5 61 These ruins of a coal-dressing plant in Iwaki are just one of sev-eral industrial heritage sites. 2 Housing for coal miners and their families in the 1960s. 3 A mine shaft on exhibit at the Mirokuzawa Coal Mine Museum.4 Trees now cover the zuriyama mounds of rock and grit that were sorted from the coal and piled high back in the day. 5 A shaft elevator moved workers and coal to and from the mines.6 This mine structure housed an exhaust fan used for ventilation.7 A former mine entrance, now closed off.8, 11 The hula show at Spa Resort Hawaiians is a crowd-pleaser.9 Miners’ daughters who were among the first hula dancers, photographed with a zuriyama in the background.10 Also on show at Hawaiians is a Samoan fire-knife dance.12 A long-ago dance practice.13 A gallery view of the Hula Museum at Hawaiians.14 The indoor water park at Hawaiians today, beneath the original dome.1 2 3 4 8 9 1012 13 7 11 14 Tohoku has a surprising connection with Hawaii. Back in 1966, a theme park, then named the Joban Hawaiian Center, opened in Iwaki, offering the dream of “travel” to an exotic Hawaiian village where palm trees and banana plants flourished. Many older Japanese still recall the television commercials. More recently, Lee Sang-il’s 2006 hit film Hula Girls followed the travails of Iwaki women who trained as dancers in preparation for the facility’s opening. Still in operation today, the attraction has since changed its name to Spa Resort Hawaiians. With heated indoor and outdoor pools, hotels, multiple spas, hula shows, and more, it is one of Fukushima’s best-known leisure destinations. How did a Hawaiian theme wind up here in the first place? The unlikely answer, it turns out, is coal mining. From the mid-nineteenth century, Iwaki was a coal-mining town. Within a few decades, thanks in part to its proximity to Tokyo’s industrial belt, the local coal business was flourishing. At its peak in the 1940s, there were 130 mines in Iwaki producing four million tons of coal a year. Coal was the backbone of the national economy, driving Japan’s entry into the modern age, and Iwaki was at the center of it. That all changed, however, with the shift to petroleum in the 1950s and ’60s. Mines in Iwaki and elsewhere across Japan closed one after the other. As unemployment soared, many communities faced imminent decline. Iwaki, though, turned out differently. Yutaka Nakamura was vice president of the Joban Coal Mining Company. As its mines faced closure, Nakamura figured he could keep the miners employed by using the area’s abundant thermal waters to create a leisure facility. Over the course of digging the mines, workers had had to contend with the prolific reservoirs of geothermal water and vapor they kept unearthing, a source of unending trouble in terms of safety and cost management. Nakamura resolved to turn that loss into profit by creating a balmy resort à la Hawaii, a place most Japanese of the time longed to visit. A huge dome would be built to house a heated pool that could 24Encountering Hawaii in TohokuTale of a Coal-Mining Town
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