Kapa haka leaps cultural borders

What must be the world's most isolated kapa haka group has made its Ngati Porou founder, Corrall Jimba, a national celebrity in Japan.

Born in Gisborne, she met her seafarer husband, Tetsuya Jimba, in Christchurch and has lived for the past 16 years at the northernmost tip of the island of Honshu, at a fishing village called Oma.

At this time of year the temperature there is around minus 15 degrees and the snow can be up to 3m deep.

Even when the road is clear, it's a 2 1/2 hour drive to the prefectural, or district, capital, Aomori.

"I have to speak Japanese because nobody else speaks English," she says.

Yet in this remote place, Mrs Jimba has created a kapa haka group. Three years ago, she discovered 150 to 200 Polynesians were among about 10,000 Americans at an air base 2 1/2 hours south, at Misawa.

"There are a lot of Samoans, Hawaiians, Tongans, and I have even met up with a half-Maori/half-Samoan who was born in Texas," she says.

"They all have the Polynesian feeling. I have got a dance group together so they do gigs at restaurants and hotels. We do kapa haka."

From this beginning, Mrs Jimba has organised "Aotearoa Day" festivals at community centres and schools all over Japan, using the 371 New Zealanders on the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) programme and hundreds of other Kiwis teaching English.

"There are a lot of Maori over here. In our group alone we have 70 to 100 Maori that we know of," she says ... "We just get on the e-mail and we all hook up."

Her work attracted the attention of the prefectural government in Aomori, which now pays for her to encourage "international relations" between Japanese and foreigners.

She has been on national television several times and is now so well-known that visitors to Oma seek out her home-delivery pizza business, which she runs from her house, "just to say they bought a pizza from me".

Mrs Jimba's daughters, Asuka and Erina, who were born 11 months apart in 1989, speak English as well as Japanese. Mrs Jimba has also been teaching them Maori from a textbook "written by a few of my friends".

Mrs Jimba is one of an estimated 500,000 people born in New Zealand who now live overseas. Asuka and Erina are two of 300,000 children born overseas with at least one NZ-born parent.