This is the final instalment of my series of articles on the remarkable Tashiro family. Today I will speak about Kazuo and Mitsuko Tashiro, who stemmed from the Cincinnati branch of the family. Like their father Shiro and their elder brother Kiyo, Kazuo and Mitsuko both studied medicine, and distinguished themselves as physicians.
The elder of the two, Kazuo Tashiro, was born in Chicago, Illinois on November 12, 1918. As a small child, he moved to Cincinnati, where he attended the Clifton School. After he participated in a children’s book festival at the school, his photo in costume garb was featured in the local Cincinnati Post.
He subsequently attended Hughes High School and University of Cincinnati, where he received a BA in 1940. He then enrolled in a joint graduate school/medical school program at Cincinnati. During this time, he was elected to university’s branch of the Sigma Xi science fraternity (which his father Shiro Tashiro had once headed).
In 1943 he was named the school’s Iglauer fellow in biochemistry. In 1944, Kazuo Tashiro received his MD degree (his brother Kiyo Tashiro graduated the same year, leading to media coverage of the brothers). Kazuo then served as an intern at the Cincinnati General Hospital. After his internship, Kazuo was board certified as a doctor in 1945.
In early 1946, shortly after he received his physician’s license, Tashiro moved to Akron, Ohio, where he was engaged as a resident at St. Thomas Hospital. While in Akron, he met a young woman, Inis Ruth Dalton. The two soon married and started a family—they would eventually have nine children.
However, the next year Tashiro ran headlong into prejudice. Intending to start a private practice, he found a vacated doctor’s office in Akron’s North Hill neighborhood. He paid the rent and deposit, and started buying equipment. However, as he prepared to move into the office, his landlord refused to allow it. Stating that he had changed his mind about renting to a Japanese American tenant, the landlord claimed (dubiously) that other tenants had expressed resentment over the rental. Tashiro begged the landlord to reconsider, but even after he checked with other tenants and received no expressions of opposition, the landlord refused to relent.
Journalist Helen Waterhouse ran a story in the local Akron Beacon Journal, protesting the injustice. The Journal ran an editorial the same day, “Who is the American?” which regretted the “shocking rebuff” experienced by the young doctor on the basis of his ancestry.
“If the young doctor’s name were Smith or Schmidt, and his father had come from England or from Germany, we are sure that there would not be a moment’s hesitancy on the part of anyone about accepting him…His rights under the Constitution are the same as those of any citizen whose ancestors came on the Mayflower. He deserves to be judged on his own merits as a person and as a doctor.”
The editorial concluded that the landlord had misjudged local attitudes, and if the landlord did not change his mind, there would be others who would be glad to rent to Tashiro.
In the end, Tashiro was recruited to set up a general practice in the outlying village of Mogadore, Ohio. He moved his family there and bought a house. (The house was later featured in local newspapers when Tahiro found a hundred abandoned clay pipes produced at a long-closed factory buried in his yard and donated them to an elderly woman smoker).
After several years in Mogodore, Tashiro entered military service. According to his son Jayshiro Tashiro, he had not been permitted to fight in World War II. However, he was included as part of a physicians’ draft during the Korean War, and enlisted as a Captain in the Air Force. After the war ended in 1953, Dr. Tashiro remained in Korea for a time and became heavily involved in helping Koreans in difficulty. He offered medical assistance to needy individuals and contacted churches in the U.S. to send care packages to “leper colonies” of Hansen’s Disease patients. With the support of his wife, Tashiro organized clothing drives for Korean orphanages.
After serving for two years in Korea, Tashiro returned to his practice in Mogodore. (He applied for a medical license in Hurley, Wisconsin as well, but his motives and the result are not clear.). In addition to his practice, he coached Little League Baseball, gave talks on health education at the local YMCA, and served on local Board of Education. Onetime town mayor Okey Nestor later lauded Tashiro’s contributions.
“He’d go out on a call without any hesitation and at any time of the night. And he’s helped people whom he knew would never be able to pay him. He took a personal interest. He’s a wonderful doctor.”
In 1962, Tashiro left Mogodore and moved to Cincinnati. There he returned to school to specialize in Radiology, taking up work as a Radiology resident and instructor of Radiology at University of Cincinnati.
In 1966, Tashiro took up a private radiology practice in Marion, Ohio, where he served for 12 years. As in Mogodore, he supplemented his practice by lecturing to local groups, and was active in sports. In 1980, he moved to Tucson, Arizona, and practiced there and in Douglas, Arizona. Following his retirement in 1993, Tashiro moved to Hawaii. He died in Marietta, Georgia, on January 11, 2008.
What led Tashiro to be so strong a humanitarian? “He grew up in a time when there was a lot of prejudice in the United States,” said his son Jayshiro Tashiro. “It shaped him into a giving person rather than a taking person…He taught me compassion and a dedication to learning.”
Kazuo’s sister Mitsuko Tashiro was born July 17, 1920 in Cincinnati. She attended Hughes High School, where she became noted for her participation in community activities, In 1934, she appeared at a local Red Cross event, where she presented a tableau showing the work of the Red Cross.
