An English-language edition was also published under the name Hawaii Herald, which relaunched in July 2024 as an online newspaper called The San Times.

Founder Frederick Kinzaburo Makino had recently been released from a ten-month prison sentence for his role in organizing a 1909 labor strike among sugarcane plantation workers.

Disappointed by existing newspapers' coverage of continuing labor disputes, Makino established the Hochi to present a "non-party and independent" perspective on the issues then facing Japanese Americans in Hawaiʻi.

[1] An English section of the Hawaii Hochi, called "the Bee" for its sting, was introduced in 1925 in order to appeal to Nisei who were not fluent in Japanese.

Unlike other prominent Japanese-language newspaper editors, like the Nippu Jiji's Yasutaro Soga, Makino managed to avoid incarceration, and in 1952 the Hochi returned to its original title.