Paul Shoichi Hiyama

Paul Hiyama, 95, died peacefully at St. Joseph Mercy Hospital, Ann Arbor, on March 19, 2019. Born on March 9, 1924, in Mukilteo, Washington, near Seattle, Paul’s life was interrupted by World War II, as he and about 120,000 other Japanese Americans and people of Japanese descent living on the West Coast were taken into custody by the U.S. government in the spring of 1942. Paul was a high school senior in Seattle and a proud member of the Queen Anne HS varsity basketball team. He and his family were placed in the Puyallup Assembly Center, south of Seattle, where Paul received his high school diploma. They were transferred a few months later to the Minidoka internment camp in Idaho. While at Puyallup, he met Grace Hagiwara, whom he would later marry.

Paul was allowed to leave Minidoka through the efforts of the American Baptist Home Mission Society to attend a college sufficiently far from the West Coast, Kalamazoo College, in Michigan. While there, he had the distinction of being on what was identified as the shortest college basketball team in the country. In 1944, he was drafted into the U.S. Army and assigned to the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, a highly decorated combat unit made up of Japanese American men. Shortly after Paul completed basic training, the war in Europe ended, and he was not sent into combat. He remained in the Army through late 1946, serving in the Army’s Military Intelligence Service as part of the Allied occupation forces in Japan.

Paul returned to Kalamazoo College and graduated with a bachelor’s degree in sociology in June 1949. In September 1952, he and Grace Hagiwara were married in New York City, where both attended graduate school. Paul studied sociology at the New School for Social Research, while Grace studied at Teachers College, Columbia University. Soon thereafter they moved to Chicago, and in March 1956, Paul received a divinity degree from the University of Chicago. He was ordained as an Episcopal priest in December 1957.

Over the next 30 years, Paul served as the rector of St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church in Clawson, Michigan; as an assistant rector at Christ Church Grosse Pointe in Grosse Pointe Farms, Michigan; and as the rector of St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Utica, Michigan.

Paul’s interest in sociology and then the priesthood was informed in part by his first-hand observations of Hiroshima in 1946. He was also moved by his own personal experience, thinking of himself as a “marginal man,” a Japanese American born into an American society steeped in anti-Japanese feeling.

Paul took up golf in Chicago at about the time of his ordination. He believed it was a calling. Happily, he was able to play golf, and play it well (at least most of the time), until the end of the 2018 season. In his retirement with Grace, in Ann Arbor, which began in 1990, Paul was able to golf even more. He took great pleasure in golfing with his family.

He and Grace doted on their seven grandchildren. They gave him great joy. He gave them ice cream. Paul also served as a volunteer at the Breakfast Program at St. Andrew’s (Ann Arbor). And he was a member of a book club formed by his good friend and fellow golfer Coleman McGehee, a former bishop of the Episcopal Diocese of Michigan.

Paul was preceded in death by his wife, Grace, and a daughter, Suzanne Ross. Following Grace’s death in 2008, Paul took comfort in being a part of a group with others who had lost spouses at about the same time. He remained close to the group the rest of his life. Indeed, a member of the group, George Fahmie, was with Paul the night before he died.

Paul was still grieving the loss of his daughter Suzanne, who passed away just last September. Using her experience as a medical social worker and other skills, Suzanne provided exceptional care to both of her parents in their later years. Paul is survived by his two other children, their families, and Suzanne’s family: Stephen Hiyama and Sarah Zearfoss, of Ann Arbor, and their children Clare and Andrew; Karen Hiyama and Joseph Schodowski, of Huntington Woods, and their children Ella, Jackson, and Lucas; and Kevin Ross, of Ann Arbor, and Katy and Cody, the children of Suzanne and Kevin.

The visitation will be on Friday, March 29, from 5-8 pm, at the Muehlig Funeral Chapel, 403 South Fourth Avenue, Ann Arbor. The Funeral Service will take place on Saturday, March 30, at 11 am, at St. Andrew’s Episcopal Church, 306 North Division Street, Ann Arbor. A reception at the church will follow the service. A private inurnment ceremony will take place later in the week at the Washtenong Memorial Park in Ann Arbor.

Paul was deeply loved, charmed friends and strangers alike, and will be profoundly missed by all. His family requests that memorial contributions be made to the Breakfast Program at St. Andrew’s (306 North Division Street, Ann Arbor, MI 48104; [email protected]) or the Japanese American National Museum (100 North Central Avenue, Los Angeles, CA 90012; www.janm.org).