The Other Side of Honolulu: Being Welcomed by Hawaii's Japanese Community
I have always dreamed of going to Hawaii since I was in elementary school, and now I am working in Hawaii. I would like to write about one aspect of the Japanese community in Hawaii that I have seen through my deep relationships with local Japanese people, my thoughts on the multicultural situation in Hawaii, and my thoughts on Japanese culture based on the Japanese community in Hawaii.
Stories from this series
Final Episode: Traditional Culture and Diversity of Japanese Americans in Hawaii
Aug. 17, 2018 • Seiji Kawasaki
This series of essays, in which I have written at a very slow pace about my own experiences with Japanese people and Japanese community in Hawaii, has now reached its 12th installment. I had had a strong desire to visit Hawaii for 20 years since I was an elementary school student, and it was in the summer of 1996 that I first visited the country. I picked out someone from a mailing list for multicultural education, my specialty, who I …
Part 11: What Japanese Hawaiians value in relationships
April 18, 2018 • Seiji Kawasaki
There is a private junior and senior high school called Mid-Pacific Institute on the north side of the University of Hawaii's Manoa campus. It is an elite school in Honolulu, on a par with Punahou and Iolani. It is abbreviated as MPI, so one of the graduates joked that M(id-Pacific Institute) is at the forefront, with P(unahou) and I(olani) following behind. The school is fully equipped with dormitories, and students come from the Hawaiian islands. There are many Japanese-Americans enrolled …
Part 10: The "Inside" and "Outside" of Japanese-Americans in Hawaii
June 14, 2017 • Seiji Kawasaki
Last time , I wrote about the Honolulu radio station KZOO in detail. I first learned about it when I was in the first year of junior high school, and since the summer I was 30, I have been going to Hawaii several times a year without fail, and it is a radio station that I always listen to while driving there. When I lived there, it was also my daily source of information about Japan. This time, I would …
Part 9: Refreshing and Comfortable "Zukezuke": Mutual Aid among Japanese Americans in Hawaii
March 29, 2017 • Seiji Kawasaki
I think it was the winter of 1976, when I was in the fifth grade of elementary school. Kikuchi had a radio cassette player at home, and when I used the walkie-talkie that came with it, I could hear the voice clearly even from across the rice fields. The walkie-talkie was stored inside the body of the radio cassette player. It was much cooler than the toy walkie-talkie we had at home. When I went to Fujimoto's house to play, …
Part 8 (Part 2) Basic English that I learned from a Japanese person that I didn't learn at school
Jan. 18, 2017 • Seiji Kawasaki
Read the first part >> So, I would like to introduce some of the English expressions that L corrected, interspersed with anecdotes. It's not interesting to talk about the correction of simple mistakes or grammatical errors, and although I may be a little biased, I think I have pretty much mastered the basics of grammar and don't make many mistakes. So, I would like to focus on the ones that I learned for the first time after they were corrected, …
Part 8 (Part 1) Basic English that I learned from a Japanese person that I didn't learn at school
Jan. 17, 2017 • Seiji Kawasaki
In the second installment, " Is dressing fashionable not stylish? ", I touched on the change in words. I took up the topic of how inherited Japanese words have lost their original meaning and changed, and thought about it while imagining the lives of the Issei. I imagined that they worked hard every day after crossing the ocean, and saved up whatever little they had left over from the remittances they sent back to their homeland. I came up with …
