Ben Hiroshi Tamashiro

Dog Company, 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate)

 

Life Before the War

Born and raised in the plantation town of Hanapēpē on Kauaʻi, Ben Hiroshi Tamashiro grew up on an island that produced a number of notable local figures, including fellow 100th Infantry Battalion veteran and U.S. Senator Spark Matsunaga. Born on October 3, 1917 to immigrants from Okinawa, Tamashiro had fond memories of his hometown, recalling his father’s tailor shop across from where the Watase Hotel once stood.

When Tamashiro was about eight years old, his father moved the family uphill to ʻEleʻele and opened a new tailor shop there.

As a student at Kauaʻi High School, Tamashiro showed early promise as a writer. He took a journalism class and wrote for “The Garden Island” newspaper, though college was financially out of reach. “My father was a poor country tailor,” he later recalled. “He had no money. He couldn’t finance me through school.” By his own admission, he also lacked the ambition at the time to work his way through college.

Instead, as war loomed over the world, Tamashiro made a decision that would shape the rest of his life. When the first peacetime draft in the U.S. was instituted in December 1940, he volunteered for the Army before he could be drafted and was inducted on December 10, 1940. Years later, he candidly explained his reasoning with characteristic honesty and humor: “I didn’t volunteer out of any high falutin’ thing like love of country; I just wanted to get out of the place, try something new. It was only one year.”

After basic training at Schofield Barracks on Oʻahu, Tamashiro — who had joined the Army hoping “to see the world” — was instead sent back to Kauaʻi and assigned to the 299th National Guard unit headquarters at the Hanapēpē Armory. He worked as a company clerk, counting down the days until his scheduled discharge on December 10, 1941. As the date approached, he prepared discharge paperwork for fellow soldiers set to leave the Army.

But then came December 7.

In the days leading up to the Pearl Harbor attack, Tamashiro had been typing discharge papers for the men in his company. That day instantly rendered them useless. “I took the whole batch of discharge papers and threw them into the basket,” he later recalled. “Nobody told me to do it; I just threw them away.”

Service in 100th Infantry Battalion

In the chaotic hours after the Pearl Harbor attack, Tamashiro’s unit was ordered to secure Burns Field, a small air field near Port Allen in Hanapēpē, by blocking the runway with 55-gallon oil drums to prevent enemy aircraft from landing. Later that day, after an American pilot radioed a distress call while pursuing a Japanese aircraft, the soldiers rushed to clear the runway so the damaged plane could land safely. It was the only direct action Tamashiro saw that day, but the war had irrevocably changed the course of his life.

Eventually he became a member of the 100th Infantry Battalion (Separate), rising to the rank of sergeant. As a member of the first segregated unit composed primarily of American soldiers of Japanese ancestry (AJA), he fought through some of the fiercest campaigns in Europe.

Tamashiro later described his September 1943 landing experience at Salerno, Italy. The Navy man handling the landing craft made several attempts to get over a sandbar blocking the way, backing off and gunning it forward each time. After the third unsuccessful try, he lowered the ramp, and Major James Lovell was the first off, with Tamashiro right behind him. At 5 ft. 2 in. and weighed down by his full field pack and other gear, he immediately sank beneath the water. But buoyed by his pack, he rose back to the surface, gasping for air, and managed to paddle forward until his feet touched bottom. Reflecting on the moment years later, he remarked, “Such was my introduction to sunny Italy.”

Tamashiro was wounded twice in combat — first in the leg just two months after entering battle, and later during the brutal fighting around Cassino, where a shrapnel wound to his arm severed the nerves in his right hand. The injury kept him hospitalized for months and ultimately prevented him from returning to the front lines. Two days after he shipped out to return to the United States, the invasion of France began.

Life After the War

After the war, Tamashiro returned home and soon met Gloria Wong while job-hunting at Fort Shafter. Gloria worked there as a supply clerk in the ordnance department. They dated “for a respectable year or so,” as Gloria later put it, and married in 1947.

Together they built a life centered on family, public service, and community. Between military and federal civilian service, the couple accumulated nearly 70 years of federal service. Ben eventually retired as administrative officer for the Directorate of Support Services, overseeing Army supply services throughout Hawaiʻi.

The couple raised five daughters — Regina, Brenda, Vanessa, Jenny, and Celia — and later delighted in becoming grandparents. Their playful banter became legendary among friends and family.

Later in life, Tamashiro unexpectedly discovered another talent: acting. In 1985, director Dando Kleuver cast Tamashiro in the play “Life of the Land” after seeking an authentic older local man for the production. Recommended by former Mānoa Valley Church Sunday School student Karen Yamamoto, Tamashiro agreed to audition despite having no acting experience. It was another example of the openness that defined his life — a willingness to try something new, whether entering the Army as a teenager, writing about his wartime memories decades later, or stepping onto the stage for the first time in his senior years.

Tamashiro had never acted before and asked Gloria to come along for support. She teased him good-naturedly but went with him, and to their surprise, both were handed scripts. After the reading, the director announced, “Okay, you’re it.” Gloria had been cast as well.

The experience opened an entirely new chapter in their lives. Additional plays followed, and the Tamashiros quickly became beloved members of Hawaiʻi’s local theater community. Most of their fellow actors were young enough to be their children. Encouraged by their younger castmates, they even signed with talent agent Kathy Muller and joined the Screen Actors Guild.

