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Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Let the dog in!"}]

Smile 26 1 30

<title>Daily Smile: Friday, January 30, 2026</title>

Let the dog in!

Daily Smile: Friday, January 30, 2026

Kam Napier Headshot

A. Kam Napier

Government & Politics

Columnists

 Gov. Josh Green’s press conference on Tuesday, held at the Hawai‘i State Capitol, in which he and other lawmakers and community leaders called for anti-ICE legislation here in the Islands. The event was hosted by the ACLU of Hawai‘i, the Legal Clinic of Hawai‘i and the Hawai‘i Coalition for Immigrant Rights, attended by Green, Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, House Speaker Nadine Nakamura and other lawmakers. It was held as a vigil for Alex Pretti, who had been shot and killed by Border Patrol agents in Minneapolis Saturday.

This is Official Hawai‘i — state government policy leaders — and it’s very upset about Minneapolis, where now two activists have been killed while interfering with federal law enforcement. In their telling, it’s ICE that is out of control, and Hawai‘i has to do something to keep things like that from happening here.

Except the laws they’re proposing would recreate the very conditions that fostered a battleground in Minneapolis. If passed, they would increase, not decrease, the likelihood of danger for everyone involved — arrestees, protestors, ICE agents, bystanders. Everyone.

Let’s back up a second. If you’re upset about Minneapolis, do you ever wonder why you aren’t upset about cities in Texas, Florida, or Tennessee, where ICE is also detaining, arresting and deporting illegal immigrants?

[{"type":"text","text":"What made Minneapolis different?"}]

Specific decisions by Minnesota politicians and lawmakers to withhold local law enforcement support. This forced ICE to conduct its arrests in public, while these same politicians gave fiery speeches denouncing ICE as unbridled fascists. Officials there even withheld the local police support that would’ve kept order as the fired-up activists took the most confrontational approach possible short of open insurrection.

[{"type":"text","text":"If you don’t believe me, maybe you’ll believe the cops there:"}]

Minnesota cops beg Walz, pols to let them work with ICE, say they could have prevented shootings

In cities where local authorities help, there is no mayhem in the streets.

So what is Hawai‘i doing? Holding press conferences decrying ICE while proposing the same kind of adversarial legislation.

 article, so to keep it brief, a package of House and Senate Bills would do such things as prohibit local law enforcement agencies from entering into an agreement with ICE to carry out immigration enforcement on ICE’s behalf; prohibit ICE from interviewing people while in local custody (even though this is the safest place to do it); prohibit local cops from inquiring about a person’s immigration status; limit information sharing between state and county agencies and ICE; and more.

Green has promised to fast-track this legislation. Maybe, instead, legislators should be thoughtful and deliberate. I’d prefer they legislate about reality not distortions.

What distortions? Take a look at our photo, above, of Gov. Green and his supporters from Tuesday’s press conference. What do you see? Earnest, sincere, worried faces, to be sure.

[{"type":"text","text":"One also sees claims and assertions on signs."}]

“PEOPLE MURDERED BY ICE … AND PEOPLE KILLED BY TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION AND DEPORTATION PRISONS:”

There follows a list of at least 30 visible names, which I started looking up, at random. And first of all, I should say, this sign is not an expose of secret knowledge. You can find the notices of “

” at ICE’s own website, as required by Congress. Here’s what I found:

 Duarte illegally entered the U.S. the first time 1976 in Arizona. He was charged with such crimes as burglary, theft and drug possession between 1984 and 2000. He was convicted in 2005 of sex crimes against children and sentenced by the Superior Court of Arizona 20 years in prison. That’s where ICE found him in January 2025, in an Arizona prison, before moving him to an ICE detention center in preparation for deportation. There his poor health was observed, and he was sent, not to any prison, but to Phoenix Specialty Hospital — a real hospital — where he was treated for six months before dying of natural causes.

