Saber awarded to ROTC sharpened with time

By William Cole
Advertiser Military Writer

The past and present sometimes have a strange way of reconnecting.

Garrett Miyamoto, left, presents his father's saber to Jeremy Wolfe, 25, a cadet lieutenant colonel with the UH Army ROTC Warrior Battalion. Lionel T. Miyamoto earned the saber while a cadet colonel with the McKinley High School Junior ROTC program in 1932. Bruce Asato • The Honolulu Advertiser

The polished chrome scabbard and blade engraved with "L.T. Miyamoto" looked brand new.

It once belonged to the family of a young Japanese American who had to quit school to help support five brothers and sisters before becoming commanding officer of the McKinley JROTC program. The saber was stolen from his home, then recovered more than a decade later.

Miyamoto told some of those gathered for the annual Governor's Day Awards Ceremony and pass-in-review that he hoped ROTC cadets could "be inspired by what one man did many years ago."

Nearly 900 cadets from 27 junior and senior ROTC programs, including UH Army and Air Force cadets, had marched in review on the stadium field earlier.

"I don't know of any school that gives out a saber for their cadet awards, so back in those days that was a very special honor," said Lt. Col. Bob Takao, who heads the UH ROTC program.

Lionel Torao Miyamoto died last month at the age of 92. His son, a 1957 graduate of UH and ROTC, decided to give the saber to the 81-year-old program, which lost a lot of memorabilia to arson during the Vietnam War and again in 1986.

Spark Matsunaga and Hiram Fong are among the graduates of the reserve officer training corps program, which is highly ranked nationally.

"We lost all that memorabilia (in the fires) — photos, albums, all that stuff," Takao said. "So it's been a goal of mine to retain the history and memory of our program by gathering history like this (saber), and placing it in our building."

Garrett Miyamoto, a board member of the UH Army ROTC Alumni Chapter, said he hoped the donation would prompt other alums to contribute keepsakes.

That he had his father's JROTC saber to give is a story in itself.

Thieves broke into the family's Honolulu home in the late 1970s and stole everything they could get their hands on — including the saber.

"We couldn't track it down. It was lost," Garrett Miyamoto said.

More than 10 years later, his father received a strange call. Someone in Kailua had gone out to dump rubbish and found the sword and scabbard on a compost heap.

"He said, 'I may have something that you may have lost,' " Miyamoto said.

The man had looked up the engraved name in the phone book.

"The thing that amazed me is it looked the way it did prior to being stolen," Miyamoto said. "Nothing was done to disfigure it."

When Lionel Miyamoto received the saber in 1932, he was one of the oldest kids in his class.

Between junior high and high school, he left school and worked for five years to help support his parents and five brothers and sisters by picking up produce and other goods on the Hilo coast and delivering it to plantation stores, his son said.

Three other siblings in the family of nine kids were on their own at the time.

In the JROTC program at McKinley, Lionel Miyamoto was selected regimental commander for the cadet corps — the highest-ranking position in the program, at a time when Japanese Americans were sometimes treated as second-class citizens.

After graduation, he set his sights on Stanford, moved to central California and worked for a summer on a farm, but was forced to return home because he didn't have money for tuition.

"It was the depression and there was no money," said Garrett Miyamoto, 66. "He could enter — he had the grades — but scholarships were very few."

Back in Hawai'i, he went into the National Guard, and when World War II broke out he sold war bonds, his son said.

Beginning shortly after graduating from McKinley, until 2000, Lionel Miyamoto was in the insurance business.

His son, a former Army officer, remembers playing swordsman and attacking boxes with the saber when he was little.

Later his father "talked about it, what's associated with it, the people he knew — but he didn't go into details as to why and how (he got it)," Garrett Miyamoto said.

On Thursday, cadet Lt. Col. Jeremy Wolfe received the Governor's Award and 1st Lt. Brian Kong Memorial Award as the top UH cadet. Army 2nd Lt. Edmund Chong was co-winner.

The award was named for Kong, an ROTC standout at UH who was killed in Vietnam in 1971.

Wolfe also accepted the donated saber on behalf of the UH program — something that could become a yearly event.

Takao said the saber not only will be displayed, he also is thinking about having it presented as an award to the cadet who best exemplifies the spirit of the Warrior Battalion at UH.

Reach William Cole at wcole@honoluluadvertiser.com or 525-5459.