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  • Pig hunting

    There's an article in the San Francisco Chronicle about pig hunting on Kaua'i (mentioned at Ian Lind's site) that has me fuming. The first thing I noticed were all the spelling errors: it's not the Nepali Coast, and the forest floor isn't littered with fallen kookui nuts. And I loved this bit (no I didn't -- actually I groaned):
    Paka nodded and took a bite of a homemade sandwich, a rice/pork mix wrapped in seaweed.
    Huh? Since when does a Spam musubi count as a sandwich?

    But then, what really got me annoyed were the factual errors. I get the feeling that this writer knows squat about Hawai'i and didn't do any research. If he did, he wouldn't have been writing that Hawaiians have hunted pigs in the forest for thousands of years. Huh? First of all, I think thousands of years is an overstatement; most historians don't place the colonization of Hawai'i further back than 1500 years or so. And second, ancient Hawaiians generally didn't hunt pigs; they raised them in enclosures. And third, they weren't exactly a staple food -- they were often kapu and reserved for the ali'i and for sacrifices.

    So the whole premise of this guy's article -- that he's profiling a noble young Hawaiian hunter who's trying to carry on the ancient traditions of his ancestors -- starts to fall apart. At most, the tradition is as old as when monster European pigs were introduced to the islands and interbred with the poi-fed Polynesian pigs that the Hawaiians kept. 200 years of pig hunting is old, but it ain't ancient.

    And I get tired of the Sierra Club being painted as bad guys for wanting to get rid of wild pigs in native forestlands. Those critters don't belong there. They root up everything and open up the ground for alien invasive plants to take over from the native plants. But as is done by so many hunting advocates, this is cast as the condescending haole outsiders trying to tell the hapless locals how to run their affairs. Guess what, it's not as simple as haoles vs locals.

  • #2
    Re: Pig hunting

    I think I know where the sandwich mistake came from. A couple of years ago my kids were watching a Pokeman cartoon when one of the characters offered another a plate of musubi. But in the english translation it came out as sandwiches as most caucasians wouldn't know what to do with a triangle of sticky rice on a plate.
    Life is what you make of it...so please read the instructions carefully.

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    • #3
      Re: Pig hunting

      Originally posted by Glen Miyashiro
      Since when does a Spam musubi count as a sandwich?
      I think the writer might have been trying to put it into words his audience would understand. He should have written it differently, though, perhaps something like "took a bite of his 'musubi,' a pork/rice mixture wrapped in seaweed, sort of like a sandwich." Something like that? <shrug> It also might have been poor editing. It's not always the reporter's fault. (Believe me -- I'm an editor! heh.)

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      • #4
        Re: Pig hunting

        I thought this part was kinda peculiar:

        We stopped, waiting for the dogs to reconnect with us, trying to get a bearing on the situation. I asked Paka the longest he'd walked to get a pig.

        He smiled. "Twenty-two," he said with a raised palm.
        What planet is Paka from? lol

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        • #5
          Re: Pig hunting

          I was wondering, did he mean twenty-two miles or twenty-two hours? Either way, I'd have given up a long time before.

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          • #6
            Re: Pig hunting

            I think it was miles. But I was wondering why he said "twenty-two" raising his hand. Braddah Paka get plenty spare fingers or what?

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            • #7
              Re: Pig hunting

              Originally posted by cezanne
              I think it was miles. But I was wondering why he said "twenty-two" raising his hand. Braddah Paka get plenty spare fingers or what?
              as in scout's honor

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              • #8
                Re: Pig hunting

                Originally posted by kimo55
                as in scout's honor
                Oh okay. Like he was saying "twenty"-*peace*

                Anyone ever watch the dumb pig hunting schtick that Da Braddahs do once in a while? I was thinking that the reporter could have gotten an interview from them...yeah right.

