Telling the ‘forgotten story’

It was Hisao Uyeno’s first trip to Honolulu, a different world from the rustic sugar cane camp he lived in with his family in Piihonua near Hilo in 1941.

For some forgotten reason, his mother urged him to wait until Sunday, but the 20-year-old man was eager to go with a friend who was leaving Friday, according to brother Tsutomu Ueno (the family changed the spelling of its surname), who still lives outside of Hilo.

Ueno has often wondered whether his mother’s suggestion was an intuitive forewarning of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor that infamous Sunday, Dec. 7. He wonders whether Hisao would still be alive had he followed her advice, and says a silent prayer of remembrance every year on the date.

Ueno, who was 10 at the time, said in a recent interview that his brother and friend Toshi Mori­moto joined several amateur boxers from the Big Island who were staying at a cheap boarding house in the Kukui Street/Vineyard Boulevard section of Nuuanu. He doesn’t remember where his brother died, but newspaper and historical accounts say Uyeno was among 12 civilians killed at the Cherry Blossom Saimin Stand on Kukui Street that morning after the Japanese attack occurred. Bystanders reported several loud explosions in the area; the diner was reduced to rubble, and bodies were flung out onto the street. Three children were among the casualties.

Ueno, a retired U.S. Army major, sugar cane grower and liquor department worker, said it has long bothered him that his brother and other innocent people were killed by “friendly fire” — historic accounts say U.S. military forces fired anti-aircraft shells that exploded after they landed, not in the air as intended. One report places the Kukui Street explosion at about 9:45 a.m., but Ueno said two friends who were at the scene told him it occurred “after 11 o’clock Sunday morning.”

In the panic that followed the surprise attack, the military shot at anything that moved, including its own planes, he said.

“I honestly feel people are not aware. I sure would like people to know my brother and other civilians were killed after the (Japanese) attack.”

“I would rather have had my brother interned or die (fighting) in the war, not be killed like that,” Ueno said. “I think it would be nice to have somebody do something to get a monument so these guys are not forgotten … like they’re nothing.”

Once, years ago, he and his wife, Emiko, walked around the district where his brother was killed. Ueno thinks a marker should be erected there.

Ueno said his parents had immigrated to Hawaii from Hiroshima, but he never heard them condemn the U.S. for dropping two atomic bombs on Japan, or for the death of Hisao, the second-oldest of their six children. “They loved the United States. I never heard any word of, Why this? or, Why that? My mama became a U.S. citizen before she passed away.”

Historic records vary in the number of civilian fatalities that day — as low as 48, although the Navy counted 68 deaths. Historian Nanette Napoleon, who has researched Pearl Harbor civilian deaths for 20 years, counts 60 deaths.

Napoleon said the civilian casualties are the “forgotten story” of Pearl Harbor, and that the majority of those killed on the ground were of Japanese ethnicity.

“Every year, the Pearl Harbor anniversary comes along and we learn more about it,” she said. “But every year, until recently, the only people you ever heard about were the military casualties.”

Even local historians don’t know the civilian stories that well. “How sad,” Napoleon said, adding that she has been on a mission to raise awareness.