Hawaii: The smile on the face of America.

If Washington and Chicago represent the frown on the face of current America, Hawaii must be its smile.
Its not just the picture-book image which reminds us of our old Viewmaster images of Hawaii. Its not only the turquoise sea and the swaying palms which are all real. Its the wonderfully smiling, utterly engaging people who steal your affection. Big, heavily built men who are the tour guides, hosts at the Polynesian Cultural Centre, taxi drivers and hotel concierges. They all exude gentle good humor and kindness. They laugh, they crack jokes and they talk with disarming honesty about everything from their pride that Barack Obama was born here to the very high cost of living in Hawaii. Honolulu is the third most expensive place to live in the US after New York and San Francisco.
We spend much of the first day at the Polynesian Cultural Centre where they have built a kind of Disney World to introduce visitors to the culture and backgrounds of six distinct Polynesian island groups. From South Africa my knowledge of Fiji, Samoa, Tonga, Tahiti New Zealand and Hawaii stems almost exclusively from what I know about their rugby teams. So this experience is an eye-opener. Mostly its their humor that gets you. Who'd have thought to look at those rugby players, whose people all do some form of the Haka, that they have this dry, self-deprecating sense of humor.They tell about mundane activities like how to break open a coconut and shave the contents into useable flakes, and making a fire without matches as if they are stand-up comics. The audience roars with laughter and loves them.
The second day we have a surprisingly emotional experience when we visit Pearl Harbor. This is particularly significant for me because the Japanese attack happened same year, same month, four days before I was born. In the excellent visitor centre we see the whole story of Japanese ascendence and increase of power in the Pacific to the final surprise attack on the base of the American fleet in the Pacific. And when we analyze what led up to it we see that, again it was oil! The Americans, wanting to stem the tide of Japanese aggression and influence initiate sanctions against Japan. This immobilizes their fleet. They decide to attack. And all of us listening to the story think 'what were they thinking?' Japan humiliates America and did they imagine that the most powerful country in the world would just roll over? The most poignant part of this visit is to the memorial now built on the surface of the harbor's water where the USS Arizona was bombed and sank, losing the lives of 1177 men. Their bodies are never recovered. The memorial simply straddles the sunken vessel and lists the names of each one of the dead. Even though we are not American and have no real connection to this event, you can't help the lump in your throat. And the somber pride America feels for the valor of young lives sacrificed. It was Pearl Harbor that brought America into the war in 1941, and it was at Pearl Harbor where the Japanese signed their final surrender.
We wonder, when we discuss this afterwards, how the Japanese visitors feel when visiting Pearl Harbor. And how confident Japan must have been at that time, and how it seems to have lost much of its world influence and leadership now.