Japan roots top off census

Advertiser Staff

Japanese is the most common ancestry in Hawai'i, according to a census report released this week. Nearly 21 percent of Hawai'i's 1.21 million residents identified their ancestry as Japanese in the 2000 census, followed by Filipino (17.7 percent), Hawaiian (16.3 percent), Chinese (8.3 percent), and German (5.8 percent).

Nationwide, German (15.2 percent), Irish (10.8 percent), and African-American (8.8 percent) were the most commonly listed ancestries.

The U.S. Census Bureau pointed out that ancestry is a broad concept that means different things to different people: ethnicity, where your parents come from, or your birthplace, for example.

A large number described their ancestry as "American."

Respondents who listed more than one ancestry were counted in each category. Ancestries with less than 100,000, such as Samoan, were not tabulated in the report.

Nationally, the number of census respondents who declared their ancestry as Japanese, Hawaiian, Filipino or Chinese increased substantially from the 1990 census, but their numbers as a percentage of the total U.S. population remained stable.

In the case of those who said they were of Filipino ancestry, there was a 46 percent increase to 2.1 million; for Hawaiian a 30 percent increase to 334,858; for Chinese a 51 percent increase to 2.27 million; and for Japanese a 10 percent increase to 1.1 million. In each case, the groups accounted for less than 1 percent of the country's total population of 281 million.

The statistics were based on a sampling of one in six households.