Shiro

Shiro

June 19, 2014

Shiro Tokuno was born on December 17, 1918. It would appear that he was named after his Uncle Shiro, however, it is hard to be sure of this since “Shiro” means “fourth son” in Japanese and both he and his uncle were the fourth sons. It is likely that his nickname “Sheik” came from the neighbor boys' inability to pronounce “Shiro” correctly. Since Rudolph Valentino’s depiction of an Arabian lover was a powerful media image of the time, the nickname stuck. According to his sisters, Shiro was a feisty young man and, being the youngest of four boys, it is almost a sure thing that he had to learn to defend himself at a fairly young age. Throughout his life, he carried a scar on his forehead from a stick that was thrown at him by his older brother, Ted. Although that injury was accidental--Ted was trying to throw a grafting stick through a woodshed door, that Shiro was holding open for him--it shows the aggressive style of play among the Tokuno boys.

He had a typical brother-sister relationship with his younger sisters, Alyce and Teyko. During the summer months, he would go with his father to Oroville to distribute crates of tomatoes to the various grocers. Shiro would do the hard work of lifting the crates off of the Model T Ford truck and putting empty crates back on. Rough work for a ten year old. On the way home, his father would stop and buy him candy to share with his siblings, but when he got home, he would not share any of the candy with his little sisters until they had run to the persimmon shed and back. He was also very protective of them. He would always keep an eye on them as they were in the schoolyard to make sure that they were never the victims of cads or bullies.

A picture of him as he finished high school shows a rather reserved, even scholarly looking young man, slender with round eyeglasses. When he reached his full height, he was 5 feet 8 inches tall and so skinny he had to wear suspenders to keep his pants up. He was a good student, being the only one in his family to go to the University of California, but that look belied his basically competitive and strong personality. He was ruggedly handsome, but dated very little in high school or college, despite the way co-eds would hang around to catch a glimpse of him.

Shiro was very athletic. When he attended Oroville High School from 1933 to 1937, he tried out for a number of sports: football, where he played left guard on the line; basketball, in which he was a forward; baseball, and track and field and won varsity letters in football and track. His best sport may have been basketball, for he was a standout on the “C” level team in his first year. When he tried out for the “B” team, though, the coach did not even want to give him a chance, probably because of his race. Undaunted, Shiro asked the varsity coach for a try-out and not only did he make the team but he started.

In track and field, he put the shot and showed his overall athletic ability by asking the coach if he could do the pole vault. This is something he had practiced at home using bamboo poles, so the first jump he attempted cleared ten feet. This does not sound very spectacular nowadays when, using fiberglass poles, athletes are jumping around 20 feet, but it was quite an impressive feat back then. In his first league track meet, a championship meet, at Colusa, Shiro competed in the pole vault and tied for first place. He helped Oroville High gain first place in the league meet for the first time in its history.

In 1937, Shiro went away to College, joining his brother, Tim, at Sacramento City College. They stayed with a family friend, Kumao Nagata. He earned his way by working first with the National Youth Administration doing landscaping, then later as a houseboy for a well-to-do family in the Sutterville district of south Sacramento. Two years later, he applied and was accepted at the University of California at Berkeley. Somewhere in his childhood, he had learned to be very frugal. His mother used to praise him for his efforts to avoid placing a financial burden on his family in any way he could. Besides working his way through college, he would do other things, such as hitch-hike all the way from Berkeley to Palermo to save money. He met a lot of interesting people that way and was always sympathetic to hitch-hikers. I spent a lot of uncomfortable moments in his pick up truck sitting next to some stranger who smelled very much of the road, if not cheap wine.

At Cal he again demonstrated his athletic prowess by gaining a place on the Cal boxing team, earning the “Block C” letter as a varsity athlete. In his first year, he rented a room for $10 a month on Ellsworth Street, then later got a spot in the Barrington Hall co-op with other students, helping to cover costs by doing cooking, cleaning, and washing as all co-op members were supposed to do. He also worked for a time in the co-op store, as a waiter, then as head waiter. In his senior year, he was elected to be a member of the House Council. On the academic side he first majored in Commerce, then changed to Agricultural Economics, making steady progress toward his bachelor’s degree when the war broke out in 1941. Although he was able to finish his degree in May of 1942, he was not able to go through the graduation ceremonies in June. He had to join his family as they were making plans for their forced evacuation.

