Japanese American author, actor, and social activist Ken Mochizuki, whose picture book debut, Baseball Saved Us, shone a light on the history of the U.S. government’s Japanese incarceration camps during WWII, died September 20 in Maple Valley, Wash., following a battle with esophageal cancer. He was 71.
Ken Mochizuki was born May 18, 1954, to Eugene, a social worker and college instructor, and Miyeko, a clerical worker for the U.S. government, in Seattle, and grew up in the multicultural Beacon Hill neighborhood on the city’s south side.
From an early age, Mochizuki was exposed to a multitude of reading material at home, in the form of newspapers, magazines, and a set of World Book encyclopedias, which he often cites as the most influential “book” he read as a child. That reading helped spark his lifelong interest in history and science. He found further inspiration in early 1960s TV shows like the WWII-set Combat, about a squad of U.S. infantrymen in France. In an autobiographical essay for Something About the Author, he recalled the program’s appealing emphasis on “teamwork, relying on each other, and the humanity that can still exist even in the most inhumane situations.”
Throughout his childhood he loved to play “war” in a wooded area behind his family’s house and enjoyed camping trips with his Boy Scout troop. According to Mochizuki’s SATA essay, scouting provided him with some of his earliest practice at creating fiction when he told scary stories about the campfire.
But the writing bug took hold more intently in ninth grade when he excelled at journal writing assignments where he found his imagination readily sparked by drafting science fiction, horror, and spy stories. High school is also where Mochizuki’s growing activism found its footing. Driven by his passion for “speaking up for people I thought had been wronged,”, he worked with classmates to protest the school administration’s arbitrary rules, to take up the fight to get more books about people of color into the school library, and to form an Asian American Student Union. Their efforts received local and national publicity, and Mochizuki wrote, “That experience taught me a hands-on lesson in activism: I would have to pay the price for what I thought was right.”
When Mochizuki began his studies at the University of Washington in 1972, he quickly discovered “how much I hadn’t learned in high school.” On campus, he took leadership roles in the fight for Asian American causes, and he wrote pieces for Asian Family Affair, Seattle’s first Asian American newspaper.
By his junior year in college Mochizuki had decided that he wanted to become an actor. Upon graduating with a B.A. in communications in 1976, he packed up his car and drove to Los Angeles, taking jobs as a waiter and a bellman, and delivered meat and newspapers while he did backstage work and performed as part of Asian American theater company the East/West Players. Over the next five years he landed several bit roles in film and television, including an episode of M*A*S*H, and was cast in a PBS series for teens called The New Voice.
But in 1981, Mochizuki planned a pivot from his acting aspirations back to writing, after reading the 1957 novel No-No Boy by John Okada, which features realistic portrayals of Japanese Americans. With encouragement from a friend and some instruction from a playwright involved with the East/West Players, Mochizuki began a draft of Beacon Hill Boys, which would later be adapted as a college/indie film and become a YA novel. That summer Mochizuki returned to Seattle and took on a raft of odd jobs on his way to earning his credentials as a journalist, writing for Seattle papers International Examiner and Northwest Nikkei over the next decade.
He held onto his goal of writing adult fiction until he received a fateful phone call in the summer of 1991 from Philip Lee, who was preparing the launch list of his new children’s publishing house, Lee & Low Books. Lee inquired if Mochizuki would want to write a picture book based on a magazine article about Japanese Americans forming baseball teams while they were imprisoned in American incarceration camps during WWII. The result of that phone call was 1993’s Baseball Saved Us, illustrated by Dom Lee.
Mochizuki followed up his debut with Heroes, this time featuring a Japanese American boy who is always forced to be “the bad guy” when he and his friends play war, because of the way he looks. In all he created seven books for young readers and particularly enjoyed doing school visits and presentations. “I know it will be my life’s work to try and change people who draw conclusions about others—based only on what they look like or the sound of their name,” he wrote in his autobiography. “I will especially try to do that for all our young people.”
In August of this year, Mochizuki was the recipient of the Asian American Journalists Association’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Rosemary Stimola, president and founder of Stimola Literary Studio, and Mochizuki’s agent, offered this appreciation: “Twenty-eight years ago, Ken became my first official client and opened a very important door for me and for the Studio. You never forget your first, and I was always very proud Ken chose me to represent him and his coming-of-age and historical stories about being Asian American in our country. The legacy of his work is strong and far-reaching, even with organizational efforts to ban his books and keep them off the shelves in many schools and libraries. And I am humbled to have been a part of it.”
And Jason Low, publisher and co-owner of Lee & Low Books, shared this tribute: “In 1993, Lee & Low Books was in its infancy of specializing in diverse books for children, and Ken Mochizuki’s Baseball Saved Us was published among our other debut titles. Baseball Saved Us set the bar high for weighty subjects, like the Japanese incarceration camps used by the United States during World War II to unjustly and unconstitutionally imprison Japanese Americans. It helped redefine what stories could be told in a picture book format. The book has sold more than one million copies so far and acts as a cautionary tale for governments that sometimes enact crimes against their own citizens because of fear and prejudice. Ken’s success continued with his books Heroes; Be Water, My Friend, a picture book biography about Bruce Lee; and another bestseller, Passage to Freedom: The Sugihara Story, about a Japanese diplomat stationed in Lithuania in WWII who saved many Jewish refugees. Ken’s books bravely told stories that needed to be told. His books will serve not only as his legacy, but as a testament to his belief that we can all be the heroes of our own stories.”
