Keith Kamisugi
Keith Kamisugi is a leading practitioner of pidgin on the Mainland. His pidgin spoken word concerts have drawn as many as five people per venue, all of whom came for the free Primo beer and spam musubi. You can catch him at Hukilau in San Francisco, begging Patrick Landeza for some mic time.
Keith's paternal grandparents came to Hawai'i from the Yamaguchi prefecture in Japan, making Keith a young sansei.
Born and raised in Waipahu and Mililani, "Keet" learned to double-chop like Kikaida, served as Mililani Waena Elementary's first student body president (while memorizing Rap Replinger's "Fate Yanagi"), did time as a rippah-wallet maker at Wheeler Intermediate, and pretended to be a drum major and school newspaper editor-in-chief at Mililani High School ('88).
Unable to give up Zippy's fried saimin (and actually because he never applied anywhere else), Keith attended the University of Hawai'i at Manoa, developing a taste for politics as student body president after an unsuccessful stint as a sports writer for the athletic department. (Jim Leahy got him fired after he forgot to change the scoreboard at a baseball game...)
After stints as an aide in the Hawai'i state Senate and in the elections office, Keith got his first full-time job in the Governor's Office a little before Gov. John Waihee finished his second term -- and then continued on as the resident computer geek when Gov. Ben Cayetano took office.
Because he was never able to take any of the 21 days of paid vacation per year offered to state workers, in 1997 Keith applied for the spokesman job at the telephone company (GTE Hawaiian Tel, Verizon Hawaii and now Hawaiian TelComm) -- and somehow managed to get hired.
Catching "rock feevah," he quit the "somber, but sincere" phone company job and packed his bags for San Francisco, joined a technology public relations firm (which closed its doors only 18 months after Keith was hired -- unrelated for sure), and then went into freelance consulting.
Always a fan of acronyms, Keith served as president of the HJJCC (Honolulu Japanese Junior Chamber of Commerce), organizers of the Cherry Blossom Festival, and on numerous community boards in both San Francisco and Honolulu, including the JACL-Honolulu, Japanese Cultural and Community Center of Northern California (JCCCNC), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), the Asian American Theater Company (AATC) and the Hawaii Chamber of Commerce of Northern California (HCCNC). He is also active in the Global Pau Hana and hapihour.org.
Keith is now the associate director for communications at the San Francisco-based Equal Justice Society, a social and racial justice advocacy organization.
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