As Shiro helped his family get ready for evacuation to Tule Lake, he wondered what the war had in store for him. He had registered for the military draft earlier, getting a 2-S classification (student deferment) while he was in college. Now he was classified as 4-C, enemy alien, so he could not serve in the army, even if he wanted. In the meantime, he wanted to do something useful while in camp. He immediately applied his degree in camp doing agricultural work, joining the technical support staff and helping plan for the use of the 3000 acres of farm land they had nearby. Since all able bodied young men in the United States were serving in the armed forces, there was as shortage of labor, so it was not hard for the young nisei to gets jobs doing important work such as farming, By December, he was the Assistant Employment Officer and using information he received in that position, learned of an opportunity to work in Utah for a cannery. With his oldest brother, Tony, and a group of 18 other men to work there in June, 1943, partly in anticipation that the Tokuno family was to be transferred to Topaz in September of 1943 and partly because the cannery job paid more. It is also clear that he found life in the camp to be very boring and restrictive.

Ever restless, by December of 1943, he decided he wanted to go to the east coast to work. Going into the personnel office to ask for application forms for a job in Washington D. C., he saw a pretty young woman working there, Asako Maida. Earlier he had been introduced to her by Sam Sato, who knew Shiro from working with him in Ogden. Sam was an old boy-friend of Asako. He impetuously asked her if she would go to the New Year’s Dance with him. She did not seem enthusiastic, but Shiro was not one to take “no” for an answer. He dropped by later with his hat in his hand and said “You wanna go to a movie?” a little too casually, for Asako’s liking. It was like he was assuming she was going to say yes. They did go and they also went to the New Year’s Dance. Little did she know where this would lead, because he intended to ask her to marry him.

No one knows when Shiro decided to ask for Asako’s hand in marriage. Knowing him, it might have been on the spur of the moment; the beginning of a new year, 1944, and a new life. Unfortunately, it was not that clear cut, because Asako, astounded that anyone would propose in such a short time, did not give him an answer. Still, there must have been something in her eyes that said “yes” when he asked the question. He was confident enough to leave later that month for Washington D. C. to work in the War Relocation Authority (WRA) offices. He found a place to rent by himself at the corner of 17th and T Street, N.W. Anyone sifting through their old mail will find a lot of correspondence between the two of them dating from just after that January.

In April he, along with all other Japanese American Nisei, was reclassified as I-A for the U. S. Military draft, so in May 1944, Shiro volunteered for the Army. He briefly returned to Topaz to be with Asako and to prepare for the Military Intelligence Service, in which he would have to become very fluent and literate in Japanese. His brother, Tim, who had joined the army before the war, wrote from Europe to advise him not to join the infantry, besides, as recent years had shown, he wanted to find ways of applying his education and he could see that going into Intelligence work might be the best way to do it.

Although he saw a lot of Asako during this interval no plans for a wedding were set. She did not want to be married to a soldier fighting in a war far away, so her thought was to wait until he got back. In June, he reported for induction at Fort Douglas in Salt Lake City, then was sent to Camp Savage in Minnesota before going to basic training at Ft. McClellan in Alabama later that month. Once his basic training was over, the Army sent him to Fort Snelling, near St. Paul, Minnesota. There he began intensive training in Japanese, learning to read and write Japanese as well as learning the techniques of interrogation, translation, and interpretation. It was a 10 month course of study, during which he spent six days a week attending class from 8:00 a.m. to 4:00 p.m., then studying all evening.

In the meantime, Japanese-Americans who were in the camp, were beginning to make arrangements to leave for other parts of the country. The executive order placing them in the camps was intended mainly to get them away from the west coast area. In September of 1944, Asako and her two sisters, Meriko and Junko, went to Rochester, New York, where Junko, who was an accomplished violinist, had been accepted into the music conservatory. Their parents insisted that she be accompanied by her two sisters. Asako found work in a calendar factory, but did not work there for very long. A wedding was beckoning. Asako’s parents has already announced their daughter’s engagement in Topaz camp newspaper.

One year after Shiro asked her to marry him, Asako found herself in Minnesota. She stayed at the YWCA in St. Paul. Earlier, when on leave from training, Shiro had gone to Rochester where he presented Asako with an engagement ring. (Asako still has a newspaper clipping announcing this formal engagement with the sad note that she soon lost that ring down the kitchen sink while she was washing dishes.) Alyce Tokuno was also there and one evening as they and some friends were gathered around the kitchen table, they began to make collective plans for a wedding right there in Minnesota. Asako still had some reservations, since she knew that Shiro would be shipping to the Far East in a few months, but she did not require much convincing. Soon a date was set, a minister found, and friends were invited.

So it happened on February 17, 1945 that Shiro Tokuno wed Asako Maida. The ceremony was held in the home of the minister, Reverend Francis Hayashi. They were joined in the celebration by what friends and family could make it to Minnesota, but both Shiro’s mother and Asako’s parents were still in the camp. Things had happened so fast that they could not make arrangements in time, even if they could have afforded the cost of travel. Shiro’s sisters, Alyce and Tey were there, Tey with her husband of three years, Henry. The friends included Sukeo (Skeets) Oji, Shiro’s witness; Ard Kozono, who sang “Oh Promise Me;” Hal Shigeura, Shiz Yoshimura, Tosh Adachi, and Hideko Kawaii. Asako moved into an apartment where Shiro stayed on Wednesdays and weekends. Asako did odd jobs during this honeymoon period, the type of honeymoon that was probably very common in wartime for ages. Even then, this short time together was something they appreciated because in times of war, soldiers and their wives are seldom together and often never see each other again.

