Alice Takemoto Obituary

Alice Takemoto, a concert pianist who was among the 120,000 people of Japanese descent who were incarcerated by the U.S. government during the Second World War, died in her sleep at home in Kensington, Md., on Jan. 6. She was 99.

She began taking piano lessons at three in Garden Grove, Calif., and started playing concerts at six, identified by the Los Angeles Times as a "crippled Japanese child genius" due to knee surgery that left one leg shorter than the other. She was a high school senior when the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Her parents were arrested without cause by the F.B.I., leaving her and three older sisters to get rid of all their possessions, including their dog, before being sent to the Santa Anita racetrack, where they lived in a horse stable. Their mother was allowed to rejoin them before they were sent to a "relocation camp" called Jerome in Southeast Arkansas, where they lived in tar-paper barracks behind barbed wire fences patrolled by armed guards. Their father was reunited with the family after being imprisoned for nearly a year in a Justice Department camp in Lordsburg, New Mexico.

Alice was allowed to leave in August 1943 to attend the Oberlin Conservatory, to which she was devoted for the rest of her life. After graduation she studied in Philadelphia with Olga Samaroff Stokowski, a renowned teacher, before moving to Washington, D.C., where her parents worked as domestics. She met and married Kenneth Takemoto, who served as a combat medic with the Japanese-American 100th Infantry Battalion/442nd Regimental Combat Team, the most decorated unit per person in U.S. military history.

They bought the house in Kensington in 1955, where she raised two children while concertizing and giving piano lessons, which she called her most fulfilling work. She loved to play chamber music, knit, sew and weave, and also learned to play the violin at 80. She cared intensely about her many friends and said she hoped they would celebrate her life, which she called, with a big smile, "quite a ride."

She is survived by her son, Paul (Lisa) Takemoto, her daughter, Ruth McInroy, three grandchildren, Ben Takemoto, Molly Takemoto and Kara (Vinnie) Peterson, and one great-grandchild, Kaia Peterson.

A memorial service will be held at Cedar Lane Unitarian Universalist Congregation, 9601 Cedar Lane, Bethesda, on April 18 at 2 p.m. Donations may be made in her memory to the Oberlin Conservatory by visiting https://advance.oberlin.edu/ or JSSA Hospice at www.jssa.org/donate/.