LOS ANGELES - Rose Matsui Ochi, a trailblazing Los Angeles attorney who tapped far-flung political networks from City Hall to Congress in her fierce advocacy of civil rights, criminal justice reform and Japanese American causes, has died at 81.
Ochi died Dec. 13 at a local hospital after being diagnosed with a second bout of COVID-19, which exacerbated existing health problems, her husband, Thomas Ochi, said.
Ochi broke barriers as the first Asian American woman to serve as a Los Angeles Police Commission member and as an assistant U.S. attorney general. She advised L.A. Mayors Tom Bradley and James Hahn on criminal justice, served on President Jimmy Carter's Select Commission on Immigration and Refugee Policy and worked with President Bill Clinton on drug policy and race relations.
But she particularly cherished her contributions to the successful campaigns to win recognition and redress for the mass incarceration of 120,000 people of Japanese descent during World War II - including her and her family, who were uprooted from their home in L.A.'s Boyle Heights neighborhood and imprisoned at the Rohwer detention camp in Arkansas after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor in 1941.
She would play pivotal roles in helping the community win a federal apology and monetary payments to camp survivors in 1988 and secure approval of the Manzanar camp in California's Owens Valley as a national historic site in 1992.
Ochi was just 3 yeas old when she was incarcerated but it fired her lifelong commitment to fight for the underdog, said William T. Fujioka, a close friend and former Los Angeles County chief executive officer. "The injustice of the relocation burned something into her soul," he said.
In a 2014 interview, Ochi recalled how racism shaped her. During a yearlong stay in Nevada after the war, she was made to wash her mouth out with soap by a teacher in front of the class for speaking Japanese, and soldiers threw snowballs and directed racial epithets at her, she said.
"Somehow I learned that I'm not a real American. I'm an outsider," Ochi said in the interview with the UCLA Library Center for Oral History Research. "And instead of feeling like you're ostracized, I just felt very strong."
Ochi was born on Dec. 15, 1938, in East Los Angeles, one of four children to Yoshiaki and Mutsuko Matsui. Her father was a businessman and her mother a homemaker and later seamstress. Ochi described herself as a gregarious tomboy who loved sports and never took no for an answer.
She cajoled her father to set aside his chauvinistic views about gender roles and teach her the Japanese martial art of kendo - which she said helped her develop the courage to endure getting hit and face her own fears. She dismissed her high school counselor's remarks that she wasn't smart enough for college but would be a good secretary.
"Excuse me? Me, take orders? You've got to be kidding," she said in her UCLA interview.
When an Inyo County supervisor declared that the Manzanar project would only proceed "over my dead body," Ochi drove to the next meeting and convinced him to go along with the plan by extolling the tourism and economic benefits it would bring to the area, according to Bruce Embrey, whose mother, Sue Kunitomi Embrey, was a founder of the Manzanar Committee and brought Ochi on as their pro-bono attorney.
After the war, the family returned to polyglot East L.A., where they forged friendships beyond the insular Japanese community with Mexicans, Jews, Italians, Scots, Armenians, Russians, Africans. That upbringing would shape Ochi's ability to develop alliances across races, cultures and politics.
Ochi attended Roosevelt High School, graduated from UCLA in 1959 and taught at various schools before earning a graduate degree in education at Cal State Los Angeles in 1967. In 1972, she earned a law degree from Loyola Law School.