By Bob Krauss
Advertiser Columnist

Maybe Okinawans do live longer than anybody else. More than 40 members of the Okinawan Senior Club at the Lanakila Multi-Purpose Senior Center are between 90 and 100.

"I think it's because they are a happy-go-lucky people," said Kay Adaniya, club president. "They love to sing and dance."

Three of them — they're 99 — will be honored at the center tomorrow: Chiyo Kochi, Kame Teruya and Kenichi Kaneshiro, not for living so long but for all the good things they've done for everybody.

Kochi is a good example, a wisp of a woman who wasn't allowed as a teenager in Okinawa to play the samisen or dance. In Hawai'i, raising a family took up most of her time. She and her husband kept trying for a boy to carry on the family name. It finally happened with offspring No. 8 and No. 9.

With that out of the way, she took up Okinawan folk- dancing and learned to play the samisen at the center.

"I never saw my mother lie down or rest," said Jane Eckenrode, daughter No. 4.

"I can still picture her washing clothes with a baby on her back, and sewing and mending clothes until the wee hours of the night. It may be the rigors of those hard years that have helped her live to a ripe old age."

Birthing nine children didn't stop Kochi from having a career. With the older girls taking care of the younger children at home, she worked in Waikiki as a hotel maid and as a waitress in several restaurants.

At the Suehiro restaurant, Kochi so impressed the chef and owner than he cooked a special steak dinner for her and her family at his home. Said daughter Jane: "This is very unusual in Japanese tradition. I was so proud of Mother."

She volunteered at Maluhia Hospital for 14 years, sewing handicrafts to sell and using the money to hold birthday parties for patients.

The part of her life that belongs on a television show happened after she arrived in Hawai'i at age 16 to join her father working on a Maui sugar plantation. Inevitably, romance intruded.

Picture a lively, quick-witted young lady who decided she could make more money in the pineapple cannery than working as baby-sitter and kitchen helper in a kimono. While busy pasting labels on cans in Ha'iku, guess what happened.

Along came a dapper fellow selling merchandise for a store in Lahaina whose family came from the same city in Okinawa as she did. But their social stations were worlds apart. He was of the royal

Okinawan family, she merely of common parentage.

However, such things count for less in Hawai'i. Love triumphed. They married, and he opened his own store. When they moved to Honolulu, he became owner of Princess Market. Eventually they bought a house in Woodlawn and traveled to Europe and South America.

All of which goes to prove that girls from Okinawa live a long time and have a lot of fun along the way.

Correction: Chiyo Kochi, Kame Teruya and Kenichi Kaneshiro are 99 years old. Their ages were incorrect in a previous version of this column.