In an age when taking a stand for social justice drew whispers of disloyalty, Koji Ariyoshi could not be shaken from his commitment to improving the lives of working men.
Ariyoshi is best remembered as the editor of the progressive newspaper the Honolulu Record and as one of the so-called Hawaii Seven defendants accused of sedition. Yet, his life was the stuff of novels long before he came to public attention.
Born on a coffee farm in Kona in 1914, Ariyoshi learned about the inequities that confronted the working class in Hawai'i by watching his parents, who came to Hawai'i from Japan as indentured laborers.
His political formation was shaped by his varied experiences as a laborer in Hawai'i and California, and by the racial segregation he witnessed while attending the University of Georgia in the 1940s.
Ariyoshi was in California working as a longshoreman when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. Soon after, he was taken to the Manzanar War Relocation Center, where he met and married his wife, Taeko.
Seeking to help in the war effort, Ariyoshi joined the Military Intelligence Service as a language specialist. His tours of India, Sri Lanka (then Ceylon), and China (where he was befriended by Mao Zedong and Zhou Enlai) only sharpened his disdain for class inequities and economic exploitation.
Back in Hawai'i in 1948, Ariyoshi eschewed job offers from the Big Five companies and instead started the labor-oriented Honolulu Record, where he tackled subjects ranging from poor working conditions to the outcome of the overthrow of the Hawaiian monarchy.
Ariyoshi's outspokenness drew the attention of anti-communist bloodhounds, and in 1951 he and six others were arrested and charged with advocating the overthrow of the government. Ariyoshi was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison, but the decision was overturned by the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals.
Ariyoshi's struggles would eventually be validated in the 1960s and '70s as the civil rights movement took hold and a new generation of activists turned to him — by then president of the Hawai'i Foundation for History and the Humanities and an ethnic studies teacher at the University of Hawai'i — for inspiration.
As Ariyoshi's son, Roger, told The Advertiser last year: "He did what he believed and he never looked back."
