Richard and Teri Uyehara hold a model of the B-57 Canberra, the plane he was flying when it crashed in an accident on Feb. 8, 1955.
The bravest man I know.
That’s what my dad used to say of Uncle Richard — Dick Masaru Uyehara.
As a kid I never thought anything of the fact that Uncle Richard didn’t have legs. Before they moved from Gardena to Colorado, my cousin Carl and I would play and he’d toss us around. He’d jump in and out of his wheelchair and when we were going someplace he would put on his prosthetic legs and just go.
I never asked about his time as a bombardier or the accident that left him a paraplegic when he was just 23 years old until we were able to go visit Richard and Aunt Teri at their home in Grand Junction last September.
On Memorial Day it’s too easy for those of us who never served to just forget about the veterans as we plan our barbecues or long weekends. This year was the first in a long time that I didn’t make it to a Memorial Day event — in our case, Eric and I took a trip to meet up with some cousins in Las Vegas.
But for those like Uncle Richard, their lives are inexorably shaped by the scars and wounds suffered when they were young men. What has always amazed me about Richard and Teri was how the accident wasn’t the end of their story, but rather a beginning, a true story of resilience, love, family and gaman tsuyoi. I can’t think of two people I love or admire more.
During World War II, Richard’s family were among the few Japanese Americans who voluntarily evacuated in March 1942. It was a fraction of the 120,000+ Japanese Americans who were on the West Coast at the time. According to Densho, 5,000 left in this way, including 1,963 in Colorado. Richard was among them.
As difficult as camp was, the lives of those who stayed out of camp was isolating and brutal. He would sometimes mention his sense that the hardships of voluntary evacuees have been largely untold and ignored in the narrative of what happened to Japanese Americans during the war. I think that experience as a child gave Richard his independent, iconoclastic streak.
In an interview on the Discover Nikkei website, he shared about the beatings he experienced as a young student at the hands of white students whose relatives were wounded or killed in the Pacific.
“The camp group felt the loneliness forced upon them by E.O. 9066. We 6,000 have felt the added loneliness of a sort of exclusion by internees as well as feeling the wrath and the anger of the whites while outside,” he said.
In 1947 the family returned to Southern California, where Richard went to Compton Junior College, earning a degree in pre-dentistry. But as war broke out on the Korean Peninsula he enlisted in the Air Force. He got engaged to Teri before shipping out. As a bombardier, he flew 18 bombing missions from the spring of 1953 until the end of the Korean War on July 27, 1953.
Flying low at night in the mountains of North Korea, they would drop bombs on targets, finding railway lines by the glint of metal in the darkened countryside.
The human toll of such destruction is something that vets like Richard know too well. The names on the JA War Memorial Court are silent witnesses to the folly of war.
“When I was young and serving, Korean War seemed the ‘right thing to do.’ Later realized ‘wars’ are glorified acts of politicians. They should fight them, then you’d never see another war. I absolutely abhor losing anymore young people in any war. There is no glory in war, just death, destruction — No glory,” he said.
After the war, Richard and Teri married and he continued his career in the Air Force, getting a promotion to train on the newest bomber, the B-57 Canberra, at Edwards Air Force Base.
When we visited Grand Junction, Richard took a model of the B-57 out of a glass case and let me hold it and feel its weight.
On Feb. 8, 1955 he was the navigator on a B-57 flying near Washington, D.C. at around 10,000 to 15,000 feet when there was a bang! — the left engine blew up and the right engine was stuck at 95% thrust. It was only seconds but Richard recalls clearly what he was thinking at the time.
“We were over Baltimore and our airplane exploded. We were right over Washington, D.C. and we didn’t want to be known as the people who left the airplane and the airplane crashed into the Pentagon or something,” he said. “You don’t want to be famous for something like that.”
As Richard called in a mayday alert, pilot Capt. William Folks Simmons Todd fought to regain control of the airplane.
“We got the airplane under control momentarily, when it went out of control,” Richard said.
Todd gave him the signal to eject and he blew the canopy. There was’t enough explosive force to propel him or Todd away from the plane and he struck the horizontal stabilizer, losing his lower right leg. Todd died immediately.
“He hit shoulder-high and it killed him,” Richard recalled.
Bloodied and grievously wounded, he landed in a tree near where an off-duty sheriff was hanging laundry and heard the explosion. Rescuers pulled him from the tree and he was taken to Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was in surgery for nine hours and suffered two cardiac arrests the first day.
Dad would sometimes talk about the number of surgeries that Richard had to endure. He went through eight reconstructive operations before making the decision to have his left leg was amputated as well.
The other side of that story is my aunt Teri. They were a young couple; their first son, Steven, just a baby at the time. Teri, my Dad’s younger sister, is a typical Muranaka, unassuming, quiet and never one to call attention to herself, and the rock that held the family together.
Together, the two of them raised a family and built a life. This is the part where I remember them: being the best and most supportive uncle and aunt. Richard took my brothers and his sons skiing. Teri and my mom Julia shuttled all of us six kids in a van across America, seeing sights like the Statue of Liberty and Plymouth Rock.
We never thought of Richard as disabled because that was never the way he saw himself. He did all the driving and built a successful dental laboratory in Hollywood before upending the family and moving out to Aspen, Colo., where they built a house among the Rockies. After he retired they moved to Grand Junction, near a VA hospital with a view of the red rocks of the Colorado Monument.
When we were together last September, our first time since years before the pandemic, I saw how time and the years had aged them. Dad had passed away months before, and it helped to see them and share our grief.
“Your dad was the most decent man I ever knew,” Richard told me and it made me silently weep.
They had seen so much, been through so much, even taking a trip across the country in a motor home to watch John Glenn fly on the space shuttle in 1998. Their respect and admiration for one another was hard- earned over the course of their lives.
Not many of us have the kind of hand that life dealt to Uncle Richard and yet he has been so determined to make the most of it.
Most remarkable is his willingness to open his heart and home to others, whether family, friends, even exchange students from Japan. And so I was shocked in 2018 to read a story in The New York Times written by the daughter of Todd, the pilot who perished in that flight.
The headline dramatically states: “The Last Person to See My Father Alive” — and that was Uncle Richard. Daryln Brewer Hoffstot writes about growing up without her father — she was just two months old at the time of the accident — and eventually tracking down Richard in Grand Junction.
So many of the details were things I didn’t know, but when she recalls meeting Richard at last — in her writing she captures his warmth and my Aunt Teri’s loving presence, the uncle and aunt I grew up with.
In our conversation, he shared the values that shaped him, haji (shame), gaman tsuyoi — suffering the unbearable.
More than enduring physical pain, Richard’s remarkable grace is his ability to channel that personal difficulty and help others.
Hoffstot writes how she was nervous to meet the man who was there in the cockpit with her father, whether it would be awkward as they met, whether he blamed pilot error for the accident that changed his life. Not a chance with Uncle Richard.
There is a different kind of bravery that isn’t about physical strength, but about sharing your vulnerabilities and your true self. Richard has done that for so many of us, and for his pilot’s daughter, it was returning something to her that only he could have done.
“What a gift he has been to me. He put me smack in the middle of that B-57 on that fateful day, in an airplane falling out of the sky, and by doing so helped me feel closer to a father I never had.”
“I lost a father, but I gained a navigator — and a dear friend,” Hoffstot says.
Having received a precious gift is how I feel when I think of Uncle Richard and Aunt Teri.
Gwen Muranaka is Rafu senior editor and can be contacted gwen@rafu.com.