 Assuming he is the same man is Roberto Carlos Montoya Valdez, he never made it to an ICE facility nor was he murdered. When ICE raided an LA Home Depot, he 

, unpursued, straight into the 210 Freeway in Monrovia, where he was hit by a car.

 A citizen of Vietnam, he was originally granted lawful permanent resident status in the U.S. in 1999, lost that status following a drug crime conviction. Last June, he was detained at Immigration Processing Center in Texas. An LPN there noted his multiple medical conditions, told him to take his insulin every day for diabetes. Phan would not take his insulin. Health care workers there also noted his high cholesterol and prescribed a medication for that, too. He wouldn’t take it. He was found having a seizure and transferred to a hospital where his own next of kin signed a do-not-resuscitate order for him, opting for hospice care instead. Phan died in the hospital when staff withdrew life support for that transfer.

. Vietnamese citizen, originally granted Legal Permanent Resident status in the U.S. in 1983. Convicted of murder in Orange County, Calif., in 1991. By the time he was detained at the El Paso Processing Center last February, he had a host of health problems and he was quickly transferred to the University Medical Center for evaluation, then the Long-Term Acute Care Hospital — a physician-owned hospital — where he stayed for many months, being treated for dementia until he died in the hospital of this condition.

I’m four names in and I’m not finding “PEOPLE KILLED BY TRUMP’S IMMIGRATION AND DEPORTATION PRISONS.” I’m finding people who ICE treated promptly and moved to real hospitals when their health conditions were serious. The records don’t say who paid for their care. I’m assuming that once the federal government assumed responsibility for them, taxpayers paid for everything.

The first three names on the sign have red asterisks, so I assume these are the ones that — iron-clad, all-caps, unequivocally — fall under the “PEOPLE MURDERED BY ICE” heading. Renee Good. Keith Porter. Geraldo Campos. The sign must’ve been made before Alex Pretti’s shooting. Renee Good’s case is familiar to all, and everyone has made up their mind as to murder vs. justifiable homicide vs manslaughter. The other two?

 Killed by an off-duty ICE agent on New Year’s Eve in Carson, Calif., when the agent investigated sounds of gunfire near his apartment and found Porter holding a rifle and shot him. Doesn’t seem related to any question of Porter’s citizenship, or any ICE operation. And as for the circumstances, I’ll just share some California reporting from 

Advocates say Porter had been firing the gun into the air as a way of observing the holiday 

 a practice routinely condemned by law enforcement officials.

"Yes, it was illegal, but at the end of the day, it's an American tradition," said organizer Najee Ali, the director of Project Islamic Hope.

[{"type":"text","text":"I can’t even. Really?"}]

 Cuban, here illegally since 1996, with past convictions in the U.S. for weapons charges, sexual abuse of a child; petit larceny; DUI and drug crimes. Died Jan. 3 in the Camp East Montana ICE facility following some kind of altercation with guards. His death has been 

, it’s unclear where things stand with an investigation to determine if it was murder. Department of Homeland Security says Campos was belligerent and attempting suicide and needed to be restrained, his death accidental. Other detainees claim he was suffocated by guards in the encounter.

And if that’s true, and they were in the wrong, throw the book at them. Just like we would any guard at any Hawai‘i prison that did such a thing. But I wouldn’t take this sign’s word for it, it so far proving to be less than fair and honest.

Green and Hawai‘i lawmakers are not responsible for every word of every sign that might appear in their vicinity. But no sign at this particular event was there by accident. This was a stage-managed event, designed for publicity. In the largest sense, Green, the Hawai‘i lawmakers, and the nonprofits leading the Make Hawai‘i Minneapolis campaign are standing up for these claims as if they were incontrovertible facts. They are just so certain 

 and they’re intent on rushing legislation with fierce urgency. They're doing so with what looks a fairly obvious mix of good, if poorly thought-out, intentions and cynical, politicized grandstanding.

Under such circumstances, maybe stop and think before blindly passing any of these bills.

