[3][4] Born Ushijima Kinji (牛島謹爾) in Kurume, Fukuoka, Japan,[5] he entered a preliminary course at the Tokyo Commercial School (now Hitotsubashi University), but failed the entrance examination for the regular course.

He was successful enough to purchase some inexpensive swampland (considered undesirable by white American farmers[6]) in the San Joaquin Delta.

Despite being the subject of such newspaper headlines as "Yellow Peril in College Town", Shima became active in the community, donating $500 to the local YMCA, and gradually won over his neighbors.

[a] At his funeral, David Starr Jordan, the president of Stanford University, and James Rolph, the Mayor of San Francisco, both served as pallbearers.

[3] Yoshinobu Hirotsu, a fellow resident of Shima's hometown of Kurume, also raised several hundred thousand yen to set up a life-sized monument to him in a park there in 1999.