The Oldest Most Reliable Online Guide to Fiji
Column 1 No Regrets
This is the first column in a serialization of PACIFIC FLASH: A Year in FIJI by Gerry Takano. Copies will be available April 1, 2010.
My unremitting and insatiable desire for new adventures was so intoxicating. My position in a Honolulu architectural firm was unstable as Hawaii plunged into economic instability and unemployment anxiety. With few prospects and dwindling professional options in my hometown, a fascinating offer was presented. Good friends in Melbourne, Australia, who had previously completed a heritage study for Levuka, encouraged me to apply for a year’s position as a heritage advisor in the very remote town.
With limited knowledge about this land, an assignment in the former British town on the primal, eastern island of Ovalau some nine hours by jet plane from Honolulu, was intriguing. Colleagues and acquaintances said the job was professional suicide -- leaving the lucrative American business world for the pastoral and obscure unknown path was romantic and highly risky. Yet the work in resort design and planning was dwindling and the prospect of more whirlwind years in corporate architecture was questionable.
Such thoughts of an ambitious middle aged man happened at a time in Honolulu when many of the city’s quaint older buildings and neighborhoods were demolished and rebuilt with a new modernist mentality that paved the way for a formulated and sterile direction in planning and design. Returning home after several years in Newton, Massachusetts and Boston’s South End, my disenchantment with Honolulu’s suburban preferences was exacerbated by the lack of public discourse and debate of the urban transformation.
Vocal opposition to a growth and development was risky. Instead it would be best to venture elsewhere again, rethink my own personal goals in the profession or simply abandon any hopes of fitting into the established system of extended modernism. Such was the moment.
Given my naïve and idealistic desire to promote and discover historic preservation in another island culture, the imagery of a faraway, exotic and less tarnished spot made sense. Fiji seemed destined to repeat Hawaii’s dependency on larger and more powerful economic forces and cultural clashes. Perhaps this was why the journey was important. At that moment the traditional ways were indeed threatened forever by the seductive melody of a new global order.
Gerry Takano was reared in Honolulu, Hawaii and received his architectural education and early training in upstate New York and Boston. Gerry served as Hawaii’s National Trust Advisor and State of Hawaii Commissioner of the Historic Sites Review Board.
He currently resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and can be reached at gertkno@aol.com
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