A. Kam Napier is editor in chief of Aloha State Daily. His opinions in Pipikaula Corner are his own and not reflective of the ASD team.

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20260127 101533 16x9

<title>Pipikaula Corner: Hawai‘i’s proposed anti-ICE laws mimic Minneapolis in the worst ways</title>

On Tuesday, Gov. Green and Hawai‘i lawmakers stood in front of some wild allegations about ICE, and they're about to rush legislation as if every horror story on display were true.

Pipikaula Corner: Hawai‘i’s proposed anti-ICE laws mimic Minneapolis in the worst ways

Square Mike Brestovansky Headshot RGZ3736 Large

Michael Brestovansky

The government will partially shut down again beginning Saturday after the Senate passed a disputed budget bill on Friday.

The U.S. Senate has been deadlocked over an appropriations measure for the 

. The version of the bill that the House had narrowly passed last week included funding for several federal agencies, but also more than $10 billion for Immigrations and Customs Enforcement, which several Democrats said they would refuse to approve.

It worked: the Senate voted Friday to pass a version of the bill with the ICE funding stripped out. The new version of the measure provides short-term funds for the Department of Homeland Security for the next two weeks.

Both Hawai‘i's senators, Brian Schatz and Mazie Hirono voted for the bill, with the final tally showing 71 votes in favor and 29 opposed. Most of the votes in opposition were from Democrats.

Hirono said after the vote that Congress now has "two weeks to negotiate immediate, common-sense guardrails to rein in the lawlessness of ICE." 

"Over the next two weeks, the onus will be on the Republicans to agree to the serious reforms Democrats are demanding," Hirono said. "I will continue my work fighting for other reforms, including giving people the ability to hold lawless government agents accountable."

Meanwhile, Schatz touted several appropriations earmarked for Hawai‘i within the bill, including $1.9 million for Maui nursing home improvements, $1.6 million to support digitization projects at Bishop Museum, $7.3 million to Hawai‘i County to develop a highway in West Hawai‘i, $7 million to the City and County of Honolulu to extend the Mālaekahana bike path and more.

However, the Friday vote was not enough to wholly avoid a government shutdown. The House must once again vote on the bill before it goes to President Donald Trump’s desk, and because the House will not vote before Monday, funding has lapsed for several government agencies, including the departments of Defense, State, Human Services and more.

Senators

<title>CONGRESS WATCH: Partial shutdown coming this weekend after Senate vote</title>

Senate votes to pass budget bill, minus ICE funds

CONGRESS WATCH: Partial shutdown coming this weekend after Senate vote

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

 can easily be considered a hidden gem. Tucked away within Hotel Renew, the business opened a few months ago and specializes in breakfast musubi options and matcha.

The drink menu features options like original matcha ($7), matcha strawberry ($8), hojicha banana cream ($8) and banana chocolate cold brew ($8).

We’re told the matcha strawberry and hojicha banana cream are customer favorites.

Meanwhile, if you prefer coffee drinks, opt for the banana chocolate cold brew ($8), which is smooth with a slight sweetness from the chocolate. 

Keep an eye out for any seasonal specials during your visit; pumpkin spice hojicha lattes and pumpkin spice matcha were available during the fall.

Musubi flavors range from spicy tuna and miso salmon to bacon and egg, and tamago. The miso salmon ($9) and tsukune, or chicken meatball ($7), are especially popular.

If you want a variety of flavors, go for the musubi bento ($15), which includes four half-musubis so you can mix and match flavors.

While there are a few tables, As You Like Waikīkī is more of a grab-and-go spot designed for takeout. It’s a short walk from the Honolulu Zoo.

As You Like Waikiki musubi with drinks 012726

<title>New café specializes in matcha and musubi</title>

Located in Hotel Renew, As You Like Waikīkī offers a variety of matcha-based drinks and musubi in a variety of flavors. If you want to try multiple flavors, go for the musubi bento.

