Last words on letter
I would like to respond to Robert Roosen in the Monday, March 5, West Hawaii Today. I don’t know where you have been living, but the Japanese people here in Hawaii — and I know many and also have some as friends — are not at all what you have described.
I believe Hawaii is now part of the United States of America. Our officials are elected like they are in every other state. Maybe you don’t know or were never educated about the 442nd platoon. They were Japanese who volunteered to fight for the United States in World War II.
My aunt lived in Japan for more than 50 years. She originally went in the late 1950s as a missionary. She also taught English to many students. I traveled to Japan a few years ago. It is a wonderful place that I enjoyed visiting and was in several locations from Tokyo to Nagano and several other places — by train as well as by air.
The next year some of those students wanted to come to the United States and because I was the closest, living here in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, they came here.
They stayed at the King Kamehameha Hotel in Kona and I also hired one of the vacation travel buses to go around the island. We had a Japanese speaking driver who went around the island. That trip instead of eight hours was 14 hours. Those students loved it.
You sound like a racist and we do not need that here.
Anita Labertew
Ocean View
Here’s what Hawaii does have
In response to Lynwood Stephens (My Turn, March 12): It is hard to know where to begin to try to educate an alternative fact Trumpster such as yourself. Are you aware that the Hawaiians lived sustainably on this island for thousands of years, without importing anything or getting any tax money from Washington? I wonder how that changed?
Perhaps it was the European contact that caused it. You mention “ownership” several times, but before Caucasians came to Hawaii and organized the Great Mahele, the native culture here did not own the land but considered themselves stewards or caretakers of the land and the sea. I believe it was also the white race that stole the Native American lands in Minnesota.
Granted, we do not have the ingredients to make steel, cement, glass, rubber and many of the other building blocks of an industrial society. I’m glad that we don’t have to live around those polluting factories and mills. What we do have is hard-working men and women who built the resorts and timeshare that you vacation in, so you can get your butt of out of freezing Minnesota.
We have dedicated coffee farmers fighting invasive pests everyday to bring us the best organic coffee in the world, which gets us going in the morning. We also have one of the best mountains on the planet to view the universe, and world class astronomy facilities from which to do that, providing scientists and staff with jobs to pay taxes. We have hard-working, taxpaying fishermen who catch that delicious ono you order at the restaurants, cooked by our talented, taxpaying chefs. We have excellent private and public schools with dedicated teachers and administrators producing intelligent, “woke” students like President Obama and world class entertainers like Bruno Mars.
I could go on all morning, listing the ways the hard-working citizens of the Hawaii contribute to the tax base of the local, state and national economy of this country and I can tell you that none of us, including many Republicans, are pleased to see your hero Donald (not my president) Trump spending our millions of taxpayer dollars to fly Air Force One to Florida to golf almost every weekend. Talk about being a taker!
It is my hope that our minimum wage workers will be able to make a living on just one job, so that our precious island will become too expensive for you to come here with your cheapskate, prejudice, ignorant attitude.
Marian Hughes
Waimea