The impeached U.S. president was acquitted and the speaker of the House tore up her copy of the State of the Union address. The new coronavirus breakout forced Tokyo to put a cruise ship under strict quarantine. But despite all the things that have happened in the world over the past week, my thoughts have gone to the history of Hawaii and its relations with Japan.
Before arriving here on a vacation, I had imagined that many of the millions of tourists to Hawaii each year must be Asians from the Far East. In fact, the street conversation on Kalakaua Avenue, a popular shopping area in Honolulu, is either in Japanese, Korean or Chinese.
Contrary to conventional wisdom in Japan, however, the great majority of people who visited Hawaii in 2018 were Americans, who accounted for 6.4 millions out of 10 million visitors.