New café specializes in matcha and musubi

[{"type":"text","text":"\"This is the largest stick Daisy has ever selected to bring home...\""}]

Smile 26 1 28

<title>Daily Smile: Wednesday, January 28, 2026</title>

"This is the largest stick Daisy has ever selected to bring home..."

Daily Smile: Wednesday, January 28, 2026

Arrasmith Portrait

Perry Arrasmith

Hawaii History

My heart sank when I found out Tom Coffman passed away on December 15, 2025. 

Tom and I were very different people of different eras, but we both believed in the power of history.

His early, formative journey into journalism is what drove him into history. To the curious mind that needed to see the root cause of an issue, such a journey was only natural.

“I kept going back and back,” he recalled in 

. “I kept seeing the events I was covering as a reporter had deeper meaning than appeared on the surface. So I've always been going backward in time!”

Although we were both tall haole with ancestral roots in the Midwestern region of the United States, our generational differences still made us perceive Hawai‘i in ways foreign to one another.

Coffman was born a few years before my grandfather. He arrived in Hawai‘i less than a decade after Hawai‘i’s admission into the American Union.

He got to witness Hawai‘i at a time when the median age in the islands was less than 25. Today, the median age of the average resident is above the age of 40. 

It was a young, dynamic place exiting the plantation era. Skyscrapers were being built in Honolulu, while resort complexes replaced sugar cane fields in the Neighbor Islands.

He got to bear witness to a young society eager for dynamism that appeared to slowly fall in upon itself, in large part due to its dependence on the outside world beyond the islands and its failure to properly reckon with those injustices suffered by Hawai‘i’s indigenous peoples.

He bore witness to the formation of the U.S. State of Hawai‘i, starting within the first decade of statehood. His career spanned stints as a journalist, documentarian, photographer, political advisor, lecturer, and general historian.

His unceasing focus, through his decades of reporting and historical story-telling, was Hawai‘i and the evolution of democracy in Hawai‘i. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"The Malihini Haole"}]

Coffman arrived in Honolulu on December 3, 1965. 

He came of age in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement. In Kansas, the segregation of public schools resulted in national infamy, culminating in a United States Supreme Court 

 decided in 1954 that ordered the de-segregation of public schools in the town of Topeka.

Topeka was about 30 miles from Tom’s childhood town of Lyndon. He was only entering his teenage years during these legal fights. Segregation’s evils had a tremendous influence on his desire for justice. “I was always interested in writing and I was politicized by the civil rights movement of the 1960s,” he later 

. “Journalism had a tremendous appeal because I felt that, for social change to occur, knowledge had to get out.”

Coffman also knew local politics. His father, Harry T. Coffman, was a Republican legislator in the Kansas House of Representatives. While there, Coffman was employed as a page in the Kansas House, where he ran errands while absorbing their proceedings. 

Tom Coffman did not stay in Kansas. He journeyed across the United States, searching for adventure. Eventually, the allure of America's newest state led him to head West. He was a young haole journalist, imbued with the societal activism of the national civil rights movements.

He was part of a new wave of migrants coming to the newly admitted U.S. State of Hawai‘i. While the populations of the Neighbor Islands stagnated during that first decade, the population of O‘ahu exploded, jumping from 500,000 people in 1960 to nearly 613,000 by the end of 1970. 

As a result of these migrants, a massive demographic shift also took place. Nearly 100,000 caucasians took up residence in Hawai‘i, primarily on O‘ahu. 

While I migrated to the Islands as a little boy at least three decades later, the context of Hawai‘i by that time, I can only imagine, was very different. For one, folks like Tom Coffman had been picking apart the nuances of Hawai‘i’s confused identity as a U.S. State.

“Statehood wasn't the end of history, but a transition to a new history,” he concluded nearly 40 years later. “Statehood allowed Hawai‘i to open up, and to let people assert themselves more, and allowed the genie of the Hawaiian movement to get out of the lantern.”

Before the genie emerged, Coffman needed a political education.

