J-Sei Home Closes After 30 Years, Leaving Bay Area Japanese Seniors in Need

[This is the second story of a two-part project that explores the influence and importance of culture in end-of-life care. Part one was published Sunday.]

In late January, about a hundred people — mostly East Bay Japanese American community members — gathered at Sycamore Congregational Church in El Cerrito to honor Ruth Sato Fukuchi.

Fukuchi, a former microbiologist, was remembered for her youthful spirit and for being a consummate learner, even late in life. When she was in her mid-70s, she picked up the ukulele and played with the Sentimental Strummers band for seven years.

Fukuchi was 90 when she passed away in December at J-Sei Home, a small, tight-knit senior residential care facility in Hayward where she had performed with her ukulele group before she moved in herself in 2021.

For decades, Bay Area Japanese American families have sought culturally sensitive senior care facilities like J-Sei Home for aging loved ones. Community members said that about a decade ago, there were approximately 10 Japanese senior care homes in the region. Today, that number has declined by about half.

The most recent closure came in January, when the last residents of J-Sei Home moved out, and the facility permanently closed its doors after 30 years of operation.

A majority of the displaced residents were Japanese Americans in their 90s and had cognitive impairment.

“J-Sei Home was a very special place. The caregivers treated each resident like family,” said Matt Fukuchi, Fukuchi’s son, during his closing remarks at the memorial. “The quality of life that she had the last couple of years, she couldn’t have gotten that anywhere else.”

Families like the Fukuchis appreciated how their loved ones were cared for at J-Sei Home. They had tender caregivers who spoke Japanese. They ate familiar comfort foods like miso soup and pickled vegetables, and they participated in daily activities such as drum circles and singing Japanese songs.

Diane Wong, the executive director of J-Sei, an Emeryville-based Japanese American community organization that primarily serves seniors, said the decision to close their Hayward facility, one of its core services, was difficult but necessary.

“For the past 13, 14 years, we could never break even,” she said. “We weren’t getting enough people into the facility, costs are rising, and so we could see the future.”

In addition to financial challenges — notably, increased costs in staffing — Wong said that J-Sei Home’s closure could be attributed to significant demographic changes as the Japanese American population has become more diverse and acculturated.

After World War II, Bay Area Japanese American organizations formed to serve first-generation Japanese immigrants or the Issei generation.

Today, they’re at a crossroads because the needs of the community have shifted, forcing some organizations to adapt their original missions and shrinking certain services that used to be critical lifelines for the community.

A comfortable place to age

J-Sei Home’s origin traces back to two youth-led organizations that later merged to become J-Sei: East Bay Japanese for Action and East Bay Issei Housing, which were founded in the 1970s by the Sansei, or second-generation Japanese Americans.

Young Japanese American student activists in the Bay Area recognized the need for targeted social services for their immigrant elders. They were inspired by the community activism of the late 1960s when the Third World Liberation Front student strikes established ethnic studies departments at UC Berkeley and San Francisco State University.

“There was still a lot of racism and distrust,” Wong said. “A lot of young people involved saw their family members who needed help.”

Peter Horikoshi said that learning Asian American history as a UC Berkeley undergraduate and witnessing the groundswell of student movements opened his eyes to his own community’s needs.

“We clearly saw that we had a lot in common with African Americans, Latinos and Native Americans,” said Horikoshi, a 73-year-old Alameda resident, adding that he and his peers particularly drew inspiration from the Black Panther Party. “They were offering free [breakfast] for kids and really trying to help out their communities, and we thought that’s a good model to follow.”

Horikoshi was a founding member of EBJA, which began planning field trips for seniors in 1971, including ferry rides to Angel Island and picnics at Lake Temescal in Oakland.

Many of the elders who participated were survivors of World War II incarceration. Some were war brides, Japanese immigrant women who had married American servicemen and left their country and families behind. The women faced language barriers and social isolation, even within the Japanese community.

“We heard these stories over and over about how they worked so hard when they first came over,” Horikoshi said. “The Japanese American-established organizations at that time were really not doing that much for them either, and so we thought, ‘We’re young, and we have the time.’”

The East Bay Japanese American population was much more spread out compared to San Francisco, where Japantown served as a community anchor. In the East Bay, Japanese temples and churches were the community’s key congregation points until student activists united the organizations around the common cause of helping immigrant seniors.

The young organizers established Japanese American senior community centers in Berkeley, El Cerrito and Hayward. EBJA organizers also created bilingual services to help Japanese seniors navigate health and social programs. They began a meal program where seniors would enjoy lunches and socialize.

