Birth in internment camp didn’t embitter Las Vegan

Thursday, July 18, 2002 | 8:30 a.m.

Roy Morihiko Shioji decided early on not to let anger poison his soul or stifle his dreams.

He had a right to be bitter. He was born in a World War II Japanese-American internment camp, and his family lost all of their possessions while they were locked up. When he was 8, his 47-year-old father died of a heart attack.

If anything, Shioji remained determinedly optimistic throughout his life, from his childhood, when his mother supported the family by working in a cannery in Long Beach, Calif., to his battle with esophagus cancer, which took his life last week.

"He appreciated everything he earned in life," his wife, Marion, said.

Shioji, who was born in the Manzanar Camp outside of Independence, Calif., near Death Valley, died last Wednesday of cancer at Nathan Adelson Hospice. He was 58.

A man who enjoyed the simplicities of life, Shioji used his $20,000 U.S. government-issued internment camp settlement check to pay bills and buy a van.

Shioji's deliberately positive attitude was typical among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent -- two-thirds of them U.S. citizens -- who lived in internment camps, says Bill Michael, director of the Eastern California Museum, which features an exhibit of the Manzanar Camp.

"Lots of people at Manzanar and the other camps had a great motivation to succeed as Americans," said Michael, who has studied the plight of Japanese-Americans during World War II.

"Many who had lost their homes and property were ambitious to not only be successful but also achieve a status as good U.S. citizens -- something that had been denied them in the camps."

Marion agreed, noting that Roy's brother, Walter Shioji, who lives in Long Beach, became a successful stockbroker, and his late sister June had a career as a Las Vegas showgirl.

Born July 8, 1944, Shioji was the youngest of the three children of Japanese-born Otoichi and Rose Shioji. They had immigrated to San Francisco, where Otoichi owned and operated a fishing fleet.

At the start of World War II the family was rounded up as part of a program to isolate Japanese on the West Coast, presumably for their protection. Michael said the real reason was to prevent any possibility of them contacting the Japanese with vital war information.

"Yes, they were fed, clothed and sheltered, but they were watched by guards with guns, and those guns were pointed in on them," Michael said.

The Shioji family was relocated to Long Beach on Oct. 16, 1945, a week after Otoichi's 40th birthday, according to camp records. They found that their home, business and all other possessions were gone. Otoichi died in 1952.

Roy Shioji attended Long Beach Polytechnic High School, where he excelled at the high hurdles and played football. After graduating from high school he enlisted in the Army, where he served from 1962 to 1965.

Shioji graduated from Cal State Domingo Hills in 1967 with a degree in sociology and that year became a mail carrier in Long Beach. In the early 1970s he met Marion during a beach volleyball game, and they married.

His experience gave him a different outlook on current events, Marion said.

"Although he never got angry at anything, he would say after reading stories of racial profiling of blacks and, more recently, Arabs in America that perhaps little was learned from the internment of his people."

Shioji came to Las Vegas eight years ago, where he worked as a flat sorter at the main post office on Sunset Road.

Co-workers remembered a man who always smiled.

"Roy's attitude was always so upbeat," said fellow flat sorter Lori Puttock. "Even when he talked about his life after the internment camp, he was not bitter."

In addition to his wife and brother, Shioji is survived by three daughters, Kiyomi Favalora and Debby Moltzan of Las Vegas and Carolyn Courtney of Riverside, Calif.; and three grandchildren.

Services with full military honors were Monday at Palm Mortuary-Eastern.