Before the age of 30, Coffman assembled a dogged political understanding of this new home, one that became subject to steady revisions in his later years. 

Coffman’s journalistic education in a small state full of tight-knit communities dominated by a single political party and limited economic opportunity seemed to prepare him for his later foray into Hawai‘i society. 

In his involvement, Coffman exercised his craft as a foreigner. His listened, learned, and took what he gathered to new places because people’s thoughts were the foundations of future conversations. As a result, his observations compounded into grand portraits. He, like Alexis de Toqueville in the United States of the 1830s, carried a special ability to observe the nuances of a society to which he was a newcomer. 

When he first started at the Honolulu Advertiser in 1965, Coffman covered such topics as the state’s rush to construct highways, the mismanagement of the Ko‘olau Boy’s Home and Kawailoa Girl’s Home, and the state’s role in the national War on Poverty. 

In February 1967, he took a break from journalism, working as a field coordinator form the Honolulu Community Action Program (HCAP). It was a brief stint, but the experience spoke to his abiding interest in social activism. 

By January 1968, he was back in journalism as a political writer with the Star-Bulletin, the other major newspaper at the time in Honolulu. While there, he covered the 1968 Legislative Session, labor relations, the 1968 Constitutional Convention, the 1968 re-election of Honolulu Mayor Frank Fasi and the consolidation of the Democratic Party’s control over all of Hawai‘i’s major state and county offices, along with the rise of President Richard M. Nixon. 

In particular, his careful coverage of the 1968 Constitutional Convention gave him unique insight into many of the event’s key actors, including such leaders as Robert Taira, John Ushijima, Nelson Doi, George Ariyoshi, Pat Saiki, and Frank Fasi, to name a few.

The relationship between land and power became another key source of coverage. In Honolulu, Governor John A. Burns’s attempt to hasten the development of Magic Island elicited statewide controversy. Beyond Magic Island, however, there was also the Boise Cascade scandal.

The story of the Boise Cascade Scandal of Hawai‘i Island opened Coffman to the story of land and power in Hawai‘i. Like some plot out of a neo-noir film, it was a story that forever shaped his understanding of the Islands.

“The story is one of people, land, money, and the byplay between Hawai‘i governmental agencies and a corporate giant,” Coffman explained in early 1970. “It revolves on questions of conservation and development, politics and ethics, plus recent public combat which could define the shape of things to come.”

It was a story which few journalists or newspapers would likely be able to pursue in the present day. As he explained, “the research extended over week, then months: a Mainland tour, a trip to the Big Island, correspondence, studying other newspapers’ files, conducting dozens of interviews, reading and more reading, then writing and re-writing.” 

While bits and piece of the story had emerged in the years before Coffman published his multi-part series, no one had ever assembled the full plot before that point. The research spoke to the democratic power of investigative journalism. 

In short, Coffman broke down a plot by the Boise Cascade company to use a legislator to facilitate the re-development of thousands of acres along the Kona Coast. Sen. John Ushijima, in a private capacity, had evidently arranged for the re-zoning of over 2,900 acres of land along the Kailua-Kona Coast from agricultural to urban use before the State Land Use Commission. 

Such a maneuver would have prefaced the subsequent re-development of this land into a resort-residential zone. Ushijima’s representation of Boise Cascade before the Land Use Commission mixed with his official duties in the State Senate, where he served as Chair of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the Hawai‘i Island Select Committee.

In the Senate, Coffman unearthed Ushijima’s efforts to advocate for Senate Bill 259 in the 1969 Legislative Session. The measure had been co-written by Boise Cascade attorneys. 

If passed into law, Senate Bill 259 would have enabled the company to function as a pseudo-county within Hawai‘i Island.

Ushijima’s efforts overlapped with the massive amounts of money that the Burns administration was pouring into Kailua-Kohala, largely to bolster the development of infrastructure for hotels and resorts along the coastline amidst the decline of sugar plantations throughout that region. 