Then, the students turned to another critical need: housing.

In 1978, EBIH was formed to address housing security for Japanese seniors. Wong said community members complained that while there were some senior homes available, “the language, food and activities just didn’t mesh or feel comfortable for people.” Having lived through the racism of World War II, the seniors sought a safe and comfortable place to age.

“The whole approach of the work is to create something where people’s histories are celebrated, their sense of being is honored,” Wong said.

Robert Sakai, one of EBIH’s co-founders, became aware of the lack of community housing for Japanese seniors when his mother’s friend had a hard time finding a place to live. As a young real estate lawyer, he met with other concerned organizers and formed EBIH to consolidate resources to establish a senior housing program.

“We felt that we needed to recruit the JACL chapters and Japanese American churches in Alameda and Contra Costa counties,” Sakai said, referring to the Japanese American Citizens League. “As far as I know, that was the first time that the East Bay Japanese American community was united to work on anything, much less a single real estate project.”

Sakai and others recruited 23 Japanese American organizations to raise money to purchase a property in Hayward, which became an affordable senior housing site that was designed and tailored for low-income Japanese elders. Years later, the group purchased a smaller ranch-style home across the street to address the needs of Japanese seniors who could not live independently. In 1994, the building that became J-Sei Home opened.

‘The family’s getting smaller’

When vascular dementia and other medical issues led Fukuchi to require extensive assisted living services in 2021, J-Sei Home was an obvious choice. Multiple generations of the Fukuchi family had already been active in the J-Sei community. Fukuchi participated in the organization’s social activities, and her husband, Tak, was a driver for J-Sei’s meal delivery program.

The exorbitant costs and burden of round-the-clock senior caregiving can be overwhelming for any family member, especially when the senior’s quality of life depends on access to familiar cultural comforts.

Cathy Fukuchi-Wong, Fukuchi’s daughter, said she’s eternally grateful that the J-Sei Home caregivers could provide for her mother in ways she could not.

“My mom did express several times that she wanted to come live with me. But the reality is, there’s no way we could’ve done that because she needed so much care,” Fukuchi-Wong said.

Fukuchi lived at J-Sei Home for three years. Her daughter said the personalized caregiving provided by the staff allowed her to enjoy her mother and be present. Fukuchi had almost daily visits from her son, Matt Fukuchi, and Fukuchi-Wong, who commuted to Hayward from their respective homes in San Ramon and Marin.

While he sympathizes with J-Sei Home’s financial concerns, Matt Fukuchi said he was upset initially when he learned of the decision to close.

“I was wondering why they didn’t try to find someone else to operate it because it seemed like there were families that were interested in having their parents go to J-Sei,” he said.

But Wong asserts there’s been declining interest in J-Sei Home in recent years. She cited an organizational survey that was sent to over 550 active J-Sei members in 2024, which gauged whether they needed a facility like J-Sei Home in the future. A majority said no.

Wong said J-Sei is now focusing on home delivery meals to address food security for Asian seniors in the East Bay and providing more support for family caregivers. She said the shift makes sense to meet the community’s current needs.

“The cost factor is going to be a big challenge for society in general,” Wong said, referring to senior care. “How are we going to do this at home? What’s the role of the family? We know that public systems of funding aren’t really keeping up with the need.”

Families said that J-Sei Home’s costs were significantly more affordable compared to other traditional care homes. Fukuchi-Wong told KQED that the direct, culturally sensitive care her mother received was “a steal” for what they paid.

After J-Sei announced the closure, residents and their families were given about five months to find an alternate facility. Before her mother’s death, Fukuchi-Wong anxiously toured homes around the Bay Area.

“I hit the bricks,” said Fukuchi-Wong, who described the search to find a facility similar to J-Sei Home as a struggle. “Some of those places are pretty ragged and so it was hard to see some of the conditions where these people lived.”

Fukuchi-Wong said her mother needed to engage in social activities and eat traditional foods that would suit her appetite. Fukuchi-Wong’s first choice was Kimochi Home in San Mateo, another Japanese culturally sensitive senior care home, but there was a 40-person waiting list.

Fukuchi noticed that her J-Sei Home friends were starting to move out. Caregivers and families shared emotional and tearful goodbyes as residents left.

“The family’s getting smaller,” Fukuchi, who began eating less and sleeping more, said to her daughter.

She was one of the last residents at the facility before she passed away.

Ron Salvