Obituary: Public schoolteacher Rose Asao found, fostered a deep love of learning

As World War II loomed in 1941, Rose Asao caught the last boat from Tokyo to return to her Midwestern hometown.

If the upheaval upset her, no one ever knew it. Asao wasn't much for complaining.

"She never had anything negative to say," her daughter Kathleen said." I can't think of anything."

Neither could her son Philip, her daughter-in-law Joy, her dog-walker Carol Ellis or her longtime church friend Gen Olson.

Asao died June 14 after suffering a stroke in April. She was 94.

A second-generation immigrant and public schoolteacher, Asao gleaned a positive outlook through her parents' hard lives, according to her children. Born Rose Yanagita in 1922, she spent her childhood in Minot, N.D., where a group of Japanese-Americans sought refuge from American internment camps.

There, her parents owned a restaurant in the Grand Hotel. Business was booming, but they always strove to return to Japan. They moved back briefly in 1936, and Asao enrolled in Tamagawa Academy and University, outside of Tokyo.

"It was an amazing teaching experience for her," Philip said.

Her penchant for playing hooky aside, she adored school. "To be a good teacher would be the most gratifying way of spending my life," Asao wrote in an college application letter.

So when she returned North Dakota, Asao earned her bachelor's degree at Minot State, then enrolled in a program at the University of Minnesota the next year.

She dozed off in the class of instructor Ted Asao, who recently had fled an internment camp. The pair connected, and that accidental catnap led to 60 years of marriage and five children.

She earned her master's in education from the U in 1971, then taught in primary schools from 1971 to 1984. She valued proper diction and loved wordplay. "You never wanted to get her going on pig Latin," her daughter-in-law Joy said.

"It doesn't matter who said it, they got a look and they had to hear what they were saying wrong," Philip said.

Outside of school, Rose and Ted led Friday night Bible studies, where Olson, a former Minnesota state senator, would join about 15 to 20 people in their home in the '70s and '80s.

"They were just a wonderful couple," Olson said.

After her husband died in 2008, Asao and her daughter joined the Nikkei Project, a social gathering of second-generation Japanese Americans.

She reminisced about North Dakota and Japan "all the time," her children reported, and took up the Japanese art of sumi-e painting, or black ink painting, in retirement.

Ellis is also Japanese-American — her aunt caught the same boat home as Rose — but learning about Japanese culture after she was born in 1945 wasn't socially acceptable, she said. Over coffee, Asao helped Ellis fill that gap, teaching her Japanese words and culture.

"Rose taught me that a good teacher was a good encourager," Ellis said.