State Senator Eureka Forbes, a Republican from O‘ahu, 

 the Star-Bulletin for its willingness to confront the Boise Cascade matter. “Land use law and process, being extremely complex, is conseqently a very sophisticated political issue, one rarely discussed and little understood by the general public.” 

Coffman set a critical standard for investigative journalism in the state. “The resulting increased awareness of an enlightened public can only be good for Hawai‘i.” 

The story laid out the economic cost of poorly-planned development in the new Hawai‘i. He was begining to understand the political significance of Governor Burns’ investment in infrastructure along the Kona-Kohala Coast, where much of Boise Cascade’s development had been planned. It also likely weighed on Coffman as he began to watch the Democratic Party devolve into infighting in the August 1970 primary for the party’s nominee for governor. 

Given Coffman’s accruing knowledge of state politics, close relationships with a wide plethora of sources, and general observational skills, he was positioned to document growing inter-party tensions within the Democratic Party, most notably the split between Governor John Burns and Lieutenant Governor Tom Gill in 1969. His coverage of the 1970 Gubernatorial Election resulted in "

," a early classic of Hawai‘i’s political history as a U.S. State. 

While he had already been established as a serious investigative journalist with a nuanced view of Hawai‘i’s politics, the work took Coffman to a new stage in his writing career. "Catch a Wave’s" publication in 1972 set the stage for Coffman’s independence. It was clear he wanted to pursue more longer-form writing projects. 

Before he became an independent writer, however, Coffman still worked as a reporter. The length of his stories began to grow into longer-form investigations. 

Coffman’s growing awareness of money’s influence on politics resulted in an unprecedented 13-part series known as ‘High-Priced Politics.’ The series uncovered the rising cost of successful campaigns in Hawai‘i politics and the increasing reliance of several political figures on campaign contributions from architects, construction companies, and other professions tied to development and land use. 

The investigation took shape after his publication of "Catch a Wave." If he had conducted the investigation before "Catch a Wave’s" publication, his views on Governor Burns’ ability to win re-election may have shifted. 

It was more than a grassroots effort by a beleaguered incumbent. As part of the investigation, Coffman peeled apart the existence of a one-million dollar campaign fund put together by Governor Burns. This fund’s unprecedented size was equivalent to $8.3 million in 2025 dollars. 

Even by today’s standards, it was a major sum. For contrast, OpenSecrets estimates that then-Lieutenant Governor 

 raised $3,655,289 between 2021 and 2022. Governor 

 raised $2,638,678 between 2017 and 2018.

However, the investigation still inspired reform. The series set the stage for the passage of a comprehensive campaign spending reform act (

His series on campaign spending also inspired another budding journalist, George Cooper. Over the course of the next decade, Cooper investigated the relationship between political officials, appointed bureaucrats, and re-zoning of land from agricultural to urban purposes across the state. As a result of the work, Cooper (with Gavan Daws) published "Land and Power in Hawai‘i: The Democratic Years" in 1985. Cooper disclosed Coffman’s influence in a November 2022 

 published shortly before his own passing in November 2023.

Tom Coffman eventually left journalism to get involved in politics. While his authorship of "Catch a Wave" is well-known, his later involvement in Tom Gill’s campaign for Governor in 1974 alongside Byron Baker is not. He left the Star-Bulletin in 1974 to advise Gill’s campaign on policy. Beyond journalism, Coffman believed in reform through the political game. 

 for an O‘ahu seat on the Board of Eduction. There were seven open seats and 26 candidates. By only 600 votes, Tom placed eighth in the race. 

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"},{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Beyond Journalism"}]

By October 1974, Tom had gone into business as an independent freelance writer and researcher. It opened a key phase of his professional life that lasted half a century.

While Coffman’s early career as a muckraking journalist was only one part of his career, I personally think it was a formative part of his journey. As a result of this period, Coffman learned how to tackle any topic with finesse, nuance, and sharp research. People were not sources for a story; they were living parts of a nuanced society whose contradictions Tom loved dearly.

