Hiko is short for Hikojiro. Hiko has been a member since 2007 of the Evergreen Glee Club, a local men’s chorus that sings traditional and contemporary Japanese songs. He discovered Northwest Sound by searching online for local a cappella groups and finding our website. He decided to come hear us sing in our June 2011 “A Cappella In the Air” show at Lake Sammamish High School, where he picked up on our invitation to come be part of “Sing, Sing, Sing!”
Hiko was born on the small island of Amami Oshima, between Okinawa and mainland Japan, but he grew up in Tokyo and then studied at Tokyo University. He works part-time now for Nikkei Concerns, which provides health and related services in a traditional atmosphere to mostly elderly Nikkei (Japanese) in the Pacific Northwest. But this is a retirement job. He’s retired from a career in forestry that took him to northern and southern Japan, Indonesia, Rome, and eventually to Seattle.
Hiko met his wife Sherry, who hails from Pittsburgh, while she was working in Tokyo. Hiko actually did his first singing as an adult, when he and Sherry joined a mixed chorus in Sapporo, in northern Japan, before they had kids.
Now Sherry works for the Bellevue School District central offices in student services and special education. She and Hiko have two grown sons, Geoffrey, 30, and Michael, 28, both of them assistant coaches to professional basketball teams in Japan.
Besides singing, Hiko likes to play and teach the ancient Japanese game of Go at the Seattle Go Center. He also likes to play golf, to cook, and, appropriately enough for a forester, to go hiking with Sherry.
The Man of Note for helping bring Hiko to Northwest Sound goes to our Membership Guru, Don Ferguson.