Japan/Kauai links

With the whipping wind and snow flurries here in northern Hiroshima, Hawaii is but a distant memory.

A quick nose on google to check links between Kauai and Japan resulted in more than two million hits.

Here’s a quick sample from the first page covering the dangerous, the historical, the environmental, a gigantic seal, Aloha shirts and the Japanese bureaucracy.

Report of a missile test off this part of the Kauai coast: A joint project carried out this week by the US Missile Defence Agency and Japan’s Defence Agency. (Hope they enjoyed the view).



For information on Japanese internment on Kauai during the war (and archaeological research conducted this week) see this article.

Gooney birds fly into Kauai (by plane!) and researchers from Japan and the US join forces in a project to save them. Read about it here.

And finally, a large number of the early Japanese to emigrate to Kauai were from Oshima, in Yamaguchi. Suo-Oshima is now a sister city of Kauai (a smart move by the Japanese bureaucrat that came up with that plan), and workers at the local town office wear Aloha shirts in the summer months while filing their paperwork in triplicate. The Hawaiian spirit only goes so far though, as the office workers have declined to use Kauai's official hanko (seal) as, being carved from monkeypod, it weighs in at 180 kilograms and may just be a little too hard to handle. You can see it in this photo.