My late uncle
Jan. 1st, 2026 11:47 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shivverWhile I'm actually sitting here at my desk posting stuff, I might as well write a post here that I've been meaning to do. My uncle -- the last of my mother's family -- died last month, and while I really didn't know him well, I wanted to jot down a few interesting things about him.
Here are a few thoughts and memories about my uncle, Yoshikiyo Nishizaki, October 11, 1916 - November 15, 2025.
Yes, you read that right. He was 109 years, 35 days old. I found that there's a "supercentarian" wiki on fandom.com that lists people that are or were over 100 years old, and he was the second oldest person ever from Hawaii. (Caveat: I'm not entirely sure how they define where someone is from. At least in the list shown, he was the oldest person born in Hawaii. Other people in the list were born elsewhere and died in Hawaii, which kind of implies that if you, say, were born in Maine and lived most of your life in Illinois but traveled to Hawaii and died there, you'd be listed as being "from Hawaii".)
I really didn't know my Uncle Nish (what we usually called him; no idea why we didn't use his first name, same for his wife (Auntie Nish) or my mom's sister (Auntie Iwasa) but not her husband (Uncle Walter); names in my mom's family were complicated) very well. You see, I was the very youngest of my generation, so much so that at the moment, I'm only a little over half of his age, and by the time I was born, his two sons were already in college or past that and married. Thus, as I was growing up, we rarely interacted, as my parents tended more toward going over to the relatives that still had children in the house. I only remember the Nishizakis as ones who would send socks as Christmas presents.
I got to interact with him a bit more when I was in college because by that time, my parents, who were very into University of Hawaii athletics, started getting season tickets to the football and baseball games and would invite Uncle Nish along because he was a big baseball fan. (If I remember correctly, also, Auntie Nish died while I was in college, so inviting Uncle to the baseball games was my mom's way of helping him through that.) I found Uncle to be soft-spoken but very intelligent, with a subtle sense of humor.
He was also very healthy. He would always outpace us when walking from the parking structure to the baseball stadium in UH's athletic complex. I mean, I was never athletic, but I was in my early 20s and this 70-year-old guy was leaving me in the dust!
I attended his 100th birthday party, back in 2016, and he was as sharp as ever. At the time, he still lived in his house (he lived there until he died, though in the last couple of years needed 24/7 in-home care) and drove himself everywhere. He'd had a second house built on his property for his son Paul's family, and Paul still lived there and could render assistance if needed, but for the most part, Uncle Nish was still independent at 100.
Most of what I know about his life is pieced together from various sources, like my mom and my sister, so this may not be entirely true, but it should be for the most part.
Uncle Nish was born in Hawaii, so yes, he was an American citizen, even though Hawaii wasn't yet a state (not for another 42 years). His mother, my Bachan (that's the familiar form of the Japanese word for "grandmother") was from Japan and had moved to Hawaii with her husband, but he died shortly after Uncle Nish was born. My understanding is that Bachan went back to Japan with her infant son for some amount of time but returned to Hawaii, and ended up living in a community of mostly Japanese immigrants -- thus, Uncle Nish's first language was Japanese, though he spoke English fluently as well.
Then, Bachan was told by the relatives that it "wasn't proper" for a woman to live without a husband (or possibly to raise a son without a father), so she was forced to remarry. She wasn't particularly happy about it (my sister points out that she looks rather aggravated in the wedding photo) but she did it, and they went on to have four children, the second of which was my mother. As I noted before, they lived in a primarily Japanese area in Hawaii, so the children all spoke Japanese first and then learned English when they started school (though all of them shed theirJapanese accents, unlike Uncle Nish).
Uncle Nish was already an adult when Pearl Harbor happened (my mom was a senior in high school at the time -- and that's another interesting story). I'm not sure what he was doing at the time (In college? Working?), but I believe he enlisted (I don't think he was drafted) in the U.S. Army, and my mom said that he worked on translating Japanese comms and teaching Japanese language to soldiers in the Pacific theater. After that, well, I'm not really sure. My mom said once that he worked as a carpenter, but I don't know if that's true or what that really means.
Here's the one lovely story about him that I always tell. His son Ernie was the general manager of the Sheraton resort on Kaua'i, which meant that he lived in a house provided for him by the company on the resort grounds. (This also meant that when we had a family reunion on Kaua'i, we all got to stay at the resort for free!) Ernie often had his dad come stay with his family at the house.
One day, Ernie was checking up on the current Japanese tour group that was staying at the resort. One of the tourists was gushing about how lovely it was, and he said it was wonderful that hotel employed bellhops that spoke Japanese. Ernie was puzzled because none of the bellhops spoke Japanese. It turned out that his dad loved meeting people and hearing their stories, so he was going down to the resort entrance to meet the Japanese tour buses as they arrived, and well, might as well help them with their bags as they talked. Ernie told his dad to stop doing that, that he can't have his dad, who's not his employee, meeting the buses and serving the customers, and his dad said, sure, he'd stop, but he never did. :)
So, yeah, that's it. Love you, Uncle Nish.
