The Senator from Hawaii: Law Alumna's Life in Public Service

Hirono's early childhood was spent on her grandparents' rice farm in Fukushima, Japan. Her father was an alcoholic and compulsive gambler. Instead of watching her family continue to suffer, Hirono's mother made the courageous decision to seek a better life for the family. She plotted and planned in secret, and when Hirono was nearly 8 years old, she, her mother and brother boarded the S.S. President Cleveland in Yokohama and set sail across the Pacific in steerage to Hawaii.

"My mom was very courageous," Hirono said. "She showed me that one person can make a difference. She totally changed my life by bringing me to this country."

Hirono did not speak or write English when she first enrolled in public school. She went on to graduate from the University of Hawaii at Manoa in 1970, during an age of national political and social turmoil, and was involved in the anti-Vietnam War protest movement at the university. "That was when I began to look at politics and activism as a way to make my contribution," she said.

If a law degree was a route to a career in politics, Hirono knew she wanted a strong clinical program and an emphasis on public interest law. That meant Georgetown Law Center.

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But Hirono never predicted that she herself would end up in the U.S. Senate.

After graduation, she worked in the antitrust division of the Hawaii attorney general's office. "One day, one of my friends-male friends-said, 'You have been encouraging so many people to run for office and make a difference. Why don't you think about it?,'" she recalled.

"Frankly, it was not something that I had thought of for myself. That's an experience that a lot of women have-that we often don't think we're prepared enough to run for office ourselves. But of course we are."

Hirono took her friend's advice and successfully ran for a seat in the Hawaii House of Representatives in 1980. She became Hawaii's lieutenant governor in 1994 and served until 2002. In 2006, Hirono was elected to the U.S. House of Representatives in the district once represented by her friend and inspiration, Rep. Patsy Mink (D-Hawaii), the first Asian-American woman elected to Congress.

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In 2012, Hirono ran for the U.S. Senate, winning by 25 percentage points over her opponent. Her election made history: Sworn into office on Jan. 3, 2013, she became the first Asian-American woman and the first female immigrant to serve in the Senate.

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Hirono says that her priority is to work to ensure that every American family has the opportunity to work hard and succeed in this country. That includes granting access to high-quality early education, preserving our promises to seniors and creating a strong, sustainable economy in Hawaii.

Read the entire piece at: http://magazine.georgetown.edu/2014/summer/tier1/hirono.html