Steve Shizuma Yamamoto grew up in San Gabriel, Calif., and attended the Japanese school his parents and members of the community built. His language teacher doubled as a judo instructor. In 1939, as part of judo exchange tour, Yamamoto traveled to Japan, Manchuria (an area occupied by Japan in northeastern China), Korea, and North China for two months. 

On March 11, 1941, Yamamoto did not want to wait for the draft to call him, so he volunteered for the Army. When he was in basic training the Military Intelligence Language School (MISLS) recruited him and he left for San Francisco to join the first class of MIS linguists eventually graduating on May 1, 1942.

He shipped out to Brisbane, Australia, where he worked for the Allied Translator and Interpreter Section (ATIS) translating captured documents. In December 1943, he left for Fort Moresby on New Guinea.

When he returned to Brisbane, he participated in an interrogation of one of the first prisoners taken in the Pacific War. The prisoner had been brought to Gen. Douglas D. MacArthur's headquarters in Australia and quickly turned over to ATIS for interrogation:

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This prisoner I had started interrogating and caught lying.... He thought that I still did not believe in him after he apologized, that he was telling the truth. He became disheartened because I didn't see him for 2-3 days while I had a three-day pass. So meantime, he got very disheartened. [Oral History]
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Yamamoto had not visited the prisoner for a few days because he had received a pass to leave the Section to buy a new uniform. The POW thought Yamamoto had gotten frustrated with the lying:

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When I came back to ATIS, I got a note signed by him saying: "I [POW] felt very badly that you [Yamamoto] didn't come see me and I thought perhaps you still did not believe that I started to tell you the truth." And so he did not know how to regain his face and committed suicide. [Oral History]
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In the Southwest Pacific campaign Gen. MacArthur began island-hopping, and Yamamoto moved from Finschhafen up the coast of New Guinea to Hollandia. He then moved to Leyte, Philippines, where he received his first Bronze Star for interrogating 3100 POWs. 

When Yamamoto participated in one of the first beach landings in the Philippines, Japanese bombers hit two other MIS linguists and the mid-section of their boat. Luckily, Yamamoto escaped without harm and received his second Bronze Star for translations he made on the Philippines. Continuing up the chain of islands, he moved with troops to Luzon, the main island of the Philippines. 

After 45 days of Temporary Duty (TDY) on the U.S. mainland, he reluctantly returned to the war. In the Philippines, he was assigned as Chief of the Translation Section of the Language Detachment until the United States bombed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Yamamoto moved to Kyoto during the Occupation and decided to take some personal time to visit his father and stepmother's old hometowns:

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They were quite surprised to see me.... In the distance I see the mothers, women folks of the house wait in the front yard, and as I come closer everybody starts to disappear.... And I greet them by hollering, "Ohayo," [good morning] nobody comes out.... I waited around and my aunt slowly opened the shoji [rice paper screen door], peered out and saw me, and apparently, she recognized me although I was in uniform. And she says, "Oh, Shizuma-san desu ka?" [Are you Mr. Shizuma?].... Everybody was afraid of American forces, especially the guys in uniform. [Oral History]
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He also visited his aunt in Hiroshima. She had eight children, and surprisingly, only one died in the atomic blast:

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My aunt, that morning when the blast took place, she was out shopping in the suburban little shop up above the city proper, and she said she had her youngest ... on her back. The baby was blown off her back and still survived. [Oral History]
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For one of his assignments during the Occupation, Yamamoto sorted through a warehouse of old swords collected by Occupation Forces. He picked out quality swords for U.S. commanding officers who wanted to take them home as souvenirs.

Later, he moved into the legal section of the Occupation and traveled to Shikoku Island to pick up Admiral Nagano for the war crime trials. He also served as Chief of the Translation Section for the Prosecution staff of the Togo trials and after finishing, he spent 60 days on the U.S. mainland. Upon his returned to Japan, Yamamoto married and began working for ATIS in Tokyo. ATIS changed to the 500th Military Intelligence, and he began work for the Joint Processing Interrogation Board and received an Army Commendation Medal for his service:

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From the intelligence point of view, we were looking for any information concerning North Korea and the Order of Battle information concerning both. [Oral History]
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After the Occupation, Yamamoto continued his military duty for 23 years while working in various departments and taught interrogation techniques and Japanese. He retired from active duty in April 1961.

