ANNEX 2 



Welcoming Address 



by 



The Honorable Shunichi Kimura 



Mayor, County of Hawaii 



Thank you very much, Dick. This must be a very competent kind of gather- 

 ing, because for once they got me a maile lei short enough to fit my stature. 

 But you know I'm particularly happy to have Mr. Roedel and Dick and all 

 of you here at this very distinguished gathering of scientists and environmen- 

 talists and sportsmen. I do want to make a confession to all of you though, 

 that the only knowledge that I have about fishing is that I do get seasick and 

 by the food that I eat; I eat raw fish by the tons and I have a 10-gallon 

 aquarium in my house and this is the extent of my abilities as far as the 

 fisheries are concerned. 



But I do want to, like all of the others, extend a very warm welcome to all of 

 you on this Island; we're very privileged to have this kind of distinguished 

 group of experts in the marine billfish area. However, I'm going to leave to 

 Mr. Roedel the overview and the technical side because I know absolutely 

 nothing about this area. But I do want to share with you some of the folks 

 that the Island of Hawaii has in the areas of research and scientific endeavor. 

 I have a strong feeling that if this Island is going to depend upon 

 agriculture and the visitor industry, I suspect many of us would be leaving 

 this Island to live in San Francisco or La Jolla or some other swinging place 

 throughout the country; what we really want on this Island is a combination. 

 If we want agriculture, we want agriculture plus the expertise in tropical 

 research in the agricultural area; if we have the visitor industry, we want the 

 visitor industry not solely for itself but because we think that we can combine 

 a very unique destination area. For instance, in this Kona area with Peter 

 Fithian's imaginative leadership and the big-game fishing area, combined 

 with the things such as Mr. Roedel and Dick and Bob are doing here on the 

 Symposium I think creates a particularly unique and particularly exciting 

 kind of a visitor destination area. And so we'd like to extend all of the best of 

 resources that we have to develop that kind of scientific and research 

 capability. As you know, NOAA already has a major facility up on Mauna 

 Loa with the Atmospheric Research group. Up on Mauna Kea, the tallest 

 mountain that we have, we also have the NASA people with their 85-inch 

 telescope and the French coming in with their 150-inch telescope within a few 

 years. In terms of geothermal kinds of research we obviously have a great ex- 

 pertise in volcanology; we'll try to extend this and participate with the 

 Atomic Energy people and the people in the National Science Foundation 

 and the other agencies so that we can have major research in the area of 

 geothermal power and energy. We have approximately about one quarter 

 million dollars in appropriations from the State and County governments for 

 this particular kind of energy research. And if we look at the rains that fall on 

 these Islands we have a fairly competent area in terms of cloud physics kinds 

 of research at the University of Hawaii Hilo Campus. And we can go on and 

 on. What we've done really is take all of the natural resources that are found 

 on this Island and tried to develop them so that we can have fairly substantial 

 research and development kinds of facilities on this Island. As I welcome you 

 here I'd like to also ask your support, your help, and your counsel in how to 

 develop the fisheries kind of expertise on this Island, in terms of developing 

 facilities, in terms of inviting you people back again when you have ad- 

 ditional information and additional need to get together. I've already asked 

 Mr. Roedel for his assistance and he's already given me advice as to how we 

 can go about it to try to extract field station and field facilities and 

 possibilities of a common research station here on the corner area on the 

 Island of Hawaii. We're pushing for a retreat, a scientific retreat area up on 

 the northern part of this Island, so that we can have scientists come here to do 

 research and, of course, to have a retreat in an area where they can quietly 

 work on their cases and their particular kinds of endeavors. 



So what we hope to do really on this Island, then, is to create a tremendous 

 expertise in tropical agriculture, both in the business end and in the area of 

 research. We also want to create a very unique visitor area, an area that's not 

 only wonderful in terms of recreational visits, but also in this kind of a 

 tremendous combination of the Peter Fithians and the National Marine 

 Fisheries Service. Of course, we want to extend our research and development 

 abilities throughout the Island of Hawaii and make these indeed one of four 

 major industries. But in trying to achieve all of these very lofty and great ex- 

 pectations for this Island, we are going to need the help, the expertise, and 

 the counsel of all of you. I hope that I can ask your help in trying to attract to 

 these Islands various scientific conferences and symposiums and retreats 

 because we do not have that much expertise or that much capacity in 

 reaching all of the scientific and research groups that we need to come to this 

 Island to hold their deliberations. 



So again I want to thank you very much; we're very happy to have all of you 

 here. It is a great privilege for all of us to have such a gathering of all of the ex- 

 perts in the areas of billfish and marine fisheries. I hope that if there is 

 anything that we can do to make your stay here that much more pleasant or 

 enjoyable please do not hesitate at anytime to call upon myself. Thank you 

 very much. 



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