Tom Honan was walking along the Ala Wai Canal, a two-mile-long waterway near Hawai‘i’s famed Waikīkī Beach, when he saw a large group hurling strange, spherical objects into its murky depths. “Hey, you can’t be doing that!” he recalls shouting at the crowd. Later, upon talking to one of the perpetrators, Fumiko Sato Chun, he learned they were part of a volunteer organization called Genki Ala Wai, united by an ambitious, if not audacious goal: to make the Ala Wai, one of the island’s most notoriously polluted waterways, swimmable and fishable by 2026. Their means for this noble end are what they refer to as “Genki balls,” unassuming mudballs made from a mix of beneficial bacteria similar to the kind found in fermented foods like yogurt, kimchi, bread, and beer.
Today, Tom and his wife, Pam, are some of Genki Ala Wai’s most impassioned supporters. At a recent community event, I watch Tom as he demonstrates the surprisingly precise process of Genki ball creation. He starts with sifting mounds of dirt to remove debris, then mixes in rice bran and a liquid teeming with yeast, lactic acid, and phototrophic bacteria until it’s finally time to shape the mixture into tennis ball-sized spheres. I try my hand at making some. Two of my mudballs get rejected, first for being too small, then for being too big. “Quality over quantity,” Tom instructs, before accepting my third attempt. “Just right.”
Volunteers like Tom are the lifeblood of Genki Ala Wai, whose work thus far has relied solely on a homegrown network of private donations, corporate sponsorships, and the very many hands responsible for the more than 146,000 Genki balls (nearly halfway to the group’s goal of 300,000) that have since been released into the canal. This particular event was made possible by ‘Ohana Kōkua Club, a student service organization led by high school sophomore Ellie Chung, after Genki Ala Wai raised the $1,000 necessary to host a workday by selling greeting cards.
“We couldn’t do anything without our volunteers, who just jump right in and do what’s needed,” says Chun, who serves as the group’s community and media liaison. She points to Tom, who uses his walker to wheel around supplies, as evidence of the volunteers’ conviction. Laurie Levi, a retired Lions Club member who lives in Kapolei, makes the 24-mile journey by bus several times a week to help with the community events, Chun adds. Levi also regularly assists in moving supplies from the group’s storage container at Jefferson Elementary School to one of four toss sites along the canal. “We could not run an event without Laurie,” Chun says, her 3-year-old daughter clinging to her as she ferries around aluminum pans of finished mudballs.
The use of effective microorganisms, or EM for short, was first introduced to Hawai‘i in 1997 by Hiromichi Nago, who had learned about the benefit of microbes while in Okinawa under the tutelage of professor Teruo Higa, a professor at the University of the Ryūkyūs. In the early 1980s, after experiencing a bout of pesticide poisoning while researching composting techniques for mandarin oranges, Higa turned his attention to microbes, stumbling upon their beneficial properties by accident. Figuring it a waste to discard the microbe solution down the drain, he poured it over a patch of grass. One week later, he discovered the grass with the microbes had grown significantly better than the grass around it. Tantalized, Higa went on to create EM•1, a trademarked mix of microorganisms that have proved beneficial in a variety of applications, from household cleaner to odor eliminator to landscape fertilizer.
In 2006, heavy rains over Honolulu caused a large wastewater pipe to burst, prompting the city to divert 48 million gallons of raw sewage into the Ala Wai Canal. Nago had a thought: He could put the balls to work at home in Hawai‘i. Although the canal’s developers originally imagined Waikīkī as a “Venice of the Pacific,” the Ala Wai Canal has served as a de-facto waste dump from its inception in 1927, first to drain the wetlands that once made up the area and make way for the infrastructure to support Waikīkī as a burgeoning tourism center; then, to divert dirty rainwater from the golden-hued shores of Waikīkī Beach.
But despite the going science suggesting the efficacy of using microbes to improve water quality in urban waterways, approval to use Genki balls in the Ala Wai would take 13 years, delayed by a permitting process and the federal Clean Water Act that prohibits the release of unpermitted materials into a waterway. Finally, in 2019, permission to deploy the Genki balls was granted.
Before the group’s inaugural toss, officials from the Hawai‘i State Department of Health squelched out into the canal to take baseline water-quality readings and quickly found themselves mired in murky sludge nearly two feet deep in some spots—the result of decades of runoff pollution and intentional dumping. The pervasiveness of the muck was rivaled only by its odor, a sulfuric stench of rotten eggs that had long beleaguered nearby residents and businesses. The tests further confirmed the high levels of fecal contamination that prompted the city to post signs from as early as the 1970s warning local residents against eating anything from the canal.
The cost of testing remains one of Genki Ala Wai’s biggest obstacles, according to Kouri Nago, Hiromichi’s son, who joined the group’s effort. Federal funds that had been promised to Genki Ala Wai—which was chartered as a nonprofit under the Hawai‘i Exemplary State Foundation, itself tasked with creating a systems-based approach to care for the entire watershed from mountain to ocean—dried up during the pandemic, as did the city’s offer to regularly test water-quality levels. Still, the group remains determined to make the Ala Wai “genki” (meaning “healthy” or “energetic” in Japanese). They are spurred on by ongoing, visible improvements: sandy, rocky bottom where there once was only tarry black sludge; the absence of any fetid stench; the decrease in enterococci bacteria from fecal contamination; the welcomed return of native species, such as weke (a type of goatfish), moi (Pacific threadfin), and Hawaiian monk seals, to parts of the canal once devoid of life. “I know the significance that EM could have here,” says Kouri, who notes that Genki balls have also now been deployed at polluted waterways in the neighborhoods of Salt Lake and Kalihi on O‘ahu, and in the sprawling koi ponds at Hawai‘i Island’s Lili‘uokalani Gardens, said to be the largest Edo-style garden outside of Japan. “I see a vision that this place could be a model for the rest of the world.”
The mudballs, for their part, do much of the heavy lifting once they’re thrown in, dissolving like time-release capsules on the canal floor over the course of a year. “That’s why we love them. They don’t complain, they don’t take vacation,” Chun says, picking up a ball and bowing her head in gratitude. “Now you go and do your good work.”
