The Journey Home

Distance between Hawai‘i and the far-flung places alumni end up in isn’t measured only in miles. There’s time – the years since graduation that have changed the landscape of living, working and raising children in the Islands. And there are social connections that wear thin and disappear as people create lives in new places.

Few know more about this than Tahnee Allman ’08 Towill. The founder of local boutique firm HIVE Recruiting, she’s a C-suite specialist who gets frequent inquiries from expat kama‘āina who want to come home. “The Hawai‘i market is always looking for talented people, especially with a connection to the Islands. A lot of employers here are a little bit reluctant to relocate candidates from the mainland if they don’t have really strong Hawai‘i ties,” she says. “With the environment of the job market, companies are really looking for Punahou graduates that have experience on the mainland and want to come back.”

HER ADVICE: “It’s a really difficult decision to make. My mainland friends, and even my family, could not understand the inner debate and turmoil. They thought it was as simple as, ‘Well if you want to, you should. And if you don’t, you shouldn’t.’ I think it’s up to you to establish your needs, then to be realistic and honest with your options. I ultimately found myself realizing – over time – ‘Okay, I would need to sacrifice X, Y and Z, which is important to me. But I would also gain A, B, and C, and that’s worth it to me.’ Your conclusion may be different than mine, but you need to take the time to understand that.”

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Colby Sameshima’s ’12 trajectory home started out straightforward enough. She headed off to Tufts University knowing she would come back – but then her interest in earth science and climate change morphed into a job supporting entrepreneurs in emerging markets. First from her company’s New York headquarters, then from its San Francisco satellite office, she found herself flying to Cape Town, Buenos Aires, Kuala Lumpur and Dubai to help local startups with global scaling challenges. While based in San Francisco, her mother got sick, trips home to Honolulu became more common and the yearning came back. “In California, I could have some of both worlds, Hawai‘i and mainland-East Coast mentalities,” she says. “But eventually, I began to see that what’s most important to me is ultimately being close to my family, giving back to this place that completely shaped who I am, and being able to raise kids in this culture. I realized I should probably start to make moves toward that decision.”

Sameshima’s research into the entrepreneurial ecosystem in Hawai‘i turned up a few new accelerators, including Mana Up, an accelerator that aims to take locally headquartered companies global. Co-founder Meli James ’96 was a Punahou graduate. Sameshima couldn’t believe it when James – named as one of Entrepreneur magazine’s Women to Watch and entrepreneurial disruptors – was slotted to speak at a Bay Area event a few months later. She asked for a chat over a cup of coffee before the event, and the two hit it off.

Then on a visit home for her grandmother’s 90th birthday that summer, she watched entrepreneurs at Mana Up’s annual showcase pitch their stories and products, and realized that while she had seen the same thing all over the world, this time her local connection made the scene resonate tenfold. That clinched it. When James offered to create a position for her, Sameshima felt as if the universe was telling her to come home.

Now 26 and Mana Up’s portfolio manager, Sameshima works on long-term growth for its entrepreneur partners and the bigger local economy. She lives at home and maintains a long-distance relationship with her boyfriend in the Bay Area. “For us from Hawai‘i, it’s especially difficult to navigate life (on the mainland) because we have such a unique culture. When you transition back, you do so with a different identity – hybrid local-mainland,” she says. “It hasn’t been completely seamless to adjust. You get used to having access to so many concerts, musicals and meeting people from everywhere (in San Francisco/New York). But it has also been so wonderful. I hike and jump in the ocean every week, and see my favorite aunties and uncles at my favorite local spots.

“I would argue all of this made me appreciate Hawai‘i even more. The whole time I was like, I still prefer Honolulu. It’s the best place on earth. I began to sense even more so this was the right place for me. For now.”

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En pointe, graceful arms sweeping toward her prince, she is the Sleeping Beauty. Pirouettes and leaps, her joy and torment arcing across the stage before enraptured audiences, she is Giselle. Romi Beppu ’94 knows how it feels to live the dream. What she didn’t know, dancing across the world with American Ballet Theatre, Boston Ballet and Ballet West, was that even a calling so rarefied and powerful could be a segue to a bigger one – awakening the dream in young dancers back home.

