Hilo at the big island looks like a local Japanese town

Hilo is very similar to Japan actually except people. That`s what I felt honestly at first when I arrived there. 

When I came back to Japan last week, I stopped by two Hawaii islands for my vacation, the big island (Hawaii island) and the Oahu island because Hwaii is on my way to Japan, although it`s not on the straight line. I decided to visit the big island first and the Oahu island after that because there is a flight from San jose to the big island, and there is a flight from the Oahu to Tokyo Narita of Japan. The main purpose of visiting the big island is that I wanted to have seen the volcano.

In the big island, there are two major airports, Kona and Hilo, but the flight from San jose is olnly to Kona, so I planned the trip based on this fact. My plan was to rent a car at the Kona airport and go around the island clockwise to Hilo through the Waipio valley and stay at Hilo at first day. When I was driving the rent car from the valley down to Hilo, I came to have strange feeling. At first I did not know what it was until I saw gravestones along a road and a pedestrian crossing bridge. When I saw them, something came to my mind that it was as if I was driving a car at local area in Japan because the gravestones and the pedestrian crossing bridge are very similar with what I see in Japan. In addition to that, I was driving the car in the town of Hilo, and what saw is almost Japan actually in terms of everything except that driving is right side. I`m showing the picture of Hilo which I have taken from the car when I was stopping at red light. If you have been to local town in Japan once, then you might feel the picture looks like what you saw there.


This is very strange feeling for me so I have been curious about why it is so, and I checked it on line, especially at Wikipedia. According to that, about 200 years ago, Japanese peoples got lost at the sea due to storm, and they survived somehow to eat fish and drink rain water. A few months later,  they were rescued at the place close to Hawaii by US ship captain, and brought there. This was time when Hawaii and Japan started its relationship. Since this time, Japanese peoples immigrated to Hawaii to work at sugar and pineapple plantations. At 1920s, the population of Japanese American seemed to be around 40%, and even now the population is around 15%.

Now I can understand the reason why I got suck kind of feeling there.