She was not only the first person of color hired to teach in the Renton School District, but also the one who unassumingly broke down racial barriers there. After a year of oppressive scrutiny, this first-year and freshly minted elementary teacher opened the door for others. The very next school year, her dear friend Betty Okamura was hired by the district, as was the district’s first African American man.
If you didn’t know about this trailblazer, you’re not alone. This January, at the memorial service for Sumiko Kono Yoshioka (1934 – 2024), hundreds in attendance heard this story for the first time. Even her own children knew nothing about this until half a dozen years ago. Although the story was newly revealed, no one was surprised, for everyone had known for years that Sumi represented a kind of uncommon and unspoken courage, a quiet determination that is so rare today.
Before the novice teacher Sumi started her first class, a stern warning in disguise came from the superintendent. She was told: “If this works out, we might hire others of your kind.” America’s war with Japan had only concluded the decade before, and the atmosphere of suspicion was still stagnant in the air. Classroom observations were monthly at best, but more commonly weekly and sometimes even daily. At the memorial service, her educator niece wondered: “Where was the teachers’ union?” This would never happen today.
But by Sumi’s own reckoning, her accomplishment was nothing exceptional. She simply did what needed to be done and endured the rest. Although she personally recognized her role in transforming opportunities for others, she simply chose to do, and needed no recognition for it. Like many teachers of her era, she stayed in the profession only a few years, and after her marriage to architect Arthur Yoshioka, she willingly chose to become a full-time mother.
This choice was not limiting, because from an early age she knew that her identity was to be a church musician. The dread of forced piano lessons as a child turned into skill and then passion, and soon the young Sumi provided the music for her minister’s father’s various Methodist church appointments in California, Hawaii, and finally on Seattle’s Beacon Hill at Blaine Memorial United Methodist Church. What followed were her decades of service as choir director, bell choir director, and church organist there.
I first heard Sumi play in the mid 1990’s at Blaine, and I was duly impressed with not only her skill, but what musicians refer to as “musicality” — the poetic aspect of performance. Playing pipe organ is no easy task, as a performer needs to be part acrobat, contortionist, and magician, as feet dance heel and toe, and hands navigate multiple keyboards, while excusing themselves to pull and push switches between the briefest of breaths between musical phrases. Sumi did it all, with such grace and lyricism.
When she retired from playing the organ, I asked her, “Why? You still play so well.” Years of battling serious diabetes was taking a toll on her extremities and her eyes, and she could see the end of playing not far down the road. “It’s time,” she said quietly and distinctly. That same courage she showed so many decades earlier while a first-year teacher was still evident and intact. Her wisdom and courage to let go outmatched and supplanted my lack in both.
In the last months of her life, broken bones from falls, the escalated severity of the ever-mounting outcomes of debilitating disease were inevitable. She knew again it was time to say, “It’s time.”
Her resolve never left, and her joy of people and living life persisted. The untimely loss of siblings and her beloved husband decades earlier may have chipped away some of it, yet hope remained. The final onslaught provided clarity, not despair, and offered opportunity to give and receive love while saying goodbye. Her deep faith in God, her resilience, and her wisdom made it all possible.
Many point to the WWII generation as the greatest and most heroic, while others worship the publicly rich, powerful, and successful — but I would like to think that the unspoken courage and quiet determination of the generation of Japanese American women like Sumi Yoshioka are even more inspirational.
