These shores were the heart of ʻEwa, a moku (district) counted among the political centers of Oʻahu before Kamehameha. Puʻuloa was its larder. Observers of old Hawaiʻi judged these bays the most favorable in all the islands for building loko iʻa, the walled coastal fishponds in which Hawaiians raised fish on a scale found almost nowhere else; people had tended them here since at least the mid-1400s. Shrimp, shellfish, and penned fish came out of Puʻuloa in steady abundance, and the families of ʻEwa built a settled, well-fed life around the harbor's quiet lochs.
That name carries one of the heaviest mornings in American memory. On December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor was attacked, and the United States entered the Second World War. Today the Pearl Harbor National Memorial keeps the day with quiet care: the USS Arizona Memorial rests above the sunken battleship, where more than eleven hundred sailors and Marines remain, and the more than two thousand four hundred service members and civilians lost that morning are honored together. Nearby, the Battleship Missouri — where the war ended in 1945 — closes the arc from the conflict's beginning to its end. It is a place of reflection and remembrance, and of the peace that former enemies have since chosen to keep.
