During a life’s journey from one side of the world to the other, Kazuko Ogawa Kimbrell repeatedly came face to face with prejudice, adversity and the risk of death.
Born into a wealthy Japanese family in China in 1930, she was, by turns, imprisoned and starved in a Chinese prison camp during World War II, reduced to begging in Japan during the desperate post-war period, and tormented by culture shock and racism as a war bride in rural Gwinnett County in the 1950s and ’60s.
Yet she faced those trials with grace, resilience, dedication to family and, most of all, hard work, said her daughter Vicky Kimbrell.
“She was too busy to hate,” said Kimbrell, an Atlanta attorney. “She always said you make your own happiness, and you choose to be happy.”
Kazuko Ogawa Kimbrell, 82, “Miss Kitty,” died from complications of a stroke on Oct. 15 at Halcyon Hospice in Atlanta. The body was cremated. Private memorial services are pending.
Kazuko Kimbrell was born in Shanghai, the daughter of a merchandiser for the Japanese military. The family enjoyed a large home and servants. But when suspected of disloyalty by the Chinese during World War II, the family was imprisoned and abused, said Kimbrell’s daughter.
“She told me a story once about being a part of a group hiding from the authorities. A mother was holding her baby to keep it from crying, because if it cried everybody would be discovered and killed. She ended up having to smother her baby.”
Released after the war, the family made their way to atomic-bomb-ravaged Nagasaki, their hometown. With everything gone, they were reduced to foraging for plant roots in radioactive rubble and begging the occupying Americans for food.
Life took a turn for the better when she met Harold Kimbrell, a U.S. Army soldier stationed in Japan during the Korean War. They married and came to the United States in 1954 to live with her husband’s sharecropper family in then-rural Dacula, later moving to Duluth.
Vicky Kimbrell said her mother told of living “in a cabin where you could look through the floorboards and see the chickens walking by.”
“Gwinnett County was country then. … There were some mean redneck racists who said very ugly things to her,” Vicky Kimbrell said. “And then there were kind people.”
“Some in my family called her ‘monkey’ and things like that,” Kimbrell said. “They’d do things like send her to the barn to get things they knew weren’t there, and then would laugh at her when she came back.”
Because folks weren’t familiar with Japanese pronunciations, Kazuko Kimbrell took up the moniker “Miss Kitty.”
She found comfort in bonding with three other Japanese women married to Americans — perhaps the only Asians in Gwinnett at the time. And she jumped feet-first into the newspaper delivery business.
“Miss Kitty was one hardworking lady,” said Bobby Baum of Atlanta, a family friend.
In her 30-plus years as a route manager for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, she often worked seven days a week, showing up at 2 a.m., then taking off in her van to deliver papers up and down Roswell Road from Paces Ferry Road to Alpharetta, her daughter said.
“Here she was, 5 feet tall and not even 100 pounds, and she’d be carrying these big bundles of papers into the stores and offices,” Vicky Kimbrell said. And if a customer called at odd hours with a delivery problem, Kazuko Kimbrell would get out of bed and fix it, the daughter said.
“She worked the day her father died. She worked the day my father died. She went to work. That was her thing,” said Vicky Kimbrell.
In retirement, an unable-to-sit-still Kimbrell moved to Biloxi for a time. Her granddaughter, Cory, recalls a grandmother who doted on her during many visits there and who was adventurous to boot.
“I remember one time we were on the road in Vidalia, Georgia. And we stopped at a place to eat and she decided to try a Vidalia onion slushy. And the rest of us were like, ‘Ewwww!’”
Kazuko Kimbrell was an inveterate writer and journal keeper from childhood, said her daughter. In 2002, those journals were included in a book at the behest of a Japanese group chronicling war brides. “Fifty Years in America, War Brides’ Stories” was available only in Japanese. But a 2002 AJC article about the book describes Kazuko Kimbrell as speaking in a “gentle, Dacula-bred drawl.”
She is survived by her daughter, Vicky; her granddaughter, Cory; and a brother and two sisters who live in Japan.
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