OMG, I think I finally get the カメハメハ / Hawaii mystery, years after reading this chapter!
I’m sure others got it, but I didn’t see anyone connect all the dots on the カメハメハ reference explicitly, so here is what it took for the penny to finally drop (for me). I’ve tagged a few people’s quotes who recently discussed this as you might be interested!
It’s on page 7. There was a recent question in the Read Every Day thread, this is what refreshed my memory of the page:
And then people were talking about the puns, and it ended with exactly the mystery I had been left with when I had read it - why the reference to the leader in Hawaii and what is funny about that?
And then with that in my head I chanced across a reference that just made it it all snap into place, and I finally got it, I think, lol.
Here’s how the word play goes to get the build up:
- Polar Bear is wondering why panda isn’t taking sugar because he used to take a lot.
- So panda says he became: 無糖派 ・むとうは a kind of made up word: “low sugar party”.
- So polar bear doesn’t get this and asks if he means (same reading) 無党派・むとうは (independent voter).
- Then polar bear plays on the とうは and mimes a martial artist and panda comes up with 武闘派・ぶとうは (perhaps reference to this film? another tidbit I haven’t seen mentioned)
- Then comes another play on とうは
- and then the big finale that was the mystery - カメハメハ. Here’s what I’m pretty sure is going on. Polar bear is just playing on the final は now, and this is a super popular Dragonball reference that every kid seems to know (here a kid is shouting it in よつばと):
And, drumroll, the link to Hawaii, I discovered on fandom. (Potential DragonBall spoiler):
Kamehameha origin story
Kamehameha (かめはめ波, lit. “Turtle Devastation Wave” or “Turtle Destruction Wave”) is the first energy attack that is shown in the Dragon Ball series.
After much contemplation, Akira Toriyama could not decide on a name for his “Kame” attack, so he asked his wife for ideas. His wife came up with the name and the stances used during the attack. She also told Akira that it would be easy to remember the name of the attack if he uses the name of the cultural Hawaiian king named Kamehameha. Akira agreed, and the Kamehameha was born.
So a Japanese person would certainly recognise the かめはめ波 cry (DragonBall), and the joke is that panda and bear are so sophisticated to think first of カメハメハ (Hawaiian leader), and the author put the “in Hawaii” text as a hint to the reader.
Finally!