Kiyoshi Jimmie Shiramizu

Mel immediately ordered the book and read with a sense of wonder and excitement the descriptions of his father. Chaplain Yost had never forgotten his friend Jimmie. He wrote of them going to Naples on leave in December 1943 and attending an opera. When Mel told Sumi that his father had gone to an opera, she was astonished. The person that she remembered had no such interests. “We just thought he was someone who was interested in having a good time. But we realize now that he was so young when he left, we didn’t really know him.” Yost wrote that Shiramizu “… was married and thought the world of his wife and little son. He was a gentleman in speech and conduct … from the mainland, one of the few kotonks in the battalion, and therefore like me.” In his memoir, Yost also wrote of his friend’s death – that although he had been severely wounded, Jimmie said to take others first because he was a medic and could handle his condition.

Wanting to know more, Mel wrote to the 100th Infantry Battalion veterans club in Honolulu and asked if any veterans remembered his father. His letter was included in the monthly newsletter, the Puka Puka Parade. After getting a positive response, he traveled to Honolulu and met some veterans who had known his father. He attended a club banquet and was struck by the kindness of the veterans’ families. Particularly significant to him was that veterans and their sons and daughters accepted and befriended him. Mel also attended a reunion of veterans in Las Vegas where he met a researcher who later found an article in a Posten camp newsletter about Jimmie Shiramizu’s visit to see his baby son and wife before he was shipped to Europe.

“I was pleased to know that my father was highly regarded,” says Mel. Some of the emptiness he has felt in his life has now been filled with pride. He feels a sense of belonging to an ohana (a large Hawaiian family) he never knew he had. “Isn’t this like a novel?” says Sumi. “I have never seen Mel so happy.”

When his mother Ruth was recently moved to a care home, Sumi came across some letters that Mel’s father had written during the war, letters Ruth had never mentioned. “I didn’t read them. I gave them to Mel. I said, “These letters are yours because they belonged to your father.”

-by Mike Markrich

Michael Markrich is a Honolulu-based researcher, writer and editor. He and Monica Yost, eldest daughter of the 100th Infantry Battalion’s wartime chaplain, Israel Yost, co-edited her father’s memoirs, which were published in 2006 by the University of Hawaii Press as “Combat Chaplain: The Personal Story of the World War II Chaplain of the Japanese American 100th Battalion.”

Ruth passed away in May 2012. On June 10, Mel and Sumi flew to San Franciso. The next day they took Ruth’s ashes to the Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California to be buried with the remains of her husband Kiyoshi. She had been a widow for 68 years. Mel passed away in January 2020.