"[This is] the story of how the California Hotel grew from an unattractive property in a run-down section of Las Vegas to become the must-visit destination for Hawai‘i gamblers, whose special relationship with the hotel was forged in its first decade of business―1975 to 1985. . . . [It’s] told largely through the voice of John Blink, who was a witness to the powerful connection Sam Boyd created between the California Hotel and Hawai‘i’s gamblers. But it also includes personal recollections from people who worked in Hawai‘i and the hotel. Together, they offer insights, memories, and opinions on what made the hotel an oasis of aloha in a depressed corner of Las Vegas. The early chapters, which provide the background and the events that led to the opening of the hotel in 1975, introduce the reader to Boyd and describe his growing mentorship of Blink. Subsequent chapters chronicle the California Hotel’s shaky start and the business decisions that turned it into a profitable casino beyond everyone’s dreams. They describe a place so popular that guests routinely say the best times to see old friends―sometimes the only times they ever see them―are at weddings, funerals, and at the California Hotel." ―from the Introduction by Dennis M. Ogawa

California Hotel and Casino: Hawai‘i's Home Away from Home

Business & Money

Ogawa, Dennis M.

GORDON, MIKE

Blink, John M.

Industries

Japanese Cultural Center

“Who You?” For Japanese Americans of Hawaii, it is all about the Issei. On the journey to find identity they do not walk alone. The Issei walk with them. They will not lose their way. These stories that honor the Issei are shared by George R. Ariyoshi, former Governor of Hawaii; Fujio Matsuda, former President, University of Hawaii; Sparky Matsunaga, late Senator of Hawaii; Masaji Marumoto, late Justice, Supreme Court of Hawaii; Fumiko Kaya, late founder, Goto of Hiroshima Foundation; and Patsy Sumie Saiki, late author and educator.

Who You? Hawaii Issei

Biographies & Memoirs

Kitano, Christine

Community & Culture

The United States is generally considered to have entered the war against Japan after the Japanese empire's attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Yet, did this conflict actually originate decades earlier? Author Claude Morita spent his career in military history and intelligence, working in programs of the US Air Force in Vietnam and with US naval intelligence operations in Japan. His research of declassified materials in the National Archives in Washington, DC, convinced him that US planning of a war against Japan began in about 1898. He examined the top-secret offensive strategy developed by the US Joint Army and Navy Board, named War Plan Orange--a series of contingency war plans to manage hostilities against Japan--tracing its various iterations, from its origins in the late 1890s through the interwar years to 1941. Morita shows that what was initially a strategic policy became a racist one aimed at anyone of Japanese ancestry. As an example, he highlights the life experiences of one such individual, Hideo Okamoto. Born in Yokohama in 1892, at the age of ten Okamoto traveled to America aboard a ship bound for San Francisco to join his father and older brother. He immersed in his new surroundings, played baseball, attended a Japanese-only high school, and then went to junior college, graduating as a business major. Okamoto moved to New York City and established his own company, which later went bankrupt at the start of the Great Depression. By then he was married with a newborn daughter and he quickly found employment with a Japanese import-export company. In 1941, Japanese companies in NYC encouraged family members of their employees to return to Japan, and Okamoto's wife and child did so, while Hideo stayed behind. On December 7, he was on a business trip and staying at a Miami hotel, when two FBI agents arrested him as an enemy alien. He was jailed and later sent to a US concentration camp, despite having been a law-abiding resident for almost forty years. Hideo Okamoto was arbitrarily selected and traded as part of the first exchange of "prisoners of war" with Japan. He lost all his personal property and was forced to live out his life in Japan. While Okamoto did not express anger at these injustices, his biographer recounts a story that deserves to be met by outrage as well as remembrance.

Hideo Okamoto: Exchange Prisoner and War Plan Orange

Morita, Claude

Family Torn Apart is the gripping story of one Hawai‘i family’s World War II odyssey. Otokichi Ozaki, a Japanese immigrant, was a Japanese language school teacher, tanka poet, and anthurium grower and also a leader of the Japanese community in the city of Hilo on the Big Island of Hawai‘i. A devoted family man, he and his Hawai‘i-born wife, Hideko, had four children ranging in age from two to eight when war broke out. After the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, he was one of several hundred immigrant community leaders to be arrested, beginning a long journey for Ozaki and his family. Based on letters, poetry, and radio scripts in the collection of the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawai‘i, and translated here for the first time, Family Torn Apart traces Ozaki’s incarceration at eight different detention camps, his family’s life in Hawai‘i without him, their decision to ‘voluntarily’ enter Mainland detention camps in the hope of reuniting, and their subsequent frustration as that reunion bogged down in red tape and government apathy. Relying on Japanese language primary sources, Family Torn Apart brings alive the Japanese immigrant perspective on the World War II incarceration, intergenerational relations, and life under martial law in Hawai‘i. It is a stirring story of the human spirit in difficult times and a cautionary tale for future generations.

Family Torn Apart: The Internment Story of the Otokichi Muin Ozaki Family

From the icy plains of Montana to the blistering deserts of New Mexico, the World War II Japanese American incarceration would take Honolulu businessman and poet Suikei Furuya on an odyssey zigzagging through seven states and across eleven thousand miles. Furuya’s chronicle of his imprisonment, Haisho Tenten,published in Japanese fifty years ago, is now translated and available here in English for the first time. An Internment Odyssey provides a rare first-hand account of an immigrant life turned upside down, when the country of Furuya’s birth attacks the nation that he has come to call home. With a keen eye and a poet’s sensibility, Furuya captures the surprise and despair that he feels over his abrupt arrest and separation from his family, his humiliation and outrage over his incarceration, and finally resignation as his life becomes a seemingly endless journey to one internment camp after another. Laced throughout with poems from Furuya’s exile, An Internment Odyssey depicts the efforts of internees to bring dignity and joy to their lives under imprisonment. Furuya’s accounts of Camp Livingston in Louisiana and Camp Forrest in Tennessee are the first in the English-language literature by a Japanese American internee. An Internment Odyssey poses questions still relevant today about the roles that race and ethnicity play in defining what it means to be loyal to our nation.

An Internment Odyssey: Haisho Tenten

Furuya, Suikei

Arts & Literature