Haiku Stairs Haiku Stairs The Haikū Stairs, also known as the Stairway to Heaven or Haikū Ladder, is a steep hiking trail on the island of Oahu, Hawaii. The total 3,922 steps span along Oahu's Ko'olau mountain range. "Haiku" does not refer to the Japanese poetry genre. The area is named "Haikū" after the Kahili flower. In 1942, contractors for the U.S. Navy began construction of the Haʻikū Radio Station, a top secret facility that was to be used to transmit radio signals to Navy ships that were then operating throughout the Pacific. In order to obtain the necessary height for the
Japanese abbreviated and contracted words Station, is referred to by locals as , a contraction of , in which the alternative reading of "Na-" (名), the first character in "Nagoya", is used. In loanwords and names, the most common pattern is to take the first two morae (or kana) of each of the two words, and combine them forming a new, single word. For example, "family restaurant" or "famirī resutoran" becomes "famiresu". Yōon sounds, those sounds represented using a kana ending in "i" and a small "ya", "yu" or "yo" kana, such as "kyo" count as one mora. Japanese long vowels count as two morae,