Akira Tsurukame
Akira Tsurukame was born in Kagoshima Prefecture in 1941. After graduating from La Salle High School in Kagoshima and Kyoto University of Foreign Studies in Kyoto, he joined the international tourism company New Orient Express in 1964. In 1966, he was dispatched to the company's US office as a representative and worked in Los Angeles and New York. He left the company in 1979 and traveled the world with his family. In 1980, he established California Coordinators in Los Angeles, providing local support for Japanese companies expanding into the US and Mexico. He later established Business Cafe in Silicon Valley, Los Angeles, and Tokyo with Japanese and American colleagues to provide support to California entrepreneurs expanding into the Japanese market.
Outside of business, Tsurukame's lifelong interest is in the relationship between Japan and the world, especially the US-Japan relationship. He is also interested in the history of Japanese immigration to the US, and continues to research it. He visited Mexico, Peru, Chile, Argentina, Brazil, etc. for three months to investigate the situation of Japanese communities in North America as well as South America. Recently, he featured pre-war Issei who contributed to the Japanese community and published an article in the Orange News, a monthly publication in Orange County, California. In 2018, to commemorate the 150th anniversary of the Meiji Restoration and Japanese immigration, he launched the "Japanese Pioneer Appreciation Society" with his new Issei friends, and successfully realized a project to express gratitude to pre-war Issei and Nisei. Tsurukame currently lives in Lomita with his wife and son. He is 78 years old.
(Updated April 2019)
Stories from This Author
Writing lessons for the 77th birthday
April 24, 2019 • Akira Tsurukame
On that day in mid-January, three days before the seventh anniversary of her husband's death, Baba Wako was in a bad mood from the morning. She woke up at 5 a.m. as usual. She is an elderly woman living alone, not working, and leading a carefree life, but out of long-standing habit, her eyes naturally open without an alarm clock. As soon as she sat up in bed, a faint pain ran through her body. It wasn't a sharp pain. …
