In late 1984, Henry Cisneros, then mayor of San Antonio, got a call from Robert G. Marbut Sr. that would change the economic trajectory of San Antonio.
Marbut, then CEO of Harte Hanks Communications, was calling from Denver. He asked Cisneros to clear his calendar the following day because he wanted to fly a Japanese couple to San Antonio to meet with him.
Cisneros, who said he first visited Japan in 1974, was a fan of that country’s industrial development and export strategies. He said he “always had it in the back of my mind to try to harness that” for San Antonio when he became mayor, so he was immediately intrigued by Marbut’s request.
“I want to bring them tomorrow, but I need a rock-solid promise from you that you’re not going to waste my time or theirs,” Cisneros recalled Marbut telling him. “So that Saturday, he showed up with Naoko Shirane, who is just one of the most unforgettable persons — and dear persons to me — that I have ever met.”
Mrs. Shirane, as she was always called, would be instrumental in creating a sister city relationship between San Antonio and Kumamoto, Japan, and forging long-term relationships with some of Japan’s biggest industrial leaders. That included Shoichiro Toyoda, the son of Toyota’s founder, whose wife was a cousin of Shirane’s.
Toyoda was critical to the automaker’s eventual selection of San Antonio as the site for what became a 2.2 million-square-foot manufacturing plant on the city’s South Side, said Cisneros — and Shirane was critical in connecting Cisneros with the Toyoda family.
On Wednesday, Toyota and local officials will celebrate 20 years since that deal was inked. Its impact, on San Antonio and Texas, is hard to overstate.
Momentous change
It can be quantified in numbers: Toyota Motor Manufacturing Texas and its on-site suppliers together employ roughly 9,400 people. Toyota has invested more than $3 billion in its factory — most recently $391 million in 2019 to upgrade assembly lines to produce the Sequoia alongside the Tundra. The automaker reports another $50 million in community donations.
The total estimated economic impact on Bexar County’s gross domestic product from Toyota’s move and its ripple effects is projected to be $208 billion through 2035, according to city-supplied figures. That’s in part because Toyota’s presence here kickstarted a growing manufacturing sector in the region, including 26 suppliers to the automaker, truck manufacturer Navistar and Caterpillar, among others.
Beyond its economic impact, the deal, which came with an initial $133 million in incentives from the city, Bexar County and the state of Texas, would ultimately change the way all three entities did economic development.
Then-Gov. Rick Perry launched the Texas Enterprise Fund to help close future deals, and Bexar County created its first economic development department. The city seeded a new economic development fund with $12 million.
And both the city and the county began funding the Economic Development Foundation, which in 2021 morphed into Greater:SATX. That organization recently scored another manufacturing win, with the announcement that Great Britain-based JCB will build a manufacturing site, also on the city’s South Side, which will eventually support 1,500 jobs.
But before all that, there was Shirane.
There are a lot of narratives about how the deal came together, Cisneros said, and many people worked incredibly hard to make it happen.
“But I will tell you, in a first-person, on-the-scene voice, that none of this would have occurred if Mrs. Shirane hadn’t worked within the Toyota system, within her family, with the Japanese elite, to make the case for San Antonio.”
‘Became like family’
Naoko Mitsui Shirane was a member of one of Japan’s oldest and most powerful noble families, whose origin story begins with a samurai in the 1500s. The Mitsuis became a merchant family, expanding into finance by the turn of the 17th century. Today Mitsui & Co. is a multinational conglomerate with interests too numerous to list.
Born in 1926, Shirane spent her early years in Oxford, England, while her father earned a doctoral degree. The family returned to Japan at the onset of World War II. She briefly worked for Gen. Douglas MacArthur while he was overseeing the postwar occupation of Japan, and she later attended Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania.
Two of Japan’s oldest royal families became linked when she wed Seiichi Shirane, son of Baron Matsusuke Shirane. (While that made her a baroness, under MacArthur’s reorganization of the country, all royal lineages beyond the emperor ended, and she never used the title.)
In the early 1960s, the couple helped found Up With People, a global organization that sought to foster multiculturalism and racial equality among young people through performance and song. It was through Up With People that she met Marbut, who served on its board.
Shirane’s upbringing led to her becoming an internationalist, said Beth Costello, who got to know her while serving as San Antonio’s director of international relations and soon became a close friend. What Shirane sought from Cisneros and, ultimately, all of Texas’ leaders, Costello said, was a commitment to creating a long-term relationship with Japan.
“Henry committed right then,” she said, “and agreed to take their guidance on forging that.”
