HUOA’s First Woman President
Karleen Chinen
Special to The Hawai‘i Herald
On their cue, the nervous third graders from Wahiawā’s ‘Iliahi Elementary School scampered out onto the stage of the Albert T. and Wallace T. Teruya Pavilion at the Hawaii Okinawa Center and took their places, just as they had practiced. They looked straight ahead at the audience, as Violet Ogawa Sensei had instructed them to do. When the celebratory song, “Medetai Bushi,” began playing, the youngsters raised their small paranku drums and bachi (drumstick) and began hitting their drums, singing the song and going through the dance steps they had been taught. Seated front and center at the foot of the stage, beaming with pride was their school principal, Jane Serikaku. Earlier that evening, she had been installed as the 42nd — and first woman — president of the United Okinawan Association of Hawaii (renamed Hawaii United Okinawa Association in 1995).
In her March 27, 1993, installation speech, Serikaku credited her parents, Bugiyu and Kanasa Miyashiro, immigrants from Nakagusuku, Okinawa, for instilling in her the values and chimugukuru — the Okinawan spirit — that had shaped her life. “Our Issei’s legacy is truly the foundation of who we are, and we are committed to honoring our Issei and the traditions they have left us,” she said.
Her parents’ grit and hard work had taught her lessons from a young age. “They worked so hard,” she told Drusilla Tanaka in a 2009 oral history interview. “My mom used to cook for all the single Filipino men and wash their clothes, in addition to taking care of all the kids, plus working in the canefield.” From the sugarcane fields of Pu‘unënë, the family moved to Ha‘ikü in east Maui, where they raised pineapple, eventually settling in Mäliko Gulch, where they eked out a living as truck farmers while raising their six daughters and three sons. Jane was their youngest child. When the children were older, their parents explained that they could not afford to send them to college. If they wanted to pursue their education beyond high school, they would have to find a way to pay for it on their own. “But we all went to college,” she said. “[T]hey instilled in us that great desire and the capacity to find some way to get there.”
For Serikaku, it was by saving all the money she received from 4-H Club projects, including $1,000 she earned from raising a young calf to a beef steer that was auctioned off at the Maui County Fair. “No matter what people say, as long as you believe in yourself and you work hard, you can get whatever you want,” she said.
In her 2009 interview, she recalled that the Okinawan families in their community gathered at her parents’ house to cook for parties, funerals and other occasions. They also assembled to collect relief items to be sent to their war-ravaged homeland, even though they had so little for their own families. “Although my parents tried to get us to understand, for kids, it’s hard. Now I understand, and I truly appreciate what my parents did for the families in Okinawa,” she said.
When the opportunity to serve as UOA president was presented to her, she did not hesitate. “I was asked to consider being president of the United Okinawan Association — not as the first female president — but just as president of the organization,” she told me in a 2001 interview. There was excitement when people realized that Serikaku would be the organization’s first woman president. She, however, took it in stride. “I guess if I had come in thinking, ‘I am the first female [UOA president] and I’m going to be blazing a trail,’ or something like that, perhaps I would have [thought it was monumental],” she said in 2001. “But I don’t think I had that pressure. I had an extraordinary amount of support from everyone. I just felt like I wanted to do the best job possible.”
From its establishment in 1951, UOA leaders had always enjoyed a close relationship with Okinawa’s government, business and community leaders. But they had never worked with a woman president. “So, it was a challenge, but one that we both overcame and benefitted from,” Serikaku wrote in her 2013 essay, “Living ‘Ohana,” in “Japanese Eyes, American Heart (Volume Three): Learning to Live in Hawai‘i.” Actually, her selection came at just the right time, as Okinawa’s prefectural government was changing, as well. In 1991, Okinawa’s new governor, Masahide Ota, had selected Hiroko Sho as one of the prefecture’s two vice governors. She was Okinawa’s first female vice governor. Both Sho and Ota held master’s degrees from American colleges — Ota from Syracuse University in New York, and Sho from Michigan State University. She also had a Ph.D. from Kyushu University. Both had been professors at the University of the Ryukyus before entering government service. When Sho left her position in 1994, she was succeeded by another woman, Mitsuko Tomon.
Even with a full-time-plus career as a classroom teacher and then school principal, Serikaku, a 1998 Milken Educator Award recipient, had always made time to volunteer with the Okinawan community.
Serikaku approached her year as president like an educator, setting goals and developing a game plan for achieving them. She believed that the UOA’s future lay in the involvement of young Okinawans and Uchinanchu at heart and set out to groom them for future leadership roles in their respective sonjinkai, or ancestral club, and the organization. To do this, she reached back into the UOA’s past — to 1980, when 37 primarily Sansei Uchinanchu journeyed to Okinawa at the invitation of the city and town governments. Their identity as Okinawans was awakened on that trip. The experience changed the lives of several members of the group, who went on to make landmark contributions to the UOA and the Okinawan community.
Serikaku hoped to rekindle that feeling of pride in the participants’ Okinawan heritage and inspire them to get involved in the UOA and its activities by organizing a 2.0 version of that tour. The 14 young people, ages 25 to 45, in her 1993 Leadership Tour visited cultural sites, learned about Okinawa’s history, experienced Okinawan culture up-close, and met government and business leaders. However, unlike the 1980 trip, which was underwritten by the city and town governments, the 1993 tour cost was shared by the participant, his or her sonjinkai and the UOA. When they returned from Okinawa, Serikaku kept them involved in Okinawan community activities. “They became the leaders, not only of their own clubs, but of HUOA,” she said in 2001. “Then the next group that I took (1999), they’re now very involved,” she said. The third leadership tour was led by 2007 president David Arakawa. Next month, 12 young people will join 2023 president Clarisse Kobashigawa on the fourth leadership tour to Okinawa.
Young people continued to be Serikaku’s focus even after her term ended. For many years, she coordinated the Hawai‘i Okinawa Student Exchange Program, which the state Legislature established in 1990 between the Hawai‘i and Okinawa departments of education. When the state could no longer fund the program, Serikaku recommended that the HUOA take over the program so that high school students in Hawai‘i and Okinawa could continue to learn about each other’s island homes and countries through tours, experiences and a homestay with a host family. The program, now 33 years old, continues to build people-to-people bonds of friendship between Hawai‘i and Okinawa.
After retiring from ‘Iliahi Elementary, Serikaku was hired as the HUOA’s executive director, serving from 2004 until her passing in 2018.
Thirty years ago, Jane Serikaku made history as the HUOA’s first woman president. She also opened the door for, thus far, nine women — Pamela Tamashiro (1998), Lillian Takata (1999), Gladys Tokunaga Asao (2002), Cheryl Okuma (2004), Laverne Higa (2006), Courtney Takara (2018), Jocelyn Ige (2019), Lynn Miyahira (2020) and Clarisse Kobashigawa (2023) — to lead one of Hawai‘i’s largest and most active cultural organizations.
Karleen Chinen is a former Hawai‘i Herald editor and writer. She is currently writing a book chronicling Hawai‘i’s Okinawan community from 1980 to 2000, titled “Born Again Uchinanchu: Hawai‘i’s Chibariyo! Story.”