For a good while, there was only one direction – onward and up. It took Beppu from Honolulu to summer training in New York, where she discovered the horizons of worldclass ballet. It was at Boston Ballet where she made principal ballerina. From then on, anywhere she went, she would command that title.

Beppu had arrived from the farthest reaches of the country. If it hadn’t been for her parents, who let her spend summers with a relative in New York, she would never have known a life in ballet was possible. When teaching ignited a new passion, she continued to nurture it, teaching and dancing at Boston Ballet, and later, at Utah’s new Ballet West, where she danced for half the year and taught students on O‘ahu and Maui the other half. In 2012, Beppu moved home and opened her studio, Honolulu Classical Ballet in Kaimukī.

When Beppu was injured late in her career – just shy of turning 30 – months of being sidelined steered her into teaching as a way to stay motivated. “My injury was a tougher time in my life. Something you really love is taken away from you, but it was a blessing in disguise in so many ways,” she says. “Dancing or anything elite like the Olympics – it’s really about you. There’s teamwork, but there’s so much focus on yourself. On the teaching side, it’s about giving back. That was really meaningful at that point in my life, because so much had been given to me. I came to the realization of, now, what do you do with it?”

“It’s not a lack of high-level coaching – there are a lot of great teachers on the Island,” she says. “I could have worked in Boston. I could have worked in Utah. But I felt like when I was growing up here, this was a dream of mine. I felt like by coming back I could try to help students if they wanted a professional career. I had access to contacts I had met nationally and internationally, because I was one of them years ago. This was the right move for me, because there’s a significant impact to what I’m doing. It doesn’t have to reach 5,000 kids. If it reaches just a handful, that’s meaningful to me. I feel like I’m giving back to the community that supported me.”

HER ADVICE: “You have to be willing to sacrifice a little bit … but also remember how you were supported as a young student in your career – how much you have achieved on the mainland, and then think about the next generation of kids who need that mentoring in whatever career path they’re interested in.”

G R E G G   YA M AU C H I ’ 0 4

If you want a textbook example of how to leverage Punahou connections and overseas experience for a smooth path back to the Islands, look at Gregg Yamauchi ’04. Yamauchi is a walking how-to: He studied business at USC, focusing on commercial real estate, not just because he was interested, but because it seemed like a potential way home. Years later, he had just returned to Los Angeles from a long stint in London, where he’d set up the European division of an L.A. private investment fund, when he organized a young professionals mixer on a visit home. It was something he did regularly – seek out new professional contacts, sit down for coffee and find out the latest in the Hawai‘i market. Also at the pau hana looking for contacts was Harrison “Jeeter” Ishida ’08, a VP at Trinity Investments. “If you ever think about moving home … ,” Ishida said.

HIS ADVICE: “Make sure you’re staying in front of people and keeping in touch with what’s going on here in the Islands. Get involved with Punahou Alumni Association. When you think you’re ready, make sure you’re in the right spot and ready to move back from a lifestyle perspective. Salaries (in Hawai‘i) aren’t as good, but that’s also an opportunity to create a job or position for yourself that maybe didn’t even exist here.”

Yamauchi never forgot the open-ended invite that spoke directly to one of his life’s goals. A year or two later, he was newly married to Chelsea Chun ’03. She quickly found an associate attorney position through the Punahou Connect job platform and moved back to Honolulu first. Yamauchi reconnected with Ishida, and in 2017, moved home to join Trinity, where he’s now VP in charge of acquisitions. That Trinity had real estate dealings as far away as Japan and Mexico allayed Yamauchi’s worry that he was leaving a global playing field for a much smaller market. But scaling down their personal lives from the headiness of Los Angeles, where major sports events and A-list concerts were the norm, and San Francisco and Palm Springs were within driving distance. How much would they miss it? “Now that we’re home and we’re settled and we have a family, it works for us. The life here is different – less exciting. But it’s just nice. What I like to do for fun now is surfing and spending time with my kid, taking her to the beach, out to the park,” Yamauchi says. “It was all pretty smooth, to be honest. We love our life here. It’s been great to be back.”

