"In his 20s, he sang "Free the Land" from concert stages. In his 50s, he wrote law review articles that protested the theft of Hawaiian ancestral lands. In between, Chris Kando Iijima married, raised two sons and worked as a teacher, lawyer, bartender, community organizer and law professor. By the time he died on December 31, after a long illness, Iijima had fulfilled a promise he had made to himself in a song he had recorded in 1973: Don't forget to live before you die."
October 2005 address at an event sponsored by the Immigrant Rights and Public Interest Legal Center of Hawai'i, conferring upon Iijima the Center's Keeper of the Flame honor.