Good deeds no big thing, insists this good citizen

With experience comes anticipation and with constancy, discernment.

And so even in the pre-dawn darkness, in the obscured recesses of Manoa District Park and Manoa Elementary School, Michael Shiroma knows where his civic duty lies.

With his faithful dog, Holly, at his side and pockets fat with dog waste bags ordered in bulk from Amazon, the 62-year-old retired city worker walks the grounds in advance of the arrival of schoolchildren and other users, and picks up lazily discarded cans and bottles, animal droppings and all manner of potentially hazardous detritus.

He knows the preferred hangouts where late-night partyers will likely leave bottles and the occasional needle. He’s keen to the hidden corners, beyond the sightlines of the neighboring senior housing facility, where used prophylactics are discarded. He knows where the stray homeless person will likely encamp when the city conducts periodic sweeps of areas outside the valley.

Shiroma sees his daily cleanups as nothing more than basic civic duty, the everyday responsibility of a guy taking a morning walk with his dog.

“I wouldn’t call it giving back,” Shiroma said. “It doesn’t cost me time or anything else. If I’m going to be there anyway, I’m going to do it.”

Shiroma’s ethic of personal responsibility and civic engagement was instilled in him at a young age by parents who, having toured the Pacific as part of the Military Intelligence Service after World War II, devoted five years of their lives to humanitarian work in Micronesia. It was further clarified by the urban decay he witnessed during his adolescence and young adulthood in New York — where his family had relocated so he could be educated in the state’s lauded magnet school system — in the 1960s and ’70s. And it was ultimately affirmed by his graduate studies in urban and regional planning at the University of Hawaii.

When Shiroma first returned to Hawaii at age 19, he recognized his birthplace as “like a paradise,” one that his experiences in New York taught him was a precious and fragile thing.

At UH, Shiroma took to heart two important theories: “the tragedy of the commons,” wherein people using shared resources solely for their own interest end up exhausting the resource, and the “broken window theory” as espoused by Jane Jacobs, which holds that a broken window left in disrepair serves as a signal of disorder or abandonment, thereby leading to incivility, as evidenced by rising crime.

Shiroma’s belief in the greater good was sorely tested in the late 1990s when, as a supervisor with the Department of Housing and Community Development, a job that had once empowered him to undertake significant civic projects like the Chinatown revitalization, he blew the whistle on the Ewa Villages corruption scandal involving abuse of the city’s commercial relocation fund.

Despite the personal and professional toll the scandal extracted, Shiroma continued his civic engagement in ways formal and informal, from his long history as a participant in neighborhood board meetings to those daily walks with Holly.

The walks themselves started as a way for Shiroma to impart some of his values to his two children.

“When they were little, we got a dog so that I could train them while they trained the dog,” he said. “We’d walk to the park and pick up cans to sell for pocket money.

“They disliked that immensely,” he said, laughing. “Their friends would tease them that they were poor, but they had the best bikes and skateboards, which they bought themselves.”

Shiroma continued the walks after his children were grown. He still recycles what he can, although these days he gives away his earnings, sort of as honorariums to others he sees doing positive things for the community, including a man named Keoki who keeps the area near the school’s kindergarten classroom cleanly swept, and another named Justin who picks up rubbish around the park using a trash picker. He’s also donated money to the school’s Tiger Paws program, which gives students incentives to do good deeds.

“It’s not from me,” he said. “I see it as the park’s way of thanking them. I’m just a conduit.”

Lately, Shiroma has been sharing observations and updates with the community’s Neighborhood Watch newsletter, thereby keeping residents and city officials apprised of potential hazards.

Through it all Shiroma remains stubbornly unimpressed with himself.

“I think almost every neighborhood has someone who does this unannounced, with no back-slapping necessary,” he said. “It’s just what I do. What’s the big deal?”

Reach Michael Tsai at mtsai@staradvertiser.com.