In Memory of Jeffry Y. Tsuji

Steve Yip and Janet Hedani Yip, New York City, September 10, 2021

We write this bittersweet memorial to our friend and comrade, Jeff Tsuji. He struggled mightily despite health challenges that eventually took him away from his beloved Mari and his extended family. And from us.

Steve: I’d love to chronicle Jeff’s social justice and revolutionary political activism that emerged from the Asian American studies at UC Berkeley, which led to Japantown and Chinatown/Manilatown in San Francisco. We will do that briefly, but here I will use music to chronicle my journal with Jeff’s life.

In those latter days of the tumultuously exciting days of the ’60s, culture and music traveled a parallel universe with our radical social justice activism. I have come to realize how much music meant to this brother’s life. Janet and I remember when Jeff and Mari visited New York City many years ago, and we went to Blue Smoke to listen to James “Blood” Ulmer. After the set, Jeff spent some time chatting with Ulmer.  

Personally speaking, I (Steve) discovered John Coltrane on the day that he passed. I was 16 years old and I was still committed to rock and soul — Motown, James Brown, the British invasion, Jimi Hendrix and sounds emanating from the electrified folk-rock hybrid music scene coming out of San Francisco, like Jefferson Airplane, Santana, the Dead. But it wasn’t until I met Jeff that my initiation to John Coltrane escalated significantly.  I attribute this to Jeff and his musical tastes that informed my own. Today, I continue to be mesmerized by Coltrane’s A Love Supreme and his rendition of My Favorite Things, as well adhering to the music of his close collaborator Pharaoh Sanders.  I have Jeff to thank for this!

But I’m not done yet!

We all know and celebrate with the comrades from the African diaspora music scene at KPFK-FM’s Afro Dicia of Jeff’s contributions and support.  It is no surprise that music and its intersection with social justice again reveal its critical influence on how Jeff and Mari came together.  

Mari was involved with the Nueva Cancion/New Song Movement and performed and toured in the ‘80s through mid-90s singing in large part against U.S. intervention in Central and South America as well as against injustice in the U.S.  I must embarrass Mari because I know that Jeff knowingly and deliberately romanticized Mari with some seriously curated Mexican music in their courtship. 

With all said, while Janet and I write as veterans of the Asian American radical movement of the late ’60s and early ’70s, who with Jeff and so many others — we became revolutionaries together — fighting the power on the streets and wrestling with the theories of making revolution at night and into the morning: we wanted to change the world! That’s stayed with us — not cuz of sentimentality for our youth (although those were heady times), but because the world doesn’t need to be this way and there is a sweeping vision of a radically different and emancipating society set forth in Bob Avakian’s new framework for human emancipation.

More recently Janet was glad to have the opportunity to work with Jeff more closely in Refuse Fascism — In the Name of Humanity, We Refuse to Live in a Fascist America!  And today, as people who continue to strive for higher ground for the emancipation of all humanity, we were happy of the opportunities to see and correspond with Jeff in these latter years. Jeff has an entirely expansive history of social justice concerns in which touched many, many communities.  

When I approached Jeff several months ago to participate in an oral history project that would anchor an Asian-Black Curriculum Initiative project, he was so supportive. Yet because of poor health, Jeff shared that he did not have the strength to seriously contribute with his experiences in this seminal social-political movement in which he played an important part.

His decision hit both of us hard — we were more saddened than disappointed knowing that we were on the verge of a loss.  We join with friends and family far and wide to say:  Jeffry Yuichi Tsuji, ¡Presente!