After eating fast food for lunch, we went to the Hawaii United Okinawa Association to have a tour of their facilities and learn about how Hawaiian nikkei helped Okinawans after WWII. There are so many similarities between Okinawa and Hawaii. In addition, there are over 60,000 people in Hawaii who have roots from Okinawa. After the war, Okinawa was devastated so these nikkei worked hard to bring over 500 pigs to Okinawa, so that the people there could rebuild their lives. We could feel the deep connection between the two places and understood that there are many Japanese people all over the world.

Finally, we were able to talk with a representative from Aloha Ocean Plus (the organization we were hoping to do the beach clean with yesterday). He talked to us about micro plastics and why so much plastic is accumulating here in Hawaii. We learned that fishing nets take a long, long time to break apart and are (along with plastic bags and PET bottles) the biggest reason that there is so much plastic in our oceans. A large percentage of this garbage is coming from Japan, and most of the garbage arriving here in Hawaii now is from the triple disaster on March 11th, 2011. We need to do more to reduce plastic in Japan to improve the ocean garbage problem here in Hawaii.