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For Celeste Connors ’94 the choice was between Kailua and London. One was her hometown, the other her retired British diplomat husband’s, and for a Beltway couple wanting to raise their children closer to family, the choice was far from obvious.

When they weighed the astronomical costs of both cities against the lifestyle each afforded, in some ways London with its world-class everything came out ahead. Then Connors’ father in Kailua got sick, and the decision was easy. As it turns out, Hawai‘i Green Growth, a public-private leadership group working to advance economic, social and environmental goals, was looking for its first executive director and reached out to Connors via Punahou Connect.

It seemed almost destined: Connors had built a career as a diplomat specializing in international sustainability, climate and foreign policy. She’d worked at the highest levels of climate change policy in the Obama White House, put in years abroad at U.S. embassies and served on the U.S. Mission to the United Nations. At one point, she helped negotiate an international climate treaty.

Clearly Hawai‘i Green Growth had chosen her to level up its work – to get it onto the world stage and connect it with like-minded initiatives for maximum collaborative impact. The specifics were up to her. “The international community is looking for scalable solutions to achieve the global sustainability goals, and has turned to Hawai‘i for inspiration,” she says. “Sustainability is about systems thinking across economic, social and environmental sectors. Growing up on an island, kids from Hawai‘i inherently understand that what happens in the watershed will affect our coral reef and the communities in between. They are therefore uniquely equipped to lead the kind of policy innovation we need at this critical time.”

For Connors, it is immensely satisfying that her children, James ’27 and Elizabeth ’30, are growing up in multicultural Hawai‘i, steeped in the values of aloha, ‘ohana, kuleana and ma¯lama – that they can climb trees and play at the beach and hike Maunawili the way Connors did growing up.

As for Connors, her superpower is her command of global diplomacy. She knows how to put Hawai‘i and Hawai‘i Green Growth’s work before the eyes of the world. When she did that, the United Nations invited the organization to work with it toward global sustainability as the only Local2030 sustainability hub in North America and the Asia-Pacific.

“We’ve now had requests to share our model – Hawai‘i’s model – with communities across the world, from Tasmania and the Canary Islands to Guam and Aruba in a locally and culturally appropriate way,” she says. “I feel grateful that my professional experience and personal background growing up in Hawai‘i have converged. It took coming home after being away for many years to reaffirm what I probably always felt – that Hawai‘i’s Island culture, people and community could be a starlight for other communities and countries seeking to get on a more sustainable pathway.”

Connors says her focus now is on establishing the Local2030 Hub, building on Hawai‘i’s history of systems thinking, and attracting alumni considering returning home, as well as future graduates from across the State who are interested in careers in sustainable development and policy.

“The world of multilateral engagement is changing, and Hawai‘i and local communities can help drive high-level diplomacy, policy and action,” she says. “By sharing Hawai‘i’s sustainability framework with the world, we can attract new resources to help us achieve our goals locally, create leadership pathways for our keiki and mitigate the worst impact of climate change on our community.”

HER ADVICE: “Hawai‘i – with its incredible ecosystem of institutions and culture – is uniquely positioned to help the world navigate towards a better future. What we do here is relevant. What you can do here is relevant and presents a tangible opportunity to leverage your experience, if you are willing to be a bit innovative.”

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It’s not uncommon for Cass Nakasone ’86 to lecture in Japan about his methods for outpatient joint surgery. He hosts surgeons who fly across the Pacific to watch him operate at Straub Medical Center. He also teaches orthopedics at the John A. Burns School of Medicine, has published nine papers a year in medical journals and co-designed a hip implant used in several countries. Now he’s collaborating on designs for a partial knee replacement system and a sensor for hip replacement implants. Techniques he developed let him do up to 12 surgeries a day. His stature is such that few in local medical circles talk about knee or hip replacement without mentioning his name.

HIS ADVICE: “Excellence in whatever field you enter is something you should strive for. If you’re not a good doctor, it’s going to be hard for you. if you’re an excellent doctor, it’s going to be easy. You’re going to be successful anywhere.”

