It sounds as if the cylinder head has been removed, sparker. It is usual practice to rotate the rockers sideways on Honda engines and remove the pushrods before taking the head off, then put them back in after reinstalling the head. It sounds as if someone forgot the final step of pushing each valve down and rotating the rocker back into position, after the head was back on. Incidentally you do much the same thing if you want to measure the compression pressure with the decompressor disabled: you just remove the exhaust pushrod. Here is an extract from the HR194 workshop manual:
Thanks for reporting the outcome of your repair - I'll close this thread.