In June 1972, Coffman laid out a clear agenda that would constitute decades of research. Even then, he knew what he wanted to do over the next half-century. “There are a whole hell of a lot of books on Hawai‘i that should be written, that I’d like to see written,” he 

“There should be a detailed book on the wartime experiences of AJAs here. That was the turning point of Hawai‘i that put us where we are today. There needs to be a book on the plantation way of life, capturing it before it dies out. At least for now, kids should be sent out with tape recorders to talk to the old people about their experience, so the material will be there.”

This particular interest led to one of Tom’s first freelance projects. It was a biography of H.S. Kawakami’s story, a major grocer, Japanese migrant, and father of then-State Representative Richard Kawakami. 

Kawakami’s story was only the first one in a series that charted the stories of Hawai‘i’s Japanese-American diaspora. "

 was one such work, along with the earlier "

," a biography of former Hawai‘i Supreme Court Justice and labor attorney Edward Nakamura. 

," a 2021 work that uncovered the multi-ethnic fight to preserve the civil rights of Japanese residents in the Territory of Hawai‘i during the Second World War. This work was the result of an earlier documentary crafted more than a decade earlier. 

There were other interests. “The hardest one to describe would be a book on the Polynesian viewpoint on life. The communal feeling, and the feeling for nature and the land, are values which have been unworkable in our profit-oriented Western society. Now, once again, these are returning as relevant values. What their life was all about — is still all about, for some people — could be a guide to everyone’s future.” 

Through Tom Coffman Communications, he branched off into audiovisual and documentary work, producing multi-media slideshows for such clients as the County of Kaua‘i and the Office of Hawaiian Affairs. By 1980, he was also involved as an early publicity officer for the Hokule‘a as part of the Polynesian Voyaging Society. 

Coffman’s later work included several documentary films, many of which have been re-published online for new generations to discover. "

 is a major documentary that re-cast the history of Hawai‘i. As recently as September 2025, Coffman’s work on "O Hawai‘i" was celebrated following the first Hawaiian History Month.

Tom followed stories wherever they took shape. Several other documentaries told the stories of other ethnic groups that journeyed to Hawai‘i, such as the Koreans ("Arirang") and Japanese communities ("Ganbare!"). Many of these projects were inspired by his earlier involvement with the Hawai‘i Multicultural Awareness Project, an effort that took shape between the late ’70s and early ’80s. 

 in 2009 on the legacy of Ninoy Aquino, a politican who was assassinated in Manila for his opposition to the dictatorial regime of President Ferdinand Marcos, Sr. Aquino’s assasination later triggered a political revolution that resulted in Marcos’ exile in Honolulu.  

Coffman, as an independent journalist, documented the rise of community organizations in the middle of the ’70s for the Hawai‘i Community Action Program (HCAP). Social work always fascinated Tom, and it resulted in the publication of a 

 which examined eight influential social workers in Hawai‘i. 

Tom’s works were always an expression of what he found most important to Hawai‘i. If no one else was documenting a story, he knew it needed to be told. 

With the environmental movement of the ’70s, Coffman began to document the cost of poorly planned growth marked by the haphazard re-zoning of agricultural lands for the sake of urban sprawl. He documented the development of Moanalua in some depth. At the end of the ’70s, he also wrote a 

 on the evolution of the Honolulu Board of Water Supply. Decades later, he produced a 

 on the sacred nature of Hawai‘i’s forests. 

