Returning to My Roots: A Visit to a Living History Kona Coffee Farm
Monday, August 22, 2011 at 4:00AM 
By Sandy Hu
Last week, I stepped back in time and into my childhood at The Kona Coffee Living History Farm in Captain Cook, Kona, on the Big Island of Hawaii. This living museum chronicles the life of immigrant Japanese coffee farmers from 1926 to 1945 through the original farmhouse and seven-acre coffee farm of the Uchida family. Their life mirrored that of my grandparents, Iwaki and Kitsu Honda, and their nine children.
While the farm is historically accurate to 1945, so much of that lifestyle continued well past it, to my own childhood, when, living in Hilo on the other side of the island, we would visit my grandparents, aunts and uncles, all coffee farmers at the time. As kids, we picked our share of coffee, too, during peak coffee season.