Raised in the business When she was just a little girl, Corine Hayashi played "restaurant" with her brother and sister. The children re-enacted what they saw around them, people serving others in the hospitality industry.
For Corine Hayashi, coming home
meant returning to family
and carrying on a legacyBy Russ Lynch
rlynch@starbulletin.comWhen she was 14, Corine told her dad, Herbert Takami Hayashi (nobody calls him anything but "HT") that she thought she was ready to work in a family hotel.
"As long as I can remember," she said in a recent interview, "my father wanted all the kids to go into the business eventually."
But HT grilled her: "What job experience do you have?"
"Well, I've sold some newspapers."
"Well, you don't have the job qualifications to get into sales," her father said. "You'll have to start in housekeeping."
She had to get a permit to go work as a child. "It was the first time I had ever done physical labor. It was a wonderful experience," Corine said. "It taught you the value of physical work" and the rewards that come from doing a hard job successfully.
Now 34, she is president of the family business, HTH Corp., which owns and operates three hotels -- the Pagoda and the Pacific Beach on Oahu and King Kamehameha's Kona Beach Resort on the Big Island.
"In a lot of ways it's wonderful" working in the family business, she said. "You grow up in the business and you hear about it all the time. You really love what you do. You're very passionate about it. Right now, I'm thrilled about it."But there are always family matters too. "You have to be careful. At Christmas dinner you start talking about the business and then suddenly it's all about the business and not about the family," she said.
"Because everybody is passionate about it, you do take it personally. If you can tolerate that aspect of it, it's wonderful."
She doesn't see herself as a "visionary" like her father has been described. Hayashi went into business as a contractor right after World War II. He built business buildings. In the early 1960s he realized the potential of an area mauka of Ala Moana Center, now mostly known as the Kapiolani business district. He built an apartment building, the Pagoda Terrace, but by the time it opened in 1963 he had created something altogether new.
He developed the Pagoda Hotel and Floating Restaurant, designing the famous carp pond himself and bringing in prize fish that satisfied his new interest in the hobby.
Visionary or not, he was very practical. He figured the hotel would do well because of its location, between Waikiki and the downtown business district, near the island's biggest shopping center.
In the 1970s he bought the Pacific Beach Hotel and let the visionary streak take over again, with the development of a huge aquarium that makes up one wall of its biggest restaurant.
In 1990, HT bought the King Kamehameha in Kona, which now has 1,200 employees.
Despite her early experiences working in housekeeping and later in the Oceanarium restaurant, and trying everything from bus boy to wait-help and cashier, Corine did not go straight into the business. She went to college on the mainland and after that, lived in Japan "to learn Japanese," she said.
She took a part-time job with a small management company and ended up running it for a few years. "It taught me the seriousness and responsibility of being in charge," she said.
Hayashi said she doesn't think she would have been happy coming back to run the family business without that experience of knowing she could run another company.
In 1998, she came back as president of HTH Corp., after her father had a stroke, became wheelchair bound and moved aside from the day-to-day business.
She is also active in tourism organizations such as the Hawaii Hotel Association and volunteers for the State Foundation on Culture & the Arts, where she is in her first term on the board of directors.
All she is doing in the family business, she said, is carrying forward what her father started.
"He was a visionary. I'm not," she said. "I think if I had been a visionary like him, I wouldn't want to continue what he did but go out and do different things."
She is the only one of the Hayashi siblings who ended up in the family's hotel business. Her sister is a psychologist on the mainland and her brother takes care of family finances and works with their father outside the hotel business.
The hotel business, she said, "is all about people" and she has always loved it, she said.
She said the some of the hardest learning was waiting on restaurant customers.
"It's a real difficult job. You need physical dexterity and ability and good people skills, because you're dealing with the customer and the back of the house," meaning the people who are preparing the food in the back, she said. "Both at times will complain at you" and you need to quickly sort out whatever problem arises.
She also had stints as cashier, checking guests in at the front desk, in sales, in reservations and in advertising, all before she went to the mainland.
Just about the only jobs she didn't do were diving into the aquarium for the underwater fish-feeding show (HT wouldn't let her) and washing dishes, because she wasn't strong enough to work the high-pressure hoses.
Her father wanted her to get an education and outside experience and then come back to the business, and that's what she did.
The outside perspective she gained was very important, she said.
"That's the wonderful thing about the hotel industry," she said. "It's everything."