Hirono’s political positions take back seat to her mom

When not debating whether to buy the white BMW or the red Porsche, TV consultants ponder exactly how many times a TV commercial must run to be effective.

Show the spot too few times and viewers won’t really notice it; but if you show it too many times, people will also tune out.

Somewhere edging toward the "tune out" category is the account of U.S. Rep. Mazie Hirono’s odyssey, as a nearly 8-year-old who came with her mother to Hawaii in 1955 from Japan.

Hirono’s mother, Laura, is something of the secret weapon in Hirono’s campaign for the U.S. Senate, as in, "Wait till you meet Mazie’s mom. She is a real kick." And Hirono is taking full advantage of fleshing out her own life story as seen through the eyes of a poor immigrant family huddled in steerage on board the USS President Cleveland bound for Honolulu harbor.

Interestingly, Laura Hirono was actually returning to Hawaii on the voyage, as she explained to former Honolulu Star-Bulletin writer Rod Ohira in a 1999 newspaper account. After moving to Japan before World War II, by 1957, the family was back in Hawaii.

"My parents were working on a flower farm (on Lunalilo Home Road) in 1957 and six of us were living in a one-room shack that didn’t even have a bath," Laura Hirono said. "We took baths in the same tarai (wooden bucket) my mother bathed me in when I was born."

Laura left Hawaii when she was 15 and did not like living in Japan, telling Ohira, "Just after the war, Japan didn’t have anything," she said. "We always got robbed at night; they took our clothes."

At 22 she married Matabe Hirono, a veterinarian. After six years of marriage, Laura left, saying her husband was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic.

"Mazie Hirono, 4 years old in 1951 when Laura left her husband, recalled, ‘There was no food or money in the house. He sold all of our things to gamble,’" Ohira wrote.

Interestingly Laura was able to return to Hawaii because she was American, but Mazie was born in Japan and would have been classified as an alien, and if she had tried to come to Hawaii as an adult probably would have been blocked because of the McCarran-Walter Immigration Act of 1952.

Jon Okamura, University of Hawaii ethnic studies department professor, says, "Mazie becoming a naturalized citizen in 1959 isn’t unusual because there was a big push for naturalization after Hawaii became a state, including classes for elderly Japanese."

Okamura says the immigration experience for Japanese is both well-known and not that remarkable.

"For a Japanese-American, I don’t know what she is trying to tap into with the Japanese immigration — it is a historical story. Is she trying to make Hawaii as a place for immigrants?

"If she was Filipino, it would resonate more, because the Japanese had a very limited immigration, so maybe it is more a personal story and about a single mother," Okamura suggests.

Neal Milner, UH professor emeritus of political science, sees the value in such a story.

"The kinds of ads Mazie is running are important when the candidate needs to create a story and an image about himself or herself. In Mazie’s case by now that would seem less important because she has been in the public eye for so long, and people who pay attention to politics already think they have strong ideas of what she is like and where she comes from," Milner says.

While the soft-touch ads have their place, Hirono has been able to refashion her own story to apply it to "Mazie’s plan for a stronger, more sustainable Hawaii," and then include food and energy independence and even ending tax subsidies for oil companies.

If that is all too much to put on one family history, it will not be because Hirono is afraid to repeat it over and over.

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Richard Borreca writes on politics on Sundays, Tuesdays and Fridays. Reach him at rborreca@staradvertiser.com.