Here are a few thoughts and memories about my uncle, Yoshikiyo Nishizaki, October 11, 1916 - November 15, 2025.
Yes, you read that right. He was 109 years, 35 days old. I found that there's a "supercentarian" wiki on fandom.com that lists people that are or were over 100 years old, and he was the second oldest person ever from Hawaii. (Caveat: I'm not entirely sure how they define where someone is from. At least in the list shown, he was the oldest person born in Hawaii. Other people in the list were born elsewhere and died in Hawaii, which kind of implies that if you, say, were born in Maine and lived most of your life in Illinois but traveled to Hawaii and died there, you'd be listed as being "from Hawaii".)
I really didn't know my Uncle Nish (what we usually called him; no idea why we didn't use his first name, same for his wife (Auntie Nish) or my mom's sister (Auntie Iwasa) but not her husband (Uncle Walter); names in my mom's family were complicated) very well. You see, I was the very youngest of my generation, so much so that at the moment, I'm only a little over half of his age, and by the time I was born, his two sons were already in college or past that and married. Thus, as I was growing up, we rarely interacted, as my parents tended more toward going over to the relatives that still had children in the house. I only remember the Nishizakis as ones who would send socks as Christmas presents.
I got to interact with him a bit more when I was in college because by that time, my parents, who were very into University of Hawaii athletics, started getting season tickets to the football and baseball games and would invite Uncle Nish along because he was a big baseball fan. (If I remember correctly, also, Auntie Nish died while I was in college, so inviting Uncle to the baseball games was my mom's way of helping him through that.) I found Uncle to be soft-spoken but very intelligent, with a subtle sense of humor.
He was also very healthy. He would always outpace us when walking from the parking structure to the baseball stadium in UH's athletic complex. I mean, I was never athletic, but I was in my early 20s and this 70-year-old guy was leaving me in the dust!
I attended his 100th birthday party, back in 2016, and he was as sharp as ever. At the time, he still lived in his house (he lived there until he died, though in the last couple of years needed 24/7 in-home care) and drove himself everywhere. He'd had a second house built on his property for his son Paul's family, and Paul still lived there and could render assistance if needed, but for the most part, Uncle Nish was still independent at 100.
Most of what I know about his life is pieced together from various sources, like my mom and my sister, so this may not be entirely true, but it should be for the most part.
Uncle Nish was born in Hawaii, so yes, he was an American citizen, even though Hawaii wasn't yet a state (not for another 42 years). His mother, my Bachan (that's the familiar form of the Japanese word for "grandmother") was from Japan and had moved to Hawaii with her husband, but he died shortly after Uncle Nish was born. My understanding is that Bachan went back to Japan with her infant son for some amount of time but returned to Hawaii, and ended up living in a community of mostly Japanese immigrants -- thus, Uncle Nish's first language was Japanese, though he spoke English fluently as well.
Then, Bachan was told by the relatives that it "wasn't proper" for a woman to live without a husband (or possibly to raise a son without a father), so she was forced to remarry. She wasn't particularly happy about it (my sister points out that she looks rather aggravated in the wedding photo) but she did it, and they went on to have four children, the second of which was my mother. As I noted before, they lived in a primarily Japanese area in Hawaii, so the children all spoke Japanese first and then learned English when they started school (though all of them shed theirJapanese accents, unlike Uncle Nish).
Uncle Nish was already an adult when Pearl Harbor happened (my mom was a senior in high school at the time -- and that's another interesting story). I'm not sure what he was doing at the time (In college? Working?), but I believe he enlisted (I don't think he was drafted) in the U.S. Army, and my mom said that he worked on translating Japanese comms and teaching Japanese language to soldiers in the Pacific theater. After that, well, I'm not really sure. My mom said once that he worked as a carpenter, but I don't know if that's true or what that really means.
Here's the one lovely story about him that I always tell. His son Ernie was the general manager of the Sheraton resort on Kaua'i, which meant that he lived in a house provided for him by the company on the resort grounds. (This also meant that when we had a family reunion on Kaua'i, we all got to stay at the resort for free!) Ernie often had his dad come stay with his family at the house.
One day, Ernie was checking up on the current Japanese tour group that was staying at the resort. One of the tourists was gushing about how lovely it was, and he said it was wonderful that hotel employed bellhops that spoke Japanese. Ernie was puzzled because none of the bellhops spoke Japanese. It turned out that his dad loved meeting people and hearing their stories, so he was going down to the resort entrance to meet the Japanese tour buses as they arrived, and well, might as well help them with their bags as they talked. Ernie told his dad to stop doing that, that he can't have his dad, who's not his employee, meeting the buses and serving the customers, and his dad said, sure, he'd stop, but he never did. :)
So, yeah, that's it. Love you, Uncle Nish.