That’s not to say there hasn’t been a cost. “I seriously could be making more money on the mainland,” he says, half-jokingly. “I just went to my colleague’s house in Colorado, and I almost wish I didn’t see it. It looks like a hotel. He does about the same volume I do. I told him if you visit me, don’t expect the same accommodations.”

Nakasone has no regrets. Through engineering studies at Whitman College, Caltech and Stanford, a medical degree from the University of Hawai‘i and subspecialty training at the University of Southern California, he never questioned whether Hawai‘i would be his home. He wanted his children (Cole ’20 and Nicole ’23) to grow up close to their grandparents, as he had. So did his wife, Tina Unebasami ’87. At the end of all his training, Nakasone joined Straub and started putting his ideas to work.

Direct anterior hip replacements were pioneering in the Islands in 2005. Now, he says, they’re the norm. But his goal went beyond evolving his field – it was to earn for subspecialty orthopedic surgery in Hawai‘i the broad recognition he felt it deserved. It stung every time doctors at mainland conferences asked about his beach time or whether he practiced rural medicine.

“If you want to be considered a leader in your field, chances are better if you stay on the mainland and become faculty at USC or Stanford or wherever, which many Punahou graduates are,” he says. “Developing here the kinds of research opportunities they have will let students see that we can build this in Hawai‘i, and we can put Hawai‘i on the map in terms of being recognized for the high level of medical care that we’ve developed in many different specialties. I have three former Punahou students right now doing research with me and many others that have done research with us and published peer-reviewed articles.

“I have a goal of providing some kind of legacy for upcoming medical students who are all very hungry and motivated for research opportunities like this. I’m hoping they can go away and train, and somehow, we get them to come back to Hawai‘i. Because one day, I’m going to be old. I’m hoping there will be somebody who’s going to be an expert in whatever I need so I don’t have to fly to the mainland for treatment.”

M A R K   F U K U N A G A ’ 7 4
Punahou Trustee (Board Chair), Chairman and CEO of Servco

Hawai‘i itself has changed a lot. It’s much more integrated into the United States and world economies. Half of Servco’s automotive business is in Australia. On our investment side, we own Fender Guitar company in California. I think this is interesting. It provides growth opportunities for folks.

Servco has an internship program with 16 interns this year from colleges across the United States and Hawai‘i and some high schools. We had over 1,300 applicants. The most gratifying thing about it is that, last year, we had several folks who were born and raised in Hawai‘i who had gone away to school.

Two or three of them were doing digital, constructing apps in human resources and marketing. They said, “I had no idea a company like Servco was doing this kind of stuff. It’s changed how I think about my career. I’m now thinking about coming back to Hawai‘i, and before last summer, I wasn’t.” So I think there are opportunities for people who want to do things along those lines here. But you have to look for them.

D U A N E   K U R I S U
Punahou Trustee, Chairman and Founder of aio Group, Chairman of Hawai‘i Executive Collaborative

It’s become increasingly more expensive to live in Hawai‘i. It’s not only making it difficult for people who grew up in Hawai‘i to move back, but it has also been the primary reason why young people have been moving away to places that are more affordable, and where higher-paying job opportunities are more in line with the cost of housing. The recent ALICE (Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed) report commissioned by Aloha United Way showed that about half of Hawai‘i residents are financially insecure.

That and for reasons beyond affordability and childcare is why the Hawai‘i Executive Collaborative was formed. The collaborative is a commitment by business CEOs and government, labor, education and community leaders to tackle the most pressing issues facing Hawai‘i and seek opportunities to build Hawai‘i’s economy. Time is not our friend, so we are not seeking incremental changes, but changes that move the dial.

Today, there is a greater call for collaboration, a greater need to build an environment that accepts risks for innovation and out-of-the-box thinking, and a need to attract and congregate world-class minds and investment. The beauty is that many things have not changed – our values of family, friendship, respect, empathy and authenticity.

Come home. We need you and your children to join hands with us and help build a better Hawai‘i.