Mazie Hirono

Mazie Keiko Hirono is an American lawyer and politician who has served since 2013 as the junior United States senator from Hawaii. Born on 3 November 1947 in Fukushima Prefecture, Japan, she was raised in Honolulu, became a naturalized United States citizen in 1959, and took her Juris Doctor at Georgetown University Law Center in 1978 before practising law in Honolulu. Her public career began in the Hawaii House of Representatives, where she sat from 1981 to 1994 and chaired the Consumer Protection and Commerce Committee from 1987 to 1992, and continued as Hawaii's lieutenant governor from 1994 to 2002 and as a member of the United States House of Representatives from 2007 to 2013. Elected to the Senate in 2012, she is recorded as the first Asian-American woman elected to that chamber and the first United States senator born in Japan. In the atlas she stands as a lawyer who became a legislator and so an author and sponsor of statute, rather than a judge.