After only a little over three months, Shiro received his orders to deploy to the Pacific theater, the Philippines, where he was to work in Manila translating Japanese war documents. On furlough after finishing his training, he and Asako returned quickly to Topaz for a belated wedding reception, then made a brief visit to see his brother Ted, who had taken his family to Idaho. They then returned to St. Paul so Shiro could board a troop train back to California from whence he was to embark by transport to the front. By then the war had moved well past the Philippines, so he was not in any danger, except for the ship’s voyage across the Pacific. Transports were still required to cross the ocean in a zig-zag style to reduce the possibility of being attacked by Japanese submarines. Back home, Asako stayed in St. Paul for a time after moving into a one room apartment.

History shows us that the war ended horribly in the fall of 1945, with the nuclear attacks on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Not long after the Japanese surrendered to the armed forces of the United States of America, Shiro was transferred to Tokyo, Japan. The date was October 22, 1945. Tokyo was a shambles, much of it an urban wasteland created by Allied bombings. He immediately began to try to find his sister, Haru, even as he was assigned the work of interrogating Japanese officials and studying various Japanese war secrets. His successful search is detailed in Chapter 5.

Shiro was assigned to the Army Air Corp Intelligence, A-2. His work included interrogating Japanese war criminals such as the men who had killed downed B-29 pilots in violation of the Geneva Convention; an admiral from whom they were trying to find what might have happened to a missing destroyer; and the Chairman of the Board of Yawata Steel, to find out more about the Japanese steel industry. All of the men who were being questioned were silently taken aback by this Japanese looking young man in the uniform of their recent enemy, asking probing questions in polished Japanese. If they were indignant about this, they never showed it and Shiro was completely unabashed. He was doing his duty.

As Shiro was doing this work and faithfully writing to his wife, Asako was in the process of going back to California along with thousands of other Japanese Americans who were eager to see what they could recover of their property. Asako drove across country with Shiro’s brother-law, Henry Imaoka, her boss, and his brother. She got back to Richmond to be reunited with her family.

How long can a young couple be separated? In this case, it was to be a long 20 months. Asako occupied herself by working in the offices of the Internal Revenue Service in San Francisco, before she got permission to join her husband in Tokyo. She arrived in January of 1947. Their first child, a son and your humble author, Kenneth Alan was born only ten months later on November 2, 1947.

Shiro was actually a civilian, having been discharged by the Army in May of 1946. He was still working under the military government of the occupation forces though, in the Economic and Scientific Section. He found the work fascinating and he enjoyed the chance to work to help the destitute Japanese population recover from the war. During the first Christmas he was there alone, he bought boxes of sandwiches that he passed out to the hungry children of Tokyo on Christmas eve. Even with a wife and son, his salary in the post-war economy of Japan allowed them to lead a high life style. They were able to hire a maid to take care of me, they had nice meals dining out, and were able to afford a very nice apartment. Shiro certainly enjoyed this life style and there was no reason he had for returning to America

Still, I was the first male off-spring of Asako’s parents and she longed for them to be able to see him. With the added pleas of telegrams from her family, Shiro agreed to return to the U. S. A. In July of 1948, the young family boarded the “S.S. Horace Greeley” for long voyage across the Pacific to California, a voyage that Bunda Tokuno had undertaken twice many years before. From a tearful departure in Tokyo harbor they went to a joy filled reunion and greeting in San Francisco. They settled temporarily in Richmond with the Maida family, but shuttled back and forth to Palermo where Shiro helped his family. It was probably difficult to plan for the future because both Asako and Shiro wanted different things. Asako’s father would have wanted Shiro to live with them and learn the nursery business, but Shiro dreamed of owning a farm one day in the central valley.

By 1949 Shiro was convinced he needed to go back to Japan and see if he could seek his fortunes there. He recalled his days in Japan with much fondness and had a solid network of friends and acquaintances who could help him. He would need to be separated from his wife and young son, but it would only be for a while. In May the whole little family traveled east by train to pick up a car and drive it back to California. The idea was to ship the car to Japan and sell it for a sizable profit and give Shiro a stake to earn his fortune, so he returned to Japan with the car to sell, staying there for two years. Asako stayed at her parents’ Richmond house, spending her time taking care of me. It was not long after Shiro left, however, that Asako found herself pregnant with their second child and Shira Lynn was born on March 4, 1950, with her father in Japan.

