Kyoko Bettinger

Kyoko Bettinger died on September 21 peacefully in her home in Lakewood, Washington. She was 94 years of age. She is survived by her daughter, Janet; her oldest son Tom, his wife Sue, and their children Jaci and Dillon; and her youngest son Chris, his wife Mary, and their children Ruby and Oliver.

Kyoko was born Kyoko Nakamura in the eastern metropolitan district (Higashi-cho) of Aichi Prefecture, Japan. She was still a baby when her family moved to Sasebo, Nagasaki Prefecture, in search of opportunity. Sasebo was where she grew up, developing a lifelong love of the waterfront and animals (who she often preferred to people).

Kyoko and her brother, Motoyoshi, had a happy childhood shielded from the tumult of business deals and other activities by their mother, who was the same rock for her children as Kyoko would be for hers. The war was difficult for Kyoko and her family. By 1944, bombing of Sasebo had become regular. When air raid sirens went off, teachers would send children within a fifteen minute walk of school home; the rest would shelter at the school. Kyoko, a half hour's walk away, lied about how close her home was. As she later said, if she was going to die, she certainly didn't want to die away from home.

As a teenager, Kyoko went to work after the war to bring in much needed money for her family. She worked at a joint restaurant and tailor shop, learning both how to cook new things and how to tailor clothes. After discovering how quick she was, especially with numbers, the owners of the businesses tapped Kyoko to be their de facto bookkeeper.

It was in the tailor shop that Kyoko met LeRoy Bettinger, a soldier in the US Army and the man she would go on to marry. He had come in looking to buy a suit; Kay and Lee, as they would be known from that point forward, shared a love of looking sharp. They married in 1954 and had their first child, Janet, on October 3, 1955.

After Janet's birth, Kay and Lee went on a whirlwind tour of the world courtesy of the US Army. For the next sixteen years, they were never in one spot for more than eighteen months. The first stop for Kyoko was Kansas. She came with an imagination full of images from the Westerns she watched as a kid in Japan; she wondered if she'd see the dusty streets and menacing American Indians on the hilltops that were ubiquitous to those films. As she later said, Kansas wasn't a Western, but there were some things that lived up to their Hollywood versions - no gunslinging sheriffs swaggering around town, but a landscape that was endless flat plains and horizons.

With Lee being sent ahead of her most often, Kyoko had to pack up the household on her own to Germany and Illinois and Texas and Thailand and Minnesota, with a couple of stints back in Japan as well. It was a lot and it gave her a hatred of air travel that took a few decades to dissipate. But the household always arrived in good shape - kids happy, things safely put out in a new place, and all the myriad details of relocating handled. It was only later in life that her children came to understand how much she had done, so steadily, and with such competence to make their transitions easy.

In West Germany, Kay and Lee had their second child, Thomas, on August 30, 1959. Postwar Germany felt a lot like Japan to Kyoko. She secured documentation on Tom's birth from the local government by bringing a can of coffee to the magistrate; in some ways, she was in familiar waters. But Germany was also an adventure. She and Lee toured the continent when they could, seeing Alsace, Lichtenstein, and Switzerland. Always a lover of food, Kyoko discovered the joy of well-made schnitzel, wurst, and sauerkraut. In 1961, just as they were preparing to leave West Germany, the Berlin Crisis occurred, cancelling all leaves. When they got the news, Kay and Lee turned to one another and said, "well, this will be interesting."

Travel and family kept Kyoko busy but, a philosopher by nature, she also thought a lot about the larger meaning of life. She began to study Catholicism, eventually adopting it as her faith. Although individual clergy often disappointed her (notable was one priest who chose to admonish her for not attending church more often when Janet was just five and Tom an infant rather than offer any support), Catholicism as a way of thinking about moral questions was important to her, particularly in rather dark times in her life.

An ectopic pregnancy almost took her life in the early 1960s, and Kay and Lee believed they would have no more children. However on January 21, 1966, Christopher, their last child was born. Bouncing between Japan when Lee was deployed for the Vietnam War, Thailand, and three very different US states made life anything but dull.

Kay and Lee finally settled in Lakewood, Washington where Lee retired in 1973. Kyoko found the area beautiful and went about building a stable and comfortable life there. The house, a fixer-upper to be sure, had a ridiculously large yard which she slowly shaped over time. (By the time she finally sold the house in 2023, she had crafted a beautiful landscape that was a primary selling point.)

Unfortunately, life in Lakewood didn't prove to be easy; financial woes took a toll on the family. Kyoko, having successfully seen all three of her children off to college and careers by the end of the 1980s as well as welcoming her first grandchild, Jacquelyn, into her life, found herself facing the very real prospect of losing her home.

Rolling up her sleeves, Kyoko went to work at an entry level job at Target. Dismayed by the poor work ethic of her much younger colleagues and the amount of petty theft perpetrated by customers, Kyoko took pride in doing her job well and never giving in to the dysfunction around her. With her modest earnings, she managed to save her house from creditors and even tucked a bit of money away in Target stock, a good move in the 1990s. When she retired in 1996, her manager, offering her a promotion at a new store if she'd stay on, told her "you know, sometimes I feel like all I need is you and one security guard to run the whole store."

After she retired, Kyoko had more time to spend with Jaci and her newest grandchild, Dillon. There were still plenty of challenges to be sure, but life settled into a better groove for a decade. Kyoko often enjoyed time with Janet who lived nearby and grew as a source of support for the rest of her life. Then, in the early 2010s, Lee's health began to deteriorate. Kyoko, with help from Janet, worked tirelessly to keep him comfortable and entertained until his dying days. When he finally succumbed to his illness, Kyoko was at his side weeping, the only time her sons had ever seen her cry.

At age 87, Kyoko finally had no one to look after. She turned her energy back to her house and yard, catching up on neglected repairs and improving an already magnificent yard. And, despite vowing never to set foot on a plane again, she began to travel, visiting Chris and Mary and her youngest grandchildren, Ruby and Oliver, in San Francisco. In her 90th year, she walked across the Golden Gate Bridge from San Francisco to Marin County; a small band of construction workers cheered her on as she stepped off the bridge on the Marin side. The following year, she travelled to Las Vegas on a family outing to take in shows and slots. That was also the year she finally decided to sell her house and move in with Janet, who did an amazing job caring for her and keeping her life filled with mini-adventures. The year after that, it was Vancouver for gardens and good Chinese food.

Healthy until her last three months of life, her lifelong distrust of doctors proved prescient as a series of misdiagnoses and malinformed treatments put her in severe discomfort. Choosing to stop eating rather than let doctors continue to experiment on her, Kyoko laid down her life in difficult circumstances, but in a manner that reflected the self-reliance and discipline that had defined her life.

Despite her life being a series of challenges, Kyoko always sought the light and laughter. No written account can ever capture her humor and ability to poke fun at foolish people and the absurdities of life, but no one who met her will ever forget those qualities. In every dark episode, she chose kindness and caring over bitterness. Her family is heartbroken, but comforted by her remarkable legacy.

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