Rearview Mirror: Times Supermarket created to honor dead brother’s dream

In July, I mentioned Albert and Wallace Teruya left Kewalo Inn to start Times Grill cafe, and then Times Supermarket. Two weeks later, I found out why they switched from restaurants to markets. I don’t know anyone else who’s ever done that.

It was due to World War II and it’s an interesting story. I also found more information on the captured Japanese officer who was allowed to marry an Okinawan nurse. So that’s what I decided to write about today, the seventh in my series celebrating the 75th anniversary of the end of the war.

Times Supermarket

The Teruyas’ parents migrated from Okinawa about 1900 to the Honomu Plantation on the Big Island. By the 1930s, sons Albert and Wallace had moved to Oahu and worked at the Kewalo Inn.

They opened Times Grill in 1939, choosing the name because it would be easy to understand and pronounce by immigrants. They also said the name would symbolize the company’s progressive image.

Albert and Wallace Teruya had a brother, Herman, who planned to go into the grocery business.

Herman wanted to own a grocery store, the brothers said. When WWII broke out, he went to the mainland for training as a combat infantryman. He spent his free time looking at grocery stores and wholesale warehouses.

Herman was part of the famed 100th Infantry Battalion. Unfortunately, he died in one of the fiercest battles of the Italian campaign.

His brothers, Albert and Wallace, were then operating the Times Grill (where the Columbia Inn was, at the top of Kapiolani Boulevard).

They decided to go into the grocery business as a living memorial to their brother. The first store was in 1949 at 1772 S. King St., in McCully. It had only 6,000 square feet.

“He gave his life,” said big brother Albert. “The least we can do is make his dreams come true.”

Times became the third-largest grocery chain in the islands, behind Foodland and Safeway. In 2002, they sold their stores to a California company.

Albert died in 2002 and Wallace three years later.

The strangest wedding that ever took place

In last Friday’s Rearview Mirror, I wrote about a World War II marriage between a captured Japanese officer and an Okinawan nurse. Paul Tognetti, who told the story, said the person who OK’d the wedding was “Gen. Hodges.”

My editor, Dave Segal, wanted to put Hodge’s first name in the article. Tognetti’s interview didn’t disclose it.

I spent about an hour looking into it. Multiple searches came up blank. Finally I searched for the unit — 10th Army, XXIV corps — and found it. He was Lt. General John Reed Hodge. No “s.”

Tognetti’s story was that the captured Japanese officer agreed to tell the Americans everything he knew, IF he was allowed to marry.

In looking into the general who gave the wedding a green light, I found some interesting details I had not seen before.

Honolulu Advertiser writer Ray Coll Jr., who penned the “Inside Merchant Street” column on banking, farming and plantations, wrote about it in 1946.

“I shall always remember Gen. Hodge, however, as the man who staged the wedding of the captured Japanese officer and his Okinawan girlfriend after they had been captured together in a cave,” Coll wrote.

“It is probably the strangest wedding that ever took place.” The enemy officer was renouncing his emperor and his country for the woman he loved.

“Gen. Hodge agreed to give his amorosa a wedding with trimmings in exchange for what the Japanese officer could divulge.”

The wedding was to take place the following afternoon in a pine grove just behind Gen. Hodge’s quarters, the ‘invitations’ to correspondents and photographers read.

“Less than a mile away, Americans and Japanese were engaged in a terrific artillery duel, and three miles beyond were the front lines.”

The night before, several GIs found the entrance to a Shinto temple somewhere on the island, and hauled it to the wedding site.

“It was under this arch that the couple were to stand while being married. A Mormon chaplain was to read the marriage lines.

“At the appointed hour, a detail of 6-foot MPs, clad in white helmets and carrying sawed-off shotguns, formed a pathway for the wedding party.

“An AJA interpreter acted as best man while Doris Ishikawa of Maui, who was a refugee on Okinawa, was bridesmaid.

“The bride managed to find a kimono in which to be wed. A GI played the wedding march on an accordion.”

With the newspaper correspondents banked on one side and Gen. Hodge and his staff on the other, and the shotgun-bearing MPs providing further background, “the wedding went off without a hitch, except that, the best man forgot to give the groom the ring at the last minute, and Doris broke into unrestrained giggling over this faux pas.”

The photographers were barred from taking pictures of the Americans extending their best wishes to the couple.

“One photographer tried to get the officer to kiss his bride, something unheard of among Japanese.

“When it was all over the MPs escorted the newlyweds back to their ‘honeymoon tent’ and one was ordered posted outside all night, probably the toughest assignment ever given an MP.

“Pictures of the wedding were later dropped behind the enemy lines on Okinawa to demonstrate how well-treated prisoners were, and inviting others to follow suit.

“One enemy warrant officer surrendered, but he didn’t bring a gal friend,” Coll’s article continued. Maybe he thought the Americans would provide one!

Tognetti said the newly wed officer did cooperate and his information saved thousands of American lives. After that, the newlyweds passed into obscurity.

The Geneva Accords prohibited publicizing POWs’ names, so we may never know the rest of the story.

A Maui girl in an Okinawan cave?

But I wasn’t done. What was a Maui girl doing in an Okinawan cave in 1945? I found a reporter who had interviewed her.

“I went to Keahua school on Maui until I was 18,” Doris Ishikawa told him. “Then my mother and I went to Okinawa in 1940 to take care of a sick sister.” Mother and sister were both named Mitsue.

The sister was left behind years earlier to care for her aged great-grandmother, when Doris’ mother left to join her husband, Kama Ishikawa, on Maui. Kama immigrated to Paia, Maui, about 1900.

“The war started before we could return. We lived at Awashi village and worked a little family farm.”

Doris said she went into a cave when U.S. planes struck the village and stayed there until Americans found her, a week later.

Her brothers, Taro and Stanley Ishikawa, who worked for the Maui Agricultural Co., were relieved to hear that their mother and sister were safe. They had not heard from them in three years.

Doris was immediately pressed into service to help the army convince Okinawa families that it was safe for them to come out of the caves in which they have been hiding, then she and her mother returned to Hawaii.

Years ago, someone told me a similar story. A Hawaii soldier investigated an Okinawan cave in 1945. Inside was a Hawaii woman he recognized. He blurted out her name and she his. It was the last place one would expect to run into someone they knew.

I don’t know if the name he blurted out was “Doris.” Do any readers know more about this?

The Rearview Mirror Insider is Bob Sigall’s now twice-weekly free email newsletter that gives readers behind-the-scenes background, stories that wouldn’t fit in the column, and lots of interesting details. Join and be an Insider at RearviewMirrorInsider.com. Mahalo!