Their greatest public recognition came through a series of enormously popular commercials for the Bank of Hawaii. Beginning in 1986, Ben and Gloria became known statewide as “Harry” and “Myra,” the lovable husband-and-wife pair featured in the bank’s television advertisements. The commercials were written specifically around their real-life chemistry and decades-long marriage.

The couple embraced the work with humor and enthusiasm. One commercial required Ben to repeatedly climb in and out of a small bathtub for hours during filming. Another production flew the pair and a film crew to Las Vegas for an overnight shoot promoting the bank’s ATM card services. Filming began at six in the evening and continued until nearly dawn, but the Tamashiros handled the exhausting schedule cheerfully.

Although fame arrived unexpectedly, the Tamashiros remained deeply grounded. Though Hawaiʻi came to know them through nearly 50 Bank of Hawaii commercials from the mid-1980s to early 1990s, the couple themselves never lost sight of who they truly were. After decades of marriage, public recognition, and newfound celebrity, Gloria explained it simply: “We don’t feel like we’re high makamaka. We’re still Ben and Gloria.”

Yet public recognition became impossible to avoid. People regularly stopped them in stores, restaurants, and parking lots. Mechanics at a local dealership once halted work entirely to shout greetings of “Eh, Harry!” across the service garage. When one mechanic jokingly warned him not to listen to “that woman,” Ben shot back instantly, “I can’t help it — she’s my wife,” sending the entire shop roaring with laughter.

For the Tamashiros, acting became more than entertainment. It marked a joyful second chapter after retirement. Yet even amid their television fame, both remained deeply committed to service and community work. Longtime members of Mānoa Valley Church, which they helped build, they supported numerous charitable projects.

Tamashiro volunteered as a driver for the church’s Meals-on-Wheels program for 17 years, delivering meals to homebound seniors. He also helped install more than 450 “Lifeline” emergency medical alert systems in the homes of those who needed them and managed the church’s recycling efforts.

Gloria transformed the family garage into a sewing room, where she made quilts, aprons, house slippers, and children’s clothing for craft fairs and donations to the Kuakini Medical Center gift shop as part of a church project. The couple also served on the Historical Gallery committee for the Japanese Cultural Center of Hawaiʻi.

Preserving the Legacy of the 100th Infantry Battalion

After the war, Tamashiro was an active member of the 100th Infantry Battalion veterans’ organization, Club 100. A voracious reader with a wide range of interests, he regularly contributed articles to Club 100’s Puka Puka Parade newsletter and other publications, despite having no formal training in writing. Tamashiro also served as editor of the Puka Puka Parade in the 1960s.

Tamashiro rarely kept notes during the war, as Army soldiers were discouraged from carrying anything that might endanger others if it fell into enemy hands. Still, years later, he discovered that his older sister and cousin had preserved many of the letters he sent home. Though limited to observations about the weather, the cold, and the routines of life in the trenches, those letters became invaluable windows into his experiences as a Japanese American soldier fighting overseas.

Tamashiro later came to be regarded by many as an unofficial historian of the 100th Infantry Battalion. He devoted much of his later life to chronicling the stories and experiences of the 100th, drawing on his own memories as well as interviews with fellow veterans. One of his accounts, describing Christmas Eve 1943 in Italy, won first place in a “Hawaii Herald” writing contest in 1982. He recalled the freezing night, warmed only by improvised candles made from bacon lard poured into sausage cans with a piece of string for a wick. “We could hear the boom and the flashes out there. On this still night, I couldn’t sleep. Some of our boys started singing Christmas carols in the middle of the night.”

In 1985 he authored a year-long series for the “Hawaii Herald” titled “From Pearl Harbor to the Po (Valley),” documenting the experiences of AJA soldiers in the European theater. The articles were also published in the Puka Puka Parade, made available through the courtesy of the Hawaii Herald and Ben Tamashiro.

He played a key role in the publication of “Remembrances,” a book created in 1992 for the 50th anniversary of the formation of the 100th Infantry Battalion to commemorate the milestone and preserve the stories of its soldiers. The volume features articles, historical narratives, personal accounts, and photographs highlighting the battalion’s training, combat experiences in Italy and France, and postwar contributions to society. Tamashiro was a key writer for the publication, contributing the foreword and reflective pieces that helped frame the collection and preserve the legacy of the battalion’s members.

Tamashiro wrote the inscription for a World War II memorial erected in Los Angeles to honor Japanese American servicemen. After a nationwide search failed to produce an appropriate inscription, his former commanding officer, Col. Young Oak Kim — who oversaw the project — contacted Tamashiro, according to his daughter. The words he submitted were ultimately chosen, with one alteration: “internment camps” was changed to “concentration camps.”

Though he never sought credit, Tamashiro’s name is inscribed at the Go For Broke Monument in Little Tokyo, Los Angeles, dedicated in 1999, under this inscription:

“Rising to the defense of their country, by the thousands they came — these young Japanese American soldiers from Hawaii, the states, America’s concentration camps — to fight in Europe and the Pacific during World War II. Looked upon with suspicion, set apart and deprived of their constitutional rights, they nevertheless remained steadfast and served with indomitable spirit and uncommon valor, for theirs was a fight to prove loyalty. This legacy will serve as a sobering reminder that never again shall any group be denied liberty and the rights of citizenship.”

Through his writing, storytelling, humor, quiet authenticity, and lifelong service to his community and country, Ben Tamashiro preserved the experiences of Hawaiʻi’s AJA World War II generation while remaining, at heart, the same grounded local boy from Hanapēpē who never forgot where he came from.

Hawaii Herald Articles by Ben Tamashiro