Kyoko (協子) Nancy Oda, 1945–2026

A funeral service celebrating the life of Kyoko Nancy Oda, 80, of Van Nuys, will be held on Sunday, June 7, 2026, at 3:00 pm at Hompa Hongwanji Buddhist Temple, 815 E. First St., Los Angeles. She passed away peacefully on May 15, 2026, just five days before her 81st birthday.

Kyoko Nancy Oda was born on May 20, 1945, while her family was incarcerated at Tule Lake Segregation Center, the highest-security segregation camp of World War II. Persevering through this dark and terrible injustice, her Japanese American parents, Tatsuo and Lili Inouye, raised their daughters Sayuri, Masako, and Kyoko within its barbed wire walls. Three weeks after her birth, her father wrote her birth certificate by hand, pressed her tiny footprints into ink, and gave her a name that would shape her entire life: 協子 (Kyōko), "child of harmony." He wrote: "The World War has no end in sight, and no time is more crucial than today for the Nation and the Family to be united as One and cooperate in harmony. Therefore, I give this baby the name 'Kyoko.'" Through the uncertainty of wartime, Tatsuo gave his daughter her lifelong calling.

Kyoko, born determined and fierce, returned with her family to Boyle Heights. She attended Maryknoll School in nearby Little Tokyo, where she played drums in the Drum and Bugle Corps, which marched in the Rose Parade. With her father an Olympian judo master, she grew up training in judo alongside her sisters, earning her black belt from Senshin Dojo through the Kodokan in 1963. She was homecoming princess and student body president at Garfield High School, the same role her future husband, Kay Oda, had held the year before. They married in 1964 and had two sons, Jon and Daron. In their early years of marriage, Kyoko supported the family through Kay’s long hours at the body shop, attended community college, and tirelessly supported the children’s elementary school, Toluca Lake, where the family made lifelong friends. She also helped her sisters Sayuri and Masako with their children, Terry, Sharlene, Ernie, Brent, Matt, and Todd.

Even while working long hours to provide for her young family, Kyoko pursued her dream and graduated from UCLA. She brought that same dedication to her students at Riverside Drive and Canterbury Elementary Schools, where she was deeply loved, before being recruited and promoted to Assistant Principal at Haddon Elementary School by her dear friend and mentor, Principal Tangee Mason. She then became the principal at Hubbard Elementary School and ended her 32-year career by founding Maurice Sendak Elementary School (“Where the Wild Things Are”).

Kyoko was driven by her dream that true education nurtures the whole child. With patience and quiet determination, she cultivated environments where students could flourish through music, the arts, and athletics, convinced that this holistic approach was the key to unlocking every child's potential. She brought instruments, teachers, and working artists into her schools to make that vision real. An exceptional educator, Kyoko is remembered and loved through the many tributes from students whose lives she changed, guiding them to their highest potential through her warm leadership and boundless love.

Retirement gave Kyoko not rest, but resolve. Answering what she called "a call to action," she committed the next chapter of her life to ensure that the injustices her family had endured would never be forgotten, nor inflicted on any other people.

At every stage of her life, Kyoko taught, supported, inspired, and fought for the rights of all people, but most fiercely for those whose voices had been silenced. From her UCLA years onward, she carried one mission close to her heart: to bring her father's wartime Tule Lake Stockade Diary to life. Tatsuo Inouye, born in Laguna Beach, was uprooted with his family under Executive Order 9066 and sent first to the Poston War Relocation Authority Camp in Arizona. After he answered the controversial Loyalty Questionnaire, the family was forcibly transferred to the Tule Lake Segregation Center. Surrounded by barbed wire and watchtowers, he wrote his diary in secret, on whatever paper he could find, even on tiny scraps of cigarette papers.

Professor Masumi Izumi of Doshisha University in Kyoto and her team translated the Tule Lake Stockade Diary, ensuring future generations would understand the injustice and human cost of incarceration through the voice of a thoughtful, moral, and disciplined judo master.

When Kyoko took up a personal cause against prejudice or discrimination, she never did it for her community alone. She believed each act of remembrance, each fight for justice, stands as a symbol to confront every injustice still alive in the world.

In 2013, Kyoko helped lead the historic effort to have the City of Los Angeles designate the former Tuna Canyon Detention Station as a Historical Cultural Monument, working alongside Kanji Sahara, Dr. Lloyd Hitt, Paul Tsuneishi, and former State Senator Richard Alarcon. As the founding president of the Coalition formed to preserve this history, she guided the development of a traveling exhibition along with two educational booklets exploring the injustice. Drawing on the research of Dr. Russell Endo, June Aochi Berk interviewed more than fifty descendants whose stories now form the heart of the exhibit. With the support of Conrad Caspari and Rachel Pistol, the Tuna Canyon exhibit is currently on view at universities in England, where it continues to teach audiences about the Japanese, German, Italian, and other immigrants who were unjustly detained during World War II.