In 1936, during the visit to Cincinnati of the celebrated evangelist and peace advocate Toyohiko Kagawa (with whom her cousin Aiko Tashiro had worked in Japan), Mitsuko participated in a ceremony at Christ Church. Donning a kimono and speaking as a representative of Japan, she offered a goodwill gift of a Japanese shuttlecock game to a white American girl, all in the presence of Kagawa. The gift was immortalized by a photo that appeared in the pages of the Cincinnati Enquirer newspaper.
The following year, as a member Girl Reserve Club of the YWCA, Mitsuko commemorated World Fellowship Week by participating in a public ceremony (again wearing a kimono and representing Japan) to promote international understanding.
After completing her studies at Hughes, and on the eve of US entry into World War II, Mitsuko Tashiro enrolled at Goucher College, a women’s college in Baltimore. It is not clear what prompted the choice of an all-female institution, but Tashiro seems to have thrived there. In her senior year, she was elected Phi Beta Kappa at Goucher.
She meanwhile excelled in student activities. She was successively secretary and treasurer of the College Christian Association and of the College Science Club, and Sergeant-at-arms of her junior class.During her first year, she went out for the archery team, and her photo with bow and arrow was featured in the Cincinnati Post.
According to her daughter Genevieve Laforet, she was an enthusiastic dancer in these years, and even considered pursuing a career in it before a swimming accident sidelined her.
After graduating from Goucher, Tashiro enrolled in a Masters Degree program at Vassar College, another all-female institution. In addition to her studies, she served as an assistant in the Physiology department. After taking summer physics courses, in fall 1944 she enrolled at the University of Cincinnati medical school, where she received her MD in 1948 and her physician’s license the following year.
In the period after the obtained her medical degree, Mitsuko Tashiro did an internship in internal medicine at Bellevue Hospital in New York. However, her internship was cut short when she was stricken with tuberculosis, and sent to a sanitarium near Poughkeepsie in upstate New York.
According to family lore, her parents feared that Mitsuko, who had already delayed building a family to complete medical school, would be broken by her illness and would be less able to support herself. As a result, they arranged for her to inherit the family summer house in Woods Hole, Massachusetts, and her father willed to her his valuable collection of Japanese ukiyo-e woodblock prints and other artwork.
In tribute to her father and his taste, she would later donate a large assortment of Japanese prints, with works by artists such as Toyokuni Utagawa, to the John Burns Library at Boston College.
Nonetheless, Mitsuko was not destined to remain single. Even as she remained in confinement at the sanitarium, her brother Kiyo, then working as a physician at Downstate Medical Center in New York, encouraged his colleague Dr. Eugene G. Laforet, a physician and Korean War veteran, to pay her a friendly visit. He did, and a romance blossomed between the two, leading to their wedding in August 1953.
Mitsuko always claimed that getting married (her “Mrs degree”) was more vital to her than her MD degree. Some years later, she would give birth to her only child, Genevieve Laforet, who would herself become a psychiatrist with a notable career.
In the years after her marriage, Mitsuko Tashiro Laforet, as she was henceforth known, cared for her husband and daughter. Later Mitsuko’s mother Shizuka came to live with the family as well. However, intent on building her professional career outside the home, Mitsuko served as a hematologist at the Peter Bent Brigham Hospital and Children’s Hospital, Boston, and then was named a research associate in medicine at Harvard University’s medical school. In 1973, she was named principal research associate in paediatrics in Harvard’s Faculty of Medicine. Even a bout with breast cancer in the late 1970s did not stop her determination to continue her work, and she was a long-term survivor.
Although Mitsuko generally worked part time, and did not get the level of institutional support that her (male) colleagues did, she preserved with her research and developed her professional contacts, and parlayed the two into a series of collaborative papers.
First, together with E. Donnall Thomas, she published, “The Effect of Cobalt on Heme Synthesis by Bone Marrow in Vitro,” which appeared in The Journal of Biological Chemistry in 1956. In addition, Mitsuko wrote an article in partnership with her husband Eugene, on “Non-Tuberculous Cavitary Disease of the Lungs.” It appeared in the June 1957 issue of the journal Diseases of the Chest, and would be widely cited in the medical literature.
In 1961, with a set of collaborators, she published the article, “pH Dependent Hemolytic Systems. I. Their Relationship to Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria” in the journal Blood. In 1967, she was a coauthor of “Relationship of Paroxysmal Nocturnal Hemoglobinuria to Other pH-Dependent Hemolytic Systems: Role of Acetylcholinesterase” in Acta Haematologica.
Two years later, she was one of the authors of the study, “Influence of Hemoglobin Precipitation on Erythrocyte Metabolism in Alpha and Beta Thalassemia,” which appeared int he Journal of Clinical Investigation. Much later, in 1981, she was a coauthor of the article “Effect of iodinated contrast material on the determination of serum creatinine” in the journal Urologic Radiology.
After a long illness, Mitsuko Tashiro Laforet died on December 13, 2006.
© 2024 Greg Robinson
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