"Peace Empowers": The Testimony of Aki Kurose, a Woman of Color in the Pacific Northwest

We are women historians eating dinner at a Vietnamese restaurant in Pullman, Washington, discussing what it was like to be a woman of color in the Pacific Northwest. We had gathered that summer weekend in 2000 for the Fifth Women's West Conference: Gender, Race, Class, Region held at Washington State University. Some of us were assigned to a plenary panel on "Engendering, Racing, and Classing Pacific Northwest History" the next morning, and the discussion had turned to the everyday life experiences of a woman of color in the Pacific Northwest. As currently written, Pacific Northwest history offers little insight into these women's lives. Someone urged that we should share what we know of those lives with a wider audience.

This article responds to that call to share the lives of Pacific Northwest women of color in two ways. First, it examines some of the everyday acts of courage practiced by peace activist and award-winning teacher Aki Kurose, whose life and career combined principles of nonviolence and theories of progressive education to shape the lives of thousands of Seattle residents until her death in 1998.¹ Kurose's life was so exemplary that in 1999, a year after her death, the Seattle School Board renamed a school building the Aki Kurose Middle School Academy in her honor. Additionally, a peace garden, an affordable housing project, a scholarship, and a science fair were named for her. This article is also about the struggle by her supporters to name a school after her. As a result of these naming acts Kurose is remembered each time the school is mentioned in the news, another phase of the housing project is finished, the scholarship awarded, or the science fair held. This public commemoration of Kurose means people continue to reflect on the meaning of her life. As time passes, however, will people remember how she lived her life committed to nonviolent direct action for social justice?

Kurose's contributions are now widely recognized and honored in Seattle and beyond, but her inspiration lives on in a second way: Her oral history was recorded for the Denshō Project, a digital, interactive multimedia archive with a searchable computer database of experiences narrated by Japanese American women and men. The videotaped interviews, historic photographs, and documents help create a multilayered history of the Pacific Northwest to balance the dominant narratives of regional history that minimize women's experiences and foreground "heroic" actions of white males. The interview of Aki Kurose illustrates how a more complex and richer account of Pacific Northwest history is achieved by incorporating diverse women's voices, beliefs, and actions.²

Kurose was born Akiko Kato February 11, 1925, in Seattle. Her parents had met in Berkeley, California, where her father, Harutoshi Kato, had moved to work. He arrived with a degree from Yokohama School of Commerce having departed from Miyagi prefecture in Japan. Her mother, Murako Okamura, had come from Kumamoto prefecture to study, and mutual friends had introduced the two. After their marriage the Katos settled in Seattle, leasing an apartment house that was managed by Aki's mother. "Managing" meant that Aki's mother "got the engineer's license," and "ran the boiler room," and "cleaned the furnace," as well as "wallpapering right along with my dad, standing on a ladder and just going at it."³ Aki's mother served as a role model, a woman not limited to traditional gendered roles.

Like many prewar Japanese Americans in Seattle, the Kato family lived in a diverse, working-class neighborhood of Asians, Jews, and African Americans in the Central District, also known as the Central Area. In contrast to the segregated lives led by most whites in Seattle, Kurose remembered her Jewish, Chinese, and African American neighbors coming to her family's apartment to enjoy the jelly rolls her father baked every Friday evening. "We'd just have a good time, listening to music and just being social," she later recalled. "And we went in and out of each other's homes all the time." Kurose noted...