Toshiko Buckley died peacefuly on November 29th 2025 at a place she and her family had grown to love, Nikkei Senior Gardens, in Los Angeles. She was 95. Toshiko was the beloved grandmother of grandsons Ben and Sebastian Buckley, mother of KTLA Morning News Anchor Frank Buckley, and mother in law to Elena Pearce Buckley. She was known by reputation in the Japanese and Japanese American communities in Los Angeles because Frank frequently referred to her as he emceed events for organizations like the Japanese American Museum, JACCC, and the Japan America Society of Southern California. Audiences heard Frank say in Japanese: "Anata no karada ni Nihonjin no chi ga nagarete iru yo. Wasurenai de ne?" Translation: You have Japanese blood in your body, too. Don't forget it, O.K.?

Toshiko Buckley was a native of Japan, born and raised in a well-to-do family in Utsunomiya in wartime Japan attending (she proudly told her son) "the top girls' high school" in her prefecture (Tochigiken Utsunomiya Dai Ichi Jyogako). However after the war, Toshiko would see her family fortune disappear and she ended up working on a U.S. military base of the very military that had bombed and destroyed portions of her village. But it was at the base that she met her future husband Bill Buckley, US Navy, with whom she was happily married until he died in 2011.

The Buckleys were a military family and lived in many locations from Washington D.C. to Seattle to Yokohama, Japan, and eventually settled in 29 Palms, California. While the family lived in simple military base housing at each of those stops, Toshiko Buckley made sure each housing unit felt like a home. She delighted in cooking and entertaining, listening to classical music, and in later years enjoyed creating art. She attended Desert Community Church in 29 Palms, and she had many friends in 29 Palms and beyond. She spoke by phone nearly every day with a lifelong friend Joyce, a fellow Japanese native who married an American and settled in Northern California.

During her final year at Nikkei Senior Gardens, she often said she was living a life of "shiawase," of joy and good fortune. Per her request, there will be no funeral and she will rest in peace with Bill at Riverside National Cemetery. In lieu of "koden" or flowers, the family requests that donations be made to Nikkei Senior Gardens through its fundraising arm Oyakoko Foundation so that other seniors may live in shiawase in their twilight years.