And by "cooked," I mean, of course, she put some salt on it and let it sit overnight in the fridge. And even though she tried to cook it for real after all that, I was able to stop her in time to enjoy some fantastically cured salmon. Thank you, the wife, Hawaii, and the sailors who told Hawaiians how to make it all those years ago!
There was an ethnically Hawaiian guy in my Japanese class in college who carried the most tremendous chip on his shoulder about...I don't know, the illegitimate occupation of his homeland? He had a lot of angry rhetoric to spew. I think he was essentially a separatist, unpopular as that opinion might be. It's a difficult question, though. Nobody can deny that America seized control of Hawaii illegitimately. The people were, in many cases, treated unfairly and victimized by American settlers. It wasn't a great situation, and even higher-ups in the U.S. government recognized the fundamentally anti-democratic nature of the annexation.
However...if America hadn't taken over, then it seems inevitable that Japan would have, and I doubt that would have gone nearly as well for the Hawaiians. All you need to do is look at Japan's treatment of the occupied locals in Korea and China to realize that "respect for the conquered," as a concept, was simply alien to Imperial Japanese thought. When Korea was under Japanese control from 1910-1945, there were a series of policies put in place with the goal of cultural assimilation. It's described in that link as "cultural genocide," and that isn't off the mark. Of course, the Koreans might be considered lucky -- the policy in China was generally to just kill as many of the locals as they could get away with.
So in the long run, I feel that Hawaii fared much better as a part of the United States than it would have under Imperial Japanese rule. For having been spared a much worse fate, should the Hawaiians be grateful to their Imperial American oppressors? Does the incidental avoidance of a greater evil somehow negate a lesser? How should we regard selfishness that has an unintended beneficial outcome? Do we keep bearing a grudge, even when we know that we're better off than we would have been?
A counterpoint: perhaps if the U.S. hadn't had such imperial ambitions, Japan never would have felt threatened, and might not have pursued a campaign of conquest. Perhaps, without a need to prove itself against a rival for Pacific domination, Japan might have just left the Hawaiians in peace. That's a very nice idea. I think it's ultimately mistaken -- there was no real avoiding Imperial Japan's rise -- but I can see why someone might raise the notion.
I love American food and Japanese food, but also I love Korean and Hawaiian food. I'm so glad that Japan's expansion was checked. And Hawaii under American control played a huge part in that. Thanks for your sacrifice, noble Hawaiians. I wish that it could have gone differently for you, but I'm glad you wound up as part of this team.
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