”

“Post-trip, I’ve been thinking about resilience,” Lewis says, “and to me, it’s ‘What are the underlying things that make Lahaina special?’ Those are the things that we need to hang onto. I don’t think we should be building back Lahaina to what it was; I think it needs to be something completely different. But holding on to those core values and that cultural history of the place, no matter who lives there. Everything else is superficial.”