I recently had the opportunity to visit Kauai to meet my father-in-law’s side of the family. Except for him and his sister, everyone else stayed on the island after high school. He’s a third-generation Japanese American whose family’s lineage dates back to his grandparents' immigration from Okinawa to Hawaii to work on the sugar plantations.

Kauai during his childhood was much different than it is today. There was limited tourism. The beaches were rugged. There were no lifeguards, so you swam at your own risk. People lived off the land and sea. His brother loved the ocean and was an avid fisherman, bringing home fish to feed the family. They even captured turtles for food, long before turtles became an endangered species.

They grew up poor in Kapa‘a, about 10 miles north of Lihue Airport. They walked everywhere barefoot, even to school. Life was hard, and the family knew little beyond the manual labor of working on the sugar plantations for low wages.

There was also a complicated racial and class hierarchy in Hawaii. “Haole,” a Hawaiian word for foreigner, was commonly used to describe white people or those of European descent. White people generally occupied the highest levels of the social and economic order, while Portuguese immigrants often occupied an........

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