Every so often a travel-adjacent story is really about a place's soul. This week, Guam columnist and former senator Aline Yamashita marked what would have been her father's 96th birthday with a loving remembrance of Antonio Carbullido Yamashita — a man whose fingerprints are all over the island's biggest public institution, the University of Guam.
Antonio Yamashita was born on 13 September 1930, the middle of thirteen children, during the Japanese occupation of Guam. Like many CHamoru of his generation, he was put to work as a translator between occupiers and occupied. He went on to speak Japanese, English, CHamoru and Latin, and briefly considered the priesthood before pivoting to science. He studied meteorology at Carroll College in Montana, then earned a doctorate at Colorado State University in Fort Collins before coming home to teach chemistry.
The turning point came when Governor Manuel FL Guerrero issued a blunt challenge: fix the struggling Territorial College, or it would be handed over to the Jesuits. Yamashita took the job and, by every account in his daughter's column, did exactly that. Under his leadership the school grew from Territorial College into the University of Guam, winning autonomy, accreditation and land-grant status. New programs spread across arts, education, agriculture, liberal arts, library science and sport, and as Triton president he built graduate and partnership programs with other institutions, hiring talented people and — in his own words — throwing gas on the fire and getting out of their way.
His legacy is still visible. The university's School of Engineering and thriving sciences trace back to his watch, as does the Yamashita Teacher Corps, which decades ago backed a young educator named Cheryl Sangueza — now a professor securing major grants that send student researchers around the world. Politics was less kind: Yamashita, described as shy, lost runs for the Board of Education, the senate and lieutenant governor.
He died suddenly of a heart condition in 1992 at Queen's Hospital, aged just 62. His gravestone reads, in his daughter's words: "To Think, To Care, To Laugh."
Why should a traveller care? Because Guam is far more than the duty-free strip of Tumon. The University of Guam campus in Mangilao is a piece of the island's modern history, and stories like this explain how a small Pacific territory built its own homegrown academic institutions after war, colonisation and upheaval. If you're passing through and want to understand the island beyond the resorts, the university — and people like Yamashita — are a good place to start.
Credit: Pacific Island Times