She and her husband, who died in 1991, were hired to represent both San Antonio and the state of Texas in Japan, establishing the Texas Japan Office in Tokyo, which remains active today, headed by Shirane’s former executive assistant.
Cisneros began traveling to Japan annually, and by 1987 the sister city relationship was formalized. That’s when the real relationship building began, Costello said. Shirane directed the creation of exchanges for every aspect of life in the two cities: cultural, business, education, medical — even baseball.
Her will was formidable, said Costello, who is working on a book about Shirane and her legacy in San Antonio, and local leaders did not want to let her down.
Yet the Shiranes, who never had children, also “became like family,” said Costello — to the Cisneros family, to attorney and civic leader Jane Macon and to Costello herself, who hosted Shirane during her frequent stays in San Antonio. With Macon, Costello cared for Shirane during an extended illness near the end of her life.
“She created everything. She was the four-star general who created all of this.” She did so, Costello said, “to establish San Antonio’s bona fides as a city that understood long-term relationships.”
‘Lay the groundwork’
Retired County Judge Nelson Wolff, who also visited Japan when he became mayor, credits Shirane, and the development of those long-term relationships, with eventually landing Toyota.
“People make light of it, or criticize and say you’re wasting money on international travel, just to create cultural exchanges and sister cities, but it’s necessary to lay the groundwork,” he said.
Mayor Ron Nirenberg, who left for South Korea Saturday as part of a delegation that includes Greater:SATX, regularly travels abroad. In 2022 that included trips to Japan, Mexico, India and Baguio, Philippines, where he and local officials there signed a Friendship City Agreement, often a precursor to official sister city status.
The historic strength of San Antonio’s sister city relationships was recognized by Sister Cities International, which in September awarded the city “best overall sister city program.”
“Before any kind of exchange can happen, whether cultural, educational — certainly economic partnerships — there has to be a relationship formed,” said Nirenberg, who served as chair of the organization’s board from 2018 to 2020.
In 2006, Shirane was honored for her lifetime of work by the San Antonio World Affairs Council as its International Citizen of the Year. She was 80 years old. A photograph taken at the award ceremony shows Shirane smiling, wearing a traditional kimono and holding a crystal globe.
Shortly before her death in 2013, the government of Japan honored her with The Order of the Rising Sun, Gold Rays and Rosette, honoring her three decades of contributions to the Japan-U.S. relationship.
In an homage to Shirane after her passing, Cisneros noted the investments beyond Toyota she helped bring to San Antonio, including Takata Seat Belt, Sony, Mycom International, Hyatt Hill Country Resort and Colin Medical Equipment.
To permanently honor her legacy here, Cisneros, Costello and the four businessmen who had been chosen to become Tier 1 Toyota suppliers — Heriberto “Berto” Guerra Jr., Fernando Reyes, Frank Herrera Jr. and Max Navarro — commissioned a statue of Shirane.
Artist Donna Dobberfuhl used the 2006 photograph as her model. But in the first version she made, Shirane was not smiling, said Costello, who would go on to head up the Naoko Mitsui Shirane Foundation, founded in 2016 to keep her legacy alive through a student exchange program.
“She was always smiling. She was so optimistic,” she said. Shirane’s cousin Hiroko Toyoda withheld her final approval of the statue until Dobberfuhl was able to accurately recreate that smile.
The statue stands just outside Kumamoto En (en means garden in Japanese) in the San Antonio Botanical Garden, a gift from the city of Kumamoto to San Antonio. Dedicated in 1989, it was designed by the emperor’s gardener, modeled after a garden at the emperor’s summer home.
In exchange, San Antonio sent a pioneer cabin. Costello recalled driving employees of the Botanical Garden around the Hill Country looking for an 1800s-era cabin. They found one in Fredericksburg, and it was was carefully dismantled, then reconstructed in Kumamoto.
On Saturday, a cadre of Japanese craftsmen sent by Kumamoto to San Antonio completed reconstruction of the azumaya, or gazebo, inside the Japanese garden. In the spring, a group of Japanese horticulturalists will come and refresh the garden itself.
A plaque next to Shirane’s statue describes her as “a true friend of San Antonio.”
Cisneros visited Shirane in Tokyo just prior to her death. Beyond her impact on San Antonio, he said, “I really really loved this lady. We really bonded; it was such a pleasure to be around her.”
He recalled her final request of him, to help her move to a chair by the window in her room, and the “indelible image” that resulted.
After getting her situated, “I stood at the doorway, knowing this was probably the last time I would ever see her. Then a beam of light came through the window and illuminated her, as if she was a saint.”
