Six years later she opened the fish market. Nori had just turned twenty-three in 1910 when she urged her husband’s family to expand the simple lean-to that sold the freshest fish in Hilo down by the wharf into a larger market. Samuel and her in-laws resisted. “We’re fishermen, why make more trouble, eh?” her husband had argued. Nori simply smiled and remained insistent. She’d given him two sons in the past five years, and was ready for something more than just changing diapers and waiting for her husband to return home each day bringing the rank smells of fish and sweat. No matter how much her husband protested, she knew he would eventually relent. Samuel was a good, hardworking man, whom she’d known and trusted since he was a boy sitting next to her at Queen Lili’uokalani High School, but Nori had all the business acumen in the family. Hadn’t she been the one to put away enough money to buy the building and start the market in the first place?

The new Okawa Fish Market opened two months later. Nori, Samuel, and the boys moved into the upstairs apartment, away from her in-laws for the first time. Nori loved Samuel, and marrying him young was a way to escape the memory of her own uncaring parents. But another weight had been lifted when she had a place of her own, away from the watchful eyes of her mother-in-law, a good woman who expected things done her way. “Do like this, yeah,” or “No, no, not that way.” For the first time in her life, Nori felt like a bird released from its cage. She bought two large iceboxes and used the long, whiskey-stained koa wood bar as a counter where customers could sit and eat. She had shelves built that lined the walls and stocked essential grocery items—canned foods, sacks of rice, beans, sugar, salt, and flour. “Survivor foods,” she called them, along with boxes of matches, cigarettes, sweet and salty dried plums, and candies at the front checkout counter, just in case a customer had forgotten to pick up something at Oshima’s grocery store, or worse yet, a natural disaster had rumbled through the island, leaving them completely cut off from the rest of the world.