It must have been a mixed feeling for Asako. Certainly she missed her husband and longed to share her children’s early years with him. Yet, her own family and their friends doted on her young children. The letters from Shiro were not as frequent as they had been in the earlier years, but he still wrote and would, from time to time, send little keepsakes. He returned to his former duties with the military government, but was not as successful in Japan as he had hoped. Soon, practicality forced his hand. The U. S. Government was placing a limit on how long veterans of World War II could take advantage of the educational benefits under the G. I. Bill. He had to decide what to do, so he came back to California, even as his father had done 50 years before. In August of 1951, he entered the graduate program in Agricultural Economics at UC Berkeley.

The G. I. Bill was pretty good for the Shiro Tokuno family, because in October of 1951, after a short stay in UC’s married student housing in Albany, they were able to buy a house under the G. I. Bill. The house was in El Sobrante, a sleepy little suburb in the East Bay Area region just north of Richmond. It was not far from the University. Asako found this ideal for it was close to her girl-hood home. Shiro was still gone a lot, though, hauling oranges from the central valley to the bay area to provide some income and studying late nights to earn his Master’s degree. He also worked part-time for a bank and other odd jobs. A third child, Anthony Theodore (who, as his cousin Tim, was named after his two uncles), was born on July 10, 1952.

Shiro finished his degree in 1953 and with three children, needed to find a full time job as soon as he could. He worked briefly for Marianni, Inc., a fruit packaging company in San Jose. He then spent a short time working for the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs, but soon found a better position in the federal government with the Bureau of Land Management. Unfortunately, it meant that they would have to move to southern California, far from both of their families. In the summer of 1955, when I was 7, Shira 5, and Tony only just turned 3, they packed all their belongings and moved to Buena Park. This was another small suburb, this time in Orange County, not far from another non-descript town called Anaheim. In those days, there was a lot of open space there. Behind the new house was a sugar beet farm and just up the road a large dairy. Houses were being built and people moving into this area at a startling rate as the United States’ economy continued its post-war prosperity. By 1956, the Shiro Tokuno family was also prospering and celebrated by having a fourth child, Riki Maida, on October 16, 1956. Sadly, it was not long after this date that they got word of the death of Shiro’s mother.

Maybe it was his mother’s passing that spurred Shiro to change his career. At least he moved closer to where his earlier dreams had told him he wanted to go: to Sacramento. He found a job with the State of California’s Department of Water Resources, so in March of 1958 the slightly larger family once again packed up all their belongings and moved back north to West Sacramento, where Shiro has bought his third house.

By this time, the family had a feeling of being “complete” and settled in some sense, but the last change was yet to come. In 1960, Shiro purchased a little over 40 acres of land north of Sacramento in the Natomas district. He intended to build his dream house there and move into it as soon as he could. Blueprints were drawn, contractors hired, and the earth was moved. By December of 1961, roughly six months behind schedule, the family moved in. It was to be the last family home. The rest were all sold to pay for this farm. Shiro also bought tractors and other farm equipment, raised a shed to shelter the equipment and tools, and planted various crops, starting with cucumbers, then watermelons as seed crops. When these proved too non-profitable he turned to sorghum, wheat, and safflower. He also farmed 20 acres of prune trees to the north in Sutter county, a venture supported by his three sisters.

These farms provided his sons with an opportunity to work the land, learn to be resourceful and discover the rewards of hard work. They also provided the family with a fifth child, Merijune, who was born on October 27, 1962, almost exactly 15 years after her oldest brother. The family was now both complete and fully settled. It had wandered through large part of California to get there, but Shiro’s clan had finally come home.

Shiro retired from the State in 1983, but like his older brothers never retired from farming. He also retired from the Army Reserve as a lieutenant colonel and served his community by being on the Natomas School Board, presiding for two terms. He has been very active in veterans’ affairs, letting the world know of the contributions of Japanese Americans to the victories in both Europe and the Pacific in World War II.

Shiro and Asako now have nine grandchildren. I live in Hawai`i with my wife, Diane, and twin daughters Jamie and Chelsea.  I work for the University of Hawaii. Shira is a professor of electrical engineering at Washington State University, living in Pullman with her husband, John. They have two children, Miya and Henry. She received her Ph. D. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington. Tony is also an electrical engineer, having both a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Engineering from the University of California at Davis. He worked in the trade in Silicon Valley. He and his wife since 1975, Norma, live there with three sons, Mathew, Zachary, and Nathan. Riki has his home in Bellevue, Washington. He met his wife, Darla, before any of his siblings met their spouses and married her in 1984. They have a daughter, Deven, and a son, Nikolas. Merijune lives close to her parents in Sacramento. She got her Bachelor’s degree in Graphic Arts from the California State University at Chico. She is employed by the State of California Department of Health.