Aiko F. Adachi

Aiko lived with her maternal grandparents in Toyama, Japan until she was school-age. When she returned to Seattle, she attended Seattle public schools, where in primary school she learned and mastered English in an era before bilingual education existed. She went on to graduate from Broadway High School. Soon after graduating, she was able help support her family financially when a family friend hired her to manage the friend’s Seattle apartment building. At the start of World War II, when Japanese-Americans on the West Coast had to move inland or face internment, Aiko’s family relocated to Denver, CO, where she attended the University of Denver and worked in her family’s dry-cleaning business.

After the war ended, Aiko traveled to Japan to work for the American occupation forces and to connect with her older sister who was living in Japan. While in Japan Aiko met and married Jiro Adachi, a Japanese-American also working for the occupation forces who previously had served in the US Military Intelligence Service in the Philippines during the war. The couple returned to the US, living in Cambridge, MA while Jiro attended graduate school at MIT, and then settling in Sudbury, MA where they raised their three children, Janet, Patricia and Michael.

Once the children were older, Aiko worked at Brandeis University in Waltham, MA for 20 years, serving as an administrator in the Office of the Dean and Departments of English, Philosophy and Near Eastern and Judaic Studies. In 2015, after over 50 years in Sudbury, Aiko moved to the Newbury Court retirement residence in Concord, MA where she lived until her death.

Throughout her long life, Aiko welcomed the opportunity to meet new people and explore new things and brought her warmth, creativity, sense of humor, organization, exacting standards and energy to every endeavor. She was an excellent cook and loved to host dinner parties. She sewed Easter outfits for her daughters and even her son, knitted argyle socks and Nordic and fisherman sweaters, created stuffed toys and taste treats for the Sudbury First Parish Church annual fairs, served as a Cub Scout den mother and assisted with the Lincoln-Sudbury high school student exchange program. She tried her hand at Japanese brush-stroke painting. At one point, she resumed playing the violin, which she had studied in grade school, and practiced for a time with another Sudbury violinist. Soon after moving to Newbury Court, Aiko decided to study watercolor and spent six months doing pencil drawings of everything, including photos from the New York Times, to persuade the art teacher that she had the necessary grounding for watercolor. Her pencil sketches and watercolors revealed talent that surprised even her family.

Aiko was preceded in death by her parents, older and younger sisters Terue and Masako, and her former husband, Jiro. She is survived by her children Janet (James Gado) of Acton, MA, Patricia of Framingham, MA and Michael of Point Richmond, CA, and nieces, nephews, great nieces and great nephews, all dearly loved and an important part of her life.

There will be a private family remembrance service at a later date. In lieu of flowers, memorial contributions may be made in Aiko’s memory to Deaconess Abundant Life Communities , Japanese American Citizens League or another charity.