A hundred years above Honolulu

Natsunoya means Summer House. Shuichi and Taneyo Fujiwara, immigrants from Shikoku, bought the nearly one-acre property in Alewa Heights from the McInerny family and opened Shunchoro Tea House here in 1921. There was no road up the hill, so they built one, and put in their own utility poles.

The family traces the whole thing back to the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. Shuichi Fujiwara lost everything he owned in it and went home to Japan. Years later, on his way back to San Francisco, he stopped in Hawaiʻi and decided to stay.

The government took the tea house over during the Second World War and turned it into an emergency fire and first-aid station; the Red Cross used it too. Afterwards the Fujiwaras leased it to Mamoru Kobayashi, who ran it into the mid-1950s. Laurence Fujiwara Sr., the youngest of Shuichi and Taneyo's five children, had opened his own tea house on School Street after the war and called it Natsunoya — until it was torn down for the H-1 freeway. In 1958 he reopened the Alewa Heights tea house under that name.

Laurence Fujiwara Jr. has run Natsunoya since his father died in 1996. Honolulu had five tea houses as recently as 1988; by 1999, Kanraku in Kapālama, Kyo-ya in Waikīkī and Rainbow Garden in Mōʻiliʻili had closed. Natsunoya is now the last full-time tea house in the islands.

When the Star-Bulletin came in 1999, it found a family that had marked four generations of anniversaries, birthdays, weddings, reunions and graduations here since the mid-'60s. The staff tend to stay, too: the head chef, the Japanese food specialist and the sushi chef had each been with the Fujiwaras more than twenty-five years.

The man with the telescope

Many people in Hawaiʻi have heard that an agent of the Japanese consulate in Honolulu watched ship movements in Pearl Harbor and sent coded messages to Tokyo in the months before the attack. Fewer know he did it from here.

“A customer named Yoshikawa used to come here during the day for tea or beer,” Laurence Fujiwara Jr. tells it. “When he was tired, my grandmother let him sleep in an upstairs room where we had a telescope. Unbeknownst to us, he was using it to watch the ship movements in Pearl Harbor.”

Other visitors left on better terms. John Wayne shot a scene from one of his movies here. Kirk Douglas came. Konishiki and his sumotori, in the owner's telling, ate them out of tea house and home. The Pittsburgh Steelers came after they won the Super Bowl. Actors and singers from Japan come regularly, and local politicians and military leaders have all been here.

The rooms upstairs are still tatami, with the best view of the city, especially at night.

My grandfather liked the view, and this was the first building on the hill. He had to build his own road and put up the poles.

History adapted from The Companies We Keep, by Bob Sigall and his students at Hawaii Pacific University, and from “Alewa teahouse one of the last of its kind,” by Rod Ohira, Honolulu Star-Bulletin, 12 April 1999.

The last tea house in the islands.

Natsunoya Tea House, since 1921