To further its educational mission, the Coalition holds the annual Marc Stirdivant Scholarship for Justice for high school students, named in honor of the fellow coalition member whose 2016 grant proposal secured National Park Service funding for the exhibit. The vital work of the Tuna Canyon Detention Station Coalition continues today under the leadership of Claudia Culling and Donna Sugimoto.

Of this mission, Kyoko said simply: "The story that I share is in honor of all who suffered social injustice during World War II, but also for minorities of all races, everywhere, who have suffered in the past and who continue to suffer today."

For more than 50 years, Kyoko was a pillar of the San Fernando Japanese American Community Center, serving as its president from 2011 to 2013. In 2011, she mobilized significant disaster relief fundraising that helped countless families in Japan recover from the Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami. Kyoko was deeply involved in countless activities at the Community Center, and especially treasured serving lunches for the elderly with her devoted niece Sharlene Miyagishima, who has carried that same spirit of service into her board work at WeSPARK Cancer Support Center.

Kyoko and Jenny Chomori were the driving forces behind the Day of Remembrance (DOR) at the ABC Unified School District, partnering with her nephew Ernie Nishii, Janet Fujii, Jason Fujii, and Esther Taira. For more than eight years, she brought camp survivors to share their stories firsthand, helping students understand the incarceration on a deeply personal level. Today, DOR is a unique and required part of ABC's curriculum.

As Vice President of the WWII Camp Wall project in Torrance, Kyoko championed Kanji Sahara's vision: a permanent memorial at Columbia Park where the names of more than 120,000 individuals unjustly detained during World War II would be engraved into walls of black granite. Working closely with President Nancy Hayata, she carried a heartfelt mission to ensure that no soul, from any community wrongfully imprisoned, would ever be forgotten.

Her remarkable contributions to harmony were recognized by Japan's Emperor in 2020 with the Order of the Rising Sun, Gold and Silver Rays, honoring her distinguished service to Japanese American society and her role in harmonizing ties between Japan and the United States. Kyoko was also named Japanese Women's Society Woman of the Year and 2009 Los Angeles City Pioneer Woman of the Year. She received 2016 California Assembly and 2018 City of Los Angeles recognition for her Tuna Canyon Detention Station work, was honored with the 2023 Nisei Week Pioneer Spirit Award, and was named 2024 California Senate AAPI Community Champion.

Kyoko and Kay Oda were high school sweethearts whose love endured every season of life. Their devotion was the thread that held everything together: their family, their work, their students, and the causes they championed side by side. Kyoko adored her sons, Jon and Daron, and guided them in every chapter of their lives with patience, wisdom, and tireless love. That same love flowed to her grandchildren, Alexander, Arielle, Devon, and Kyle, to her daughters-in-law, Monique and Yvonne, and to her nieces and nephews, all of whom she embraced as her own. She took deep pride in watching her grandchildren become kind, college-educated, and socially conscious young adults, and she cherished one final journey with all of them: a family pilgrimage to Tule Lake, returning at last to the place where her father had once pressed her newborn footprints into ink and named her Kyoko, child of harmony. Carrying that legacy forward, her nephew Terry Takeda serves as a docent for the pilgrimage. He continues today on the Leadership team, honoring the same work of remembrance Kyoko gave her life to.

For Kyoko, no day carried more meaning than New Year's. Each year, family and friends enjoyed the gardens, flowers, gazebo, trees, and tranquil stone ponds, before gathering inside for her steaming ozoni, served alongside the full traditional spread. As the generations settled around the table, sharing food, stories, and hopes for the year ahead, the Rose Parade played on in the background, a beloved memory for Kyoko, who had once marched in it herself as a young drummer in the Maryknoll Drum and Bugle Corps. In that one day, everything she treasured came together: family, friendship, heritage, and harmony.

These moments of harmony were the very heart of who Kyoko was. She touched every life she encountered with boundless energy, endless kindness, and a warmth that drew people in. She loved deeply: her family, her students, her community, and the causes she gave her life to.

Kyoko was predeceased by her parents, Tatsuo and Yuriko Lili Inouye; her sisters, Frances Sayuri Takeda and Ernie Jane Masako Nishii; and her beloved son, Daron Oda, whose memory she carried with her always.

Kyoko is survived by her devoted husband, Kay Oda; her son, Jon Oda, and his wife, Monique; her daughter-in-law, Yvonne Oda; and her grandchildren, Alexander, Arielle, Devon, and Kyle Oda. She is lovingly remembered by her family, community, students, and many friends, who will carry her message and spirit of harmony forward.

Lovingly prepared by her husband Kay and son Jon Oda.