Basketball Star Sumi Tashiro Passes

The star of Lompoc’s pre-World War II girls basketball team, has died.

Sumi Tashiro Tsuji died the morning after Christmas at the age of 88 in Monterey. Cancer had been discovered in August.

Sumi may be seen here on the Photographs page of this website in a photo with Chiyo Iwamoto Kobayashi and Kaoru Bill Honda. They are each holding up Block L’s which they received last May when they visited Lompoc.

In Vanished in the team photo from 1941, Sumi is seen front row center with a basketball directly in front of her knees. I don’t think that was an accident. In my two long interviews with Sumi, the basketball team was a joyful topic of conversation. After the 1939-40 season she was named to a Central Coast All-Star team which played Stockton, the state champion She was proud of that, just as she was for the 700 series she bowled years later in Hanford, the first woman to accomplish the feat in that city.

Sumi was always full of life. She had a great smile, a voice like a foghorn, and she was candid, willing to talk about drinking that took place at the Nihonjin picnics, and about the controversy over whether Katie Inouye, a Christian, should be allowed to play on the Lompoc basketball team. The two teamed at guard on the squad.

Katie never saw Sumi again after they graduated high school together in 1941. Even at the gatherings occasioned by Vanished, they missed one another. Sumi came to Lompoc in May 2010 but Katie could not. Katie came in October when Sumi could no longer travel.

“She was the one I really wanted to see,” Katie said today. “I used to go over there (to the Tashiro farm outside Lompoc) and eat tomatoes out of the warehouse. She was very independent. She never hesitated to speak out. I had good times with her. She was a roughneck like me.”  

Sumi worked most of her life as a hairdresser. She was widowed in 1986 and lived in recent years with her brother Yeiki in Manteca. Of the four Tashiro siblings, only Yeiki survives.