OLYMPIA – Gov. Jay Inslee leaves late this month on a trade mission to Japan and South Korea, hawking Washington’s agricultural products, making nice with aerospace companies and paying family visits, of sorts, on behalf of the state.

Before you start complaining about the waste of taxpayers’ dollars for the governor to gallivant around the globe, it would be good to note taxpayers don’t pay his freight on these economic excursions. That’s covered by a special non-profit, the Host Fund of Washington, set up by the Trade Development Alliance in Seattle, from donations.

Costs for state staff who accompany the governor, including the directors of the Commerce and Agriculture departments, come out of their respective department budgets, so it’s not  a complete freebie for taxpayers.

Governors often appreciate the chance to get out of Olympia and confer, converse and otherwise hobnob with brother wizards. But the trade missions are primarily about selling products and businesses from the state in the nation most dependent on foreign trade. Inslee will reciprocate for a visit by officials from the state’s newest aerospace company, Mitsubishi, which opened an engineering office in Seattle earlier this year.

He’ll also visit fellow governors in two of Washington’s sister states, Hyogo Prefecture in Japan and Jeollabuk-do Province in South Korea.

Turns out states, like many U.S. cities including Spokane, adopt familial relations with states, provinces or prefectures around the globe. And like any family relationship, if you’re in the neighborhood only once in a blue moon, you want to drop by to say hi.

Washington has six such sisterly relationships, with China, the Philippines, Mexico and India as well as the two Inslee will visit. The state and Spokane both started acquiring far-off sisters in the early 1960s. The state bonded with Hyogo about the time Spokane and Nishinomiya adopted each other, and it all lined up rather nicely because Nishinomiya is in Hyogo Prefecture.

At the time, the two countries were working to get past the feelings from “the late unpleasantness”, which some people used to describe a long list of events stretching from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In that context, Inslee trip is rather interesting, considering Mitsubishi is the company that brought us the Japanese Zero and Pearl Harbor, and Washington is the state that brought us Hanford and the Nagasaki bomb. Those are things that family members might not want to dwell on years later.

In Spokane, the Nishinomiya relationship blossomed and produced such things as the Japanese Garden in Manito Park and Mukogawa Fort Wright Institute.

Washington has another special relation with Japan. Mount Rainier and Mount Fuji are sister mountains, although it seems that the familial relationship for such large snow-covered masses might be brotherly, or snow bros.

Spokane’s younger sister cities in China and South Korea aren’t located in Washington’s sister provinces. The city also is sisters with Limerick, Ireland, and the state claims not so much as a second cousin, once removed, in the Emerald Isle. Spokane also has cut ties with two former sister cities, in Lubeck, Germany, and Makhachkala, Russia. For Lubeck, the breakup seemed to be a matter declining interest.

Makhachkala was signed up when that was part of the old Soviet Union’s Republic of Dagestan. After the fall of the Soviet Union, Spokane folks didn’t hear a peep from Makhachkalans for a couple of years, and Spokane decided to cut ties. That’s how it goes sometimes with families: “You never call, you never write. It’s like we don’t even exist to you any more.” 

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