On a crystalline morning, with humpback whales leaping in the indigo waters offshore, a group of archivists, curators, conservators and volunteers gathered in a makeshift field station at the Lahaina Jodo Mission, a once-magnificent Japanese Buddhist temple compound that was largely obliterated in the wildfires of Aug. 8, 2023. They were there to take on a “CSI”-like challenge: identifying, cleaning and cataloging the surprising array of artifacts that survived the fires, some nearly unrecognizable beneath flaking metal, scorch marks, ashes and soot.
Theirs was a daunting and humbling task.
On Sundays, Nancy Fushikoshi, one of the volunteers, used to come to the mission with her grandchildren to visit the three-tiered pagoda holding the cremated remains of her husband, Lane, who died 24 years ago. She would slide open the niche’s doors so the grandkids could say “Hi, Grandpa!” before lighting a stick of Japanese incense and saying a prayer.
On the day wind-whipped embers turned the mission’s coconut palms into torches, the Rev. Gensho Hara and his family attempted to stave off the flames with garden hoses, trying desperately to save the main temple and the pagoda, with its hand-laid copper shingled roof. The only structure to emerge unscathed was a monumental statue of the Buddha; at 12 feet tall, it was the largest such statue outside Japan. He sat serenely on his stone pedestal through it all, bronze hands folded on his lap.
The pagoda’s wooden shelves had collapsed in the inferno, sending the 187 metal urns housed there careening to the ground. The Fushikoshis were among the families volunteering on that recent morning, hoping that somehow curators and conservators would be able to discern the shallow engravings in Japanese of loved ones’ names all but lost in charred and mottled metal.
The wildfire of Aug. 8 claimed the lives of over 100 people, including five members of Hara’s congregation. It displaced thousands and destroyed or damaged much of the town’s historic core, with rebuilding estimated at $5.5 billion. The tragedy has resulted in increased rates of poverty, higher unemployment and skyrocketing housing costs.