Anchorage, Alaska was a more common stopover between the U.S. West Coast and Japan, Korea, etc. in the days before airliners could easily cross the Pacific in one hop.

ANC is still a major refueling and sorting stop for air cargo -- most all air cargo between China and the mainland U.S. passes through Anchorage. The Anchorage FedEx hub is only passed by Hong Kong and Memphis in terms of volume, and the UPS hub is also one of the largest for that company.

That's counterintuitive when you look at a flat map, but not on a globe.

Here's a flat projection of some great circle routes:

http://www.gcmap.com/mapui?P=SFO-NRT-SIN,SFO-HKG-SIN

Note that the shortest path goes a lot closer to Alaska than it does Hawaii.

Reminds me of something the boss of the company operating a former soviet cargo plane demonstrated. They often figured out how to get the plane somewhere by taking a piece of string cut to fit the flight range of the plane, and placing it on top of a globs to look for suitable airports.

Depends on the destination. Try Sydney, for example.

On most (all?) the round-the-world charters that Concorde did, it had two stopovers on every transpacific leg, one in Honolulu and the other variously in Papeete, Guam, or Fiji (and likely elsewhere, I've not looked exhaustively).

That said, the furtherest north any of those charters landed in the far east was Hong Kong.