Aki Kurose

Aki Kurose (February 11, 1925 – May 24, 1998) was an American teacher and social justice activist who helped establish Washington state's first Head Start program and worked to increase access to education and affordable housing, particularly among low-income and minority families.

She was incarcerated with other Japanese Americans during World War II and during this period was exposed to the Quaker values of peace advocacy and nonviolent conflict resolution by Friends working in camp. After the war, she joined several groups in Seattle working for peace, racial equality, and open housing, and became an award-winning elementary school teacher in the Seattle Public Schools system during her 25-year tenure with the district. She is the namesake of a middle school, a low-income housing community and a peace garden in Seattle, and the local chapter of the Japanese American Citizens League awards the Aki Kurose Memorial Scholarship each year.

Early life Born Akiko Kato in Seattle on February 11, 1925, Kurose was the third of four children. Her parents had immigrated separately – her father Harutoshi arriving from Miyagi prefecture seeking work, her mother Murako from Kumamoto to study – and met through mutual friends in Berkeley, California. They moved to Seattle soon after marrying and leased an apartment building which Murako managed while Harutoshi took a job as a porter at Union Station. (The Katos were unable to purchase the property due to alien land laws which kept Asian immigrants, prohibited by law from naturalized citizenship, from owning land or real estate in Washington.)

From an early age, Kurose was encouraged to think outside expected gender roles by her parents' egalitarian and nontraditional relationship: Her mother obtained an engineer's license, operated the boiler room and furnace, and performed general maintenance around the building, while her father would bake jelly rolls every Friday evening for get-togethers with friends and neighbors. Her parents placed little emphasis on traditional Japanese values and cultural ties, and unlike many other Nisei at the time, she and her siblings attended Japanese language school only once a week instead of each day after their regular classes. She later recalled brushing off her father's worries of trouble, unconcerned as she and her siblings were American citizens – but at school the next day, she was reminded of her "Japaneseness" and unequal status when a teacher told her, "You people bombed Pearl Harbor."