Janice “Jan” Kumasaka was a tenacious, committed individual who selflessly gave her time in service to the community. She is best known for being elected to and serving two terms on the Seattle School Board from 1997 to 2005.
“Jan Kumasaka was an advocate of Seattle students and a supporter of Southeast Seattle schools throughout decades as a parent, community member, and school board director,” said retired Seattle Public Schools administrator Aimee Hirabayashi. “Her voice as an Asian American leader in education will long be remembered.”
Janice Matsuoka was born to James and Amy Matsuoka on August 12, 1937. In 1942, after Pearl Harbor was attacked, Jan and her family were forcibly uprooted from their home to a train guarded by armed soldiers, destined for life behind barbed wire in internment camps. The train would take the Matsuoka family first to the Pinedale Assembly Center in Fresno, California, then onto the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Her stay there was brief.
Internees were allowed to leave if they could find employment inland, away from the coast, so Jan and her family ended up in Montana — not exactly a haven for unwanted Japanese Americans. At age four, she was too young to understand the unfairness of her predicament, but she did know that they were “scary times.”
When the family returned to Seattle at the end of the war, Jan attended Beacon Hill Elementary and then Franklin High School, graduating in 1955. She continued her education at the University of Washington, graduating in 1959 from the School of Nursing with a B.S. degree. That same year, in 1959, Jan married Henry (Ham) Kumasaka, a young Boeing engineer. It was a marriage that would last for more than 60 years, until Ham died in 2020. “They were always a couple and meant to be together,” said Bea Kiyohara, Jan’s cousin on her mother’s side.
In the 1960s, the couple settled in the Rainier Beach neighborhood and started a family. Jan left the workforce and became a full-time homemaker. Within a few years, they brought four babies into the world: Kyle, Kerri, Kody, and Kory. Each of the Kumasaka children attended Seattle Public Schools.
Jan took an active role in each child’s schooling, volunteering and serving on numerous parent-teacher and parent-teacher-student associations, often in leadership positions. These activities allowed her to develop a keen awareness of the strengths and weaknesses of public education and to become an advocate for equity in education.
She discovered that some schools had access to more resources and better educational environments than others. She got involved in school desegregation issues on a district-wide basis and brought these issues up to the state level. She won election as an officer for Educational Service District #121.
In 1997, Alan Sugiyama decided not to run for a third term on the Seattle School Board, but the Asian American student population was growing and needed representation on board. Jan decided to gamble, running and winning. She later won re-election to a second term.
In her eight years, Jan served her Southeast Seattle constituents, faithfully attending long and drawn-out board meetings, facing the wrath of angry parents, making tough decisions on financial resources (or the lack thereof) by forcing unpopular cuts, and being criticized by editorial writers who claimed to know better.
When she finished her second term, she was asked what her greatest accomplishment was. She pointed to her advocacy on behalf of bilingual education, that the Seattle Public Schools committed to prioritize meeting the needs of non-English speaking students. As for Jan’s children, they each went on to college and graduated.
But Jan’s community involvement started long before her tenure on the school board and extended until a few years ago. When her children were old enough to attend school, she returned to the workforce but not as a nurse. She found employment with the City of Seattle’s Department of Neighborhoods, gradually working up into the position of director, where she was responsible for managing the well-regarded P-Patch Program and the Neighborhood Matching Fund.
She was also appointed to the Washington State Human Rights Commission where she served for 10 years, including 7 as its chairperson.
Jan couldn’t help being a leader. As cousin Bea Kiyohara said: “Jan was the type of person who couldn’t sit back. She had to be doing something.” Kiyohara believes that her cousin’s community activism was strongly influenced by her father.
Jan’s father, James Matsuoka, was the charter president of Seattle’s First Hill Lions Club and a longtime member of the Jackson Street Community Council, one of the first neighborhood improvement associations in the city. When she joined an organization, she gave maximum effort. Jan joined the boards of a multitude of organizations — the Japanese American Citizens League, Northwest Asian American Theatre, Seattle First Hill Lions Club, the Washington State Chapter of the National Association of Human Rights Workers, the Coalition for Quality Integrated Education, the Youth Hall of Fame, the Rainier Beach High School Foundation, and various Seattle School Levy committees.
She also served as a board member and board president of the International Examiner. In 2005, Jan was honored by the IE with its Community Voice Award for her work in education and in the community.
Beyond education and community service, Jan was a political junkie. She thrived on being active in political campaigns, successfully managing school levy propositions. When community leader Bob Santos decided to run for a seat on the King County Council, he asked Jan to run his campaign. In his autobiography, Humbows Not Hot Dogs, Bob Santos described Jan as a “steadying influence on the lives of many activists of the 1980s and 1990s.” Jan was organized. Bob, not so much. Jan was disciplined. Bob, not so much. Bob admitted that he ran his campaign managers ragged. He lost but proclaimed it wasn’t Jan’s fault. He knew and Jan knew that you didn’t win every hand in the world of politics.
But there were wins as well.
“Jan was very active in the Democratic Party. We worked and lobbied very hard to put language supporting redress in the national Democratic Party platform for thousands of Japanese Americans incarcerated in internment camps during World War II,” said Arlene Oki, a longtime political activist.
This was just one step, but a key one in the enactment of the ultimate redress bill, which was signed into law by President Ronald Reagan, the 1988 Civil Liberties Act.
Those who knew her well also noted Jan’s fondness for gambling. She worked hard and played hard, and could spend hours playing the slot machines at any one of the nearby casinos. “Jan had a thing for games — chess, bridge, you name it. Very competitive. She loved to play poker and played regularly with several sets of friends,” said Kiyohara, also describing her playing style as “ruthless,” but with a conscience. Often, after Jan had a winning hand, she paid the ante in the next deal for the player she’d just beaten.
Jan Kumasaka passed away on Oct. 25, 2024, at the age of 87, due to health complications from hip surgery after a fall. She is survived by three sons Kyle, Koby, Kory and one daughter Kerri; two daughters-in-law Deby and Therese; and seven grandchildren Mice, Panos, Mateo, Kai-zen, Emma, Akio, and Sofie.