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                • #9
                  Re: Pig hunting

                  Originally posted by cezanne
                  Anyone ever watch the dumb pig hunting schtick that Da Braddahs do once in a while? I was thinking that the reporter could have gotten an interview from them...yeah right.
                  I saw that last night. I'm not a regular Da Braddahs watcher -- does that guy always wear that white thing on his face?

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                  • #10
                    Re: Pig hunting

                    Originally posted by craigwatanabe
                    I think I know where the sandwich mistake came from. A couple of years ago my kids were watching a Pokeman cartoon when one of the characters offered another a plate of musubi. But in the english translation it came out as sandwiches as most caucasians wouldn't know what to do with a triangle of sticky rice on a plate.
                    I was born in Japan and can tell you if you go there and ask for a musubi, they won't know what you are talking about. It's only in Hawaii that we call it that. In Japan it's nigiri or onigiri.

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                    • #11
                      Re: Pig hunting

                      Japanese culture that exists here in Hawaii is reflective of a time in Japan perhaps 100 or so years ago. As Japanese culture evolved and modernized in Japan, the traditional ways and language pretty much stayed the same here in Hawaii so there are definate cultural and language differences in Modern Japanese and Traditional.

                      I am Sansei (third generation Japanese) in Hawaii and my generation pretty much will kill off any traditional sense of Japanese culture that our grandparents brought over from the days of Hirohito because we have integrated our lifestyles into the western world almost completely. My children have a hard time understanding that their ancestry is primarily Japanese because they've grown up with three generations of successive westernized living.

                      As one who has grown up in Japan can you still remember a time where your parents may have taught you the practice of folding the paper sleeve from those disposable wooden hashi into a triangle and the significance of how you insert or place the tips inside or on the triangle? This is a practice that is slowly dying and when I go into a sushi bar the hostess hasn't a clue as to what I'm signalling. Yanagi Sushi on Kapiolani BLVD was the only place that picked up on those subtle hints.

                      To me Nigiri is a type of sushi with a thin slice of fish (Hamachi is my favorite)and not a musubi at all. A typical Musubi is a simple triangle of rice sprinkled with roasted sesame seeds, wrapped with Nori and a single Ume embedded in it's center.

                      Round musubi in the shape of a ball is typically served after a funeral and not recommended for pot lucks after a Saturday little league baseball game.

                      These are traditional Japanese practices and terminologies from a century ago in Japan that is still practiced in some of our more traditional Japanese restaurants around Hawaii because unlike Japan, the Japanese culture here in Hawaii hasn't changed much.
                      Life is what you make of it...so please read the instructions carefully.

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                      • #12
                        Re: Pig hunting

                        I once asked a friend from Osaka about the musubi/onigiri thing. She told me that she could recall her grandfather using the word "musubi", but that people in Japan don't use it any more. So like Craig said, it's probably an old-fashioned term that we Hawai'i Japanese never stopped using. Just like all the other quaint 19th-century Japanese traditions that we still have, much to the amusement of the Nihonjin tourists.

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                        • #13
                          Re: Pig hunting

                          Originally posted by craigwatanabe
                          As one who has grown up in Japan can you still remember a time where your parents may have taught you the practice of folding the paper sleeve from those disposable wooden hashi into a triangle and the significance of how you insert or place the tips inside or on the triangle?
                          I was born there but moved to Hawaii when I was three so I didn't grow up there. I've got lot relatives there though and they were bewildered by the word musubi.

                          I think it's also that the Japanese immigrants came here only from certain regions of Japan where some words were only used locally. My relatives said the language changes througout Japan. Maybe they still say musubi in Hiroshima or Kyushu but definitely not in Tokyo.

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                          • #14
                            Re: Pig hunting

                            A lot of immigrants came from the southern prefectures of Japan, mostly the country side where there were many farmers and peasants. My grandparents were farmers.
                            Life is what you make of it...so please read the instructions carefully.

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                            • #15
                              Re: Pig hunting

                              People are starting to realize -- there are too many wild pigs up in the mountains. There are so many, they're starting to come down into people's yards.

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