Yae Fuson:
February 24, 1929 – October 3, 2024
An Obituary
Story by Jon Stalnaker AKA The Studebaker Dude
Born in Hokkaido Japan, her father was an Ainu fisherman. The Ainu were Indigenous Japanese, and were closer genetically, to the Eskimos than Japanese people. At 14 years of age, she was pulled out of school by the government to clean potatoes in the river for the soldiers. It was a filthy job, and she hated it. Two years later the United States Army Air Corps dropped nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. I’ll let that sink in for a minute. It must have been the ultimate significant emotional event for her. She wasn’t geographically very close to ground zero as Hokkaido is at the northern tip of Japan while the bombs were dropped about 779 miles and 946 miles respectively from Hokkaido. That’s about from Sapulpa to Fargo, North Dakota for one, and Phoenix, Arizona, for the other. It must have been a scary time for her.
She later became a hat check girl for the USO, and she caught the eye of a young American Army musician. He played the trombone in the Army Band and asked his Army buddies how he could ask her out since she spoke Japanese, and he didn’t. They told him to just say Coca-Cola. That worked, and he also won her over by supplying her with Hershey’s chocolate bars. He later found out that she was hoarding them in her dresser drawer as she considered them too valuable to eat. He convinced her that the supply would not run dry. Before long my wife, Carlene, was born. They got married in 1953 and Yae’s husband, Keith, was stationed in Japan till 1962. They wanted to get stateside much earlier than that, but Yae had some health issues that made it difficult for her to enter the states. Finally, they were on a ship bound for Oakland California. They took a taxi to San Francisco to see Japan Town and before they knew it, they were on a bus to Colorado Springs.
Keith retired after 26 years in the military and got a retirement job with the Civil Service. Yae got a job with a Chaplain who liked her work well enough to get her a job at the Broadmoor Hotel before he transferred away. She worked in housekeeping for many years in the 60s and 70s. She found work in Japanese restaurants after that. She worked with a young man named Masanobu Terauchi. If you have ever eaten at the Fuji Sushi Bar in Tulsa, you may know him. He is the owner of that restaurant (small world). They lived in Colorado Springs where Carlene graduated from high school. Her husband Keith passed away in 1994 and Yae moved to Las Vegas to work in Japanese restaurants there. She was quite the commodity as she looked great in her kimonos. She lived there until soon after the 9/11 attacks put a serious stop to vacationing in Sin City.
It was after she was forced to retire that we drove down to Vegas, packed her up, and drove her to our home in Dixon California. She lived with us for the next 22 years. At first she was still young and independent. We traveled together back to Vegas and to Studebaker meets all over the country. We took a train from California back to Colorado Springs one year. We visited her old friends and even went back to the Broadmoor Hotel. We introduced her to the front desk as a former employee and they treated us like royalty with guided tours and everything. I was so impressed with that.
Then 3 years ago we decided to move to Oklahoma, and she was on board with the move, especially since Keith was born and raised in Oklahoma. We got to eat at Fuji sushi bar and were treated like family by Nobu San. We celebrated her 95th birthday last February. She was still getting around okay until she fell in the garage and never fully recovered from that. Thanks to hospice, we were able to keep her with us until she decided it was time to go be with Keith. Now, when we think about her, we imagine her in Heaven dancing with the love of her life.