Like his support for Tom Gill in 1974, his influence over former Governor George Ariyoshi’s legacy is more often forgotten. Coffman helped memorialize the legacy of Governor George Ariyoshi. These works were not strict works of history, as Ariyoshi’s memoir omitted any reference to Larry Mehau or the construction of the Interstate H-3 on O‘ahu. He conducted the oral history of former Governor George Ariyoshi, a monumental work conducted under the Center for Oral History. Published in 2016, the full interviews are freely available 

 the publication of Ariyoshi’s memoir in 1997 and advised Ariyoshi’s 2020 book "

." Coffman also worked with Ariyoshi in 2009 on "Hawai‘i: The Past Fifty Years, The Next Fifty Years." Thousands of copies of this work were distributed across schools in the State as part of a statewide essay 

 that asked students about their vision of Hawai‘i future. I still remember getting a copy when I was a high school student in ‘Aiea. 

Coffman never forgot the hours he spent interviewing Burns, who shared his theory of Hawai‘i’s political evolution in the run-up to the 1970 Gubernatorial Election. Coffman later detailed those experiences at an 

 commemorating the 50th anniversary of the founding of the John A. Burns School of Medicine in May 2025. 

 of the modern State of Hawai‘i in 2003, he recognized that the ’70s were the period where the conflict between unplanned development and environmental degradation became stark. It was also a period where the Native Hawaiian Civil Rights movement became a central part of the state’s politics.

," which was based on Coffman’s book of the same name, narrated the history of the overthrow of the Hawaiian Kingdom in a U.S.-backed coup. Coffman’s production of the document was one attempt to tell history beyond the bounds of the written word. 

His efforts to reckon with the legacy of historical injustice against Hawaiians, as perhaps best magnified by the overthrow, inspired his history. History, to that end, was not a passive device for the nostaglic. It was a tool for bulldozing societal inaction. 

“In the press for a system of reconciliation and redress for Native Hawaiians, we will sooner or later establish a Native Hawaiian governing entity,” Tom predicted in 2010. “There will be a necessarily contentious negotiation of the associated issues of land and water — specifically those that belonged to the Hawaiian kingdom and the Hawaiian monarch.”

In 2025, Coffman found Hawai‘i a confused place in need of history more than ever.

We might’ve met for breakfast at Kam Bowl in Kalihi, ice cream at the Zippy’s on Vineyard, or via phone call. Regardless, the talk story nature of our conversations was always a treat.

Tom sought a sustainable course of Hawai‘i and its democracy, one that would continue after his passing. History was a means to this end. 

He knew I was frustrated with Hawai‘i, and he was frustrated too. Yet he always tried to push me to channel that frustration into research. Resignation with circumstance was never productive. 

In his later years, Coffman called for the ‘re-invention’ of Hawai‘i. “As when we spoke optimistically about the noble possibilities of statehood, in that same spirit we can engage optimistically in a search for how a reinvented Hawai‘i might work,” he said in 2010. “The project called the State of Hawai‘i in its present configuration is temporal, but Hawai‘i is timeless.”

I think this is the point in his intellectual journey where I actually met Tom Coffman, in part thanks to my research into the 1978 Constitutional Convention. Coffman saw the 1978 Constitutional Convention as the watershed political moment in state history. It appeared as an unprecedented chapter in Hawai‘i’s experimentation with democracy. 

Any conversation about the future of Hawai‘i always turned to the lofty agenda of the 1978 Constitutional Convention and the present-day debates over Hawaiians over their own political future. It was a conversation which turned to such developments as Mauna Kea. If Tom had time for another project, I personally wish he might have pursued an environmental history of Mauna Kea’s management over the past century.

Tom leaves behind a lot of unfinished work. It will fall on those who survey his legacy to see what remains undone. The work was infinite. 

Coffman 1973 16x9

<title>Hawai‘i’s evolution, as related by Tom Coffman</title>

“Statehood wasn't the end of history, but a transition to a new history,” Tom Coffman once said. “Statehood allowed Hawai‘i to open up, and to let people assert themselves more, and allowed the genie of the Hawaiian movement to get out of the lantern.” Here, our political historian examines Coffman's life in the Islands as an investigative journalist, historian and filmmaker.

Daily Smile: Friday, January 30, 2026

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Daily Smile: Friday, January 30, 2026

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ASD Staff

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