In the summer of 1967, a young man stepped off a plane on Guam carrying more hope than experience, trailed by seven of his college classmates from Japan. His name was Hidenobu “George” Takagi, and his plan was disarmingly simple: to grow tomatoes.
The island, small and lush, seemed ready to provide. The local stores carried little more than spoiled, soft fruit, the kind that collapsed at the touch. Tomatoes would be his beginning. But the island had other ideas. By the time the first crop bore fruit, a bacterial wilt—carried across the hillsides by the roaming carabao—swept through the fields. Within days, the plants that had once promised abundance withered into ruin. Green peppers followed the same fate. Beans were devoured by insects that, with nowhere else to go, feasted until the stalks were bare. Even the pigs joined in, turning watermelon fields into a kind of grim sport—taking one bite here, another there, spoiling fruit after fruit without finishing a single one.
Three years later, the farm was gone. The island’s flora and fauna had won.
Takagi could have left. His family urged him to return to Japan, to fold himself into the familiar embrace of their insurance business. But he had grown stubbornly attached to Guam. He would not go home. The compromise was a condition: if he would not farm, he would insure.
By 1976, Takagi had done just that. Starting in the UIU Building in Tamuning, he launched what was then a modest operation. Unlike crops, insurance had its own peculiar perils. Guam, battered regularly by typhoons, was a market many companies were wary of entering. Policies could appear profitable for years, only to be undone in a single season when a storm leveled homes, cars, and businesses. Carriers came and went. For many, the risk wasn’t worth the reward.
“Even if we started making money, everything would be gone because of the typhoon,”
But Takagi persisted. Drawing on the resilience he had learned from the fields, he positioned his company to offer what Guam most needed: all-line coverage. Not just auto, but homeowner, liability, marine, bonding, and travel—every safety net an island life required. Takagi & Associates grew into a fixture of Guam’s commercial landscape, an anchor in an environment where even global insurers often packed up after a storm.
“Guam needs more than just auto insurance. We need surplus lines, which means in addition to auto, homeowner, business, bonding, marine, travel, and liability.”
The parallels to his early failures in farming were not lost on him. Disease, insects, typhoons, pigs—the message was always the same: survival required resilience, adaptation, and above all, imagination.
Beyond insurance, Takagi has been an active player in Guam’s tourism industry, not only lending his voice to policy discussions but also supporting research and programs that shape the island’s future strategies. He has worked to bridge Japanese businesses with Guam, encouraging investment and cultural exchange that keeps Guam connected to its most significant tourist market.
It is a type of forward imagination that continues to color his philosophy of business.
“Don’t think only about Guam, think about other islands and working together.”
For him, the future lies not in isolation but in Pacific-wide unity, a chorus of small territories combining their voices into something large enough to be heard.
And yet, in an age defined by technology, his counsel is tempered with caution.
“AI can guide you on how to go to the moon, but it cannot tell you how to be a good human…. Don’t depend on AI for everything. Think for yourself.”
Nearly six decades after his first tomato crop rotted in Guam’s soil, Takagi is still here—older, perhaps wearier, but carrying the same determination that first drew him to a place so quick to test his resolve. He has been a farmer, an insurer, and a philosopher of island life. And through it all, he has insisted on staying, weathering the storms, convinced that Guam’s story—like his own—will be written not in departures but in what endures.
Author’s Note: This article is based on a personal interview conducted with Hidenobu “George” Takagi in July 2025. Quotations and anecdotes are drawn directly from that conversation, which has been lightly edited for clarity and length.
