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By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
As part of the Okinawan Centennial Celebration, teams
from the United States and Japan give their all in a tug-o-war.

Okinawa trip
brings cousins
together

The girls finally get
together in Hawaii
after a sea voyage

By Leila Fujimori
Star-Bulletin

Two 16-year-old cousins who had never met -- one American, one Okinawan -- searched for one another on a voyage that brought 37 Hawaii and 300 Okinawan students together.

Marissa Ohnishi finally found her Okinawan cousin, Mika Igei, and the two became fast friends, laughing and talking.

Igei said it was "really nice to meet a cousin."

Forming such ties between young people was what Mayor Katsuhiro Yoshida of the Okinawan town of Kin envisioned when planning the trip to Hawaii to "relive" and commemorate the voyage of the first Okinawan emigrants to Hawaii 100 years ago.

So the mayor of Kin, the birthplace of Toyama Kyuuzo, the "Father of Okinawan Emigration," invited an ethnically mixed group of Hawaii students as well as descendants of Kin immigrants to fly to Okinawa and join the Kin students and about 100 townspeople on the voyage.

The town, with the Japan government's help, sponsored the trip for the students, teachers, chaperones and government officials.

By Kathryn Bender, Star-Bulletin
Cousins Mika Igei of Okinawa, left, and Marissa Ohnishi
of New York finally get to see each other for the first
time, at a Hawaii celebration.

Soon after departing Okinawa, a typhoon hit, and the bonding began.

"I felt really moved when I saw students helping each other when they got seasick," Yoshida said through an interpreter yesterday.

The typhoon also triggered something else.

"We kept reminding ourselves when the boat was rocking and most of us were getting sick that the immigrants didn't have air conditioning, plumbing and fine dining, so we shouldn't be complaining," said Terence Kam, 17, whose grandmother came from Kin.

And the 600-passenger cruise ship, with chandelier and swimming pool, did not resemble the fishing boat-like vessels on which the early emigrants sailed.

"Here we were traveling in the lap of luxury -- and to think of what our ancestors had to go through," said Karen Koles, a chaperone for the Hawaii Kin club students.

With tears welling up, Koles said: "It made me appreciate what they went through for their children. I wish I could thank my grandparents for what they had done."

Yesterday, a few immigrants, including 103-year-old Mata Yonashiro, a relative of Toyama Kyuuzo who sailed to Hawaii in 1915, were at Ala Moana Beach Park to see the appreciation.

The Hawaii United Okinawan Association festival yesterday celebrated the Okinawan immigration centennial and welcomed the Kin visitors. The highlight was when Okinawan and Hawaii students, garbed in purple, gold, black and white, performed an Okinawan eisa dance and beat drums -- all 337 in unison.

Today, the Okinawan students were to visit the schools their shipmates attend. They leave Honolulu Wednesday for their return trip with a new group of Hawaii students.