Mazie Hirono - Background and Early Life

Background and Early Life

Hirono was born in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, in 1947. At the age of 16, her maternal grandfather, Sato Hiroshi, emigrated to Hawaii from Fukushima to work on the sugar plantations; Hirono’s grandmother, Tari Shinoki, was a picture bride. After finding plantation work difficult, they opened a bathhouse on River Street in Honolulu in 1928 and saved their money. The couple had a daughter, Sato Laura Chie, in 1924 and a son, Akira. In 1939, Tari returned to Japan with their son and daughter; Hiroshi remained behind to run the bathhouse for two more years before rejoining his family in 1941. Though Laura felt out of place in Japan, in 1946, aged 22, she married a veterinarian, Hirono Matabe, and moved with her husband to southern Fukushima. The couple had three children, Roy, Mazie and Wayne; Hirono was the middle child and only daughter.

Hirono's father was a compulsive gambler and alcoholic who would pawn his wife's possessions for gambling money. Treated "like a slave," by her in-laws, Hirono said, in 1951 Laura left her abusive marriage. The deciding moment for her had come after Akira, who had returned to Hawaii after the war, had sent some money for a school uniform for her youngest son Wayne, but her husband had taken it to buy an overcoat As Laura later recounted, "My brother sent money to buy a school uniform for my son. My husband took the money, went to town and never came back home. It was getting closer to the start of school, so I went to look for him. I found out he had ordered an overcoat for himself with the money. He didn't need an overcoat in the spring. That's when I made up my mind to leave." After telling her in-laws she would be taking her elder son and Hirono to school in her hometown, Laura left the house, never to return. Selling her clothes for the rail fare, she returned to her parents' house. Laura said, "My husband never came around once; my parents were supportive and took all of us in. My mother gave us money. I guess it all boils down to love."

Hirono's grandparents decided to return to Hawaii, but as Japanese citizens without professional backgrounds, they could only immigrate under a quota system; as Laura had citizenship, she decided to return first. As Wayne was only three, Laura left him with her parents and returned with Hirono and Roy to Hawaii in March 1955, sending for Wayne and her parents in 1957.

"She determined that she had to get away, and it wasn't enough to even be living in the same country — she wanted to put thousands of miles between them," Hirono said. "That took a lot of courage. I always tell my mom there is nothing I can do, hard as it is to be in politics, to be in public life, that I think is harder then what she did.",

After first living with her uncle Akira, Hirono, Roy and her mother moved into a rooming house on Kewalo Street in Honolulu. "The first place had one room, one table, three chairs and one bed," Laura said. "Mazie and Roy slept on the bed. I slept on the floor with a futon. The landlady was so nice. The rent was $35, but she charged us less because I didn't have a job." Laura found work for Hawaii Hochi as a typesetter and also worked three nights a week for a catering company.

Though money was tight and the family was forced to move often, Laura kept them together. Hirono recalled that she and her brother used to get a dime once or twice a week from their mother. "We both had baseball piggy banks. My older brother spent all his dimes but I saved mine. But one day I came home and the dimes were gone. My mother had to use it to buy food."

Hirono never saw her father again, and he has since died. Laura became a newspaper proofreader in 1961 and retired from the Hawaii Newspaper Agency in 1986; Roy became a Hawaii Electric supervisor. Wayne drowned in 1978, aged 26. Her grandfather, Hiroshi, died in 1989, and her grandmother Tari passed away in 2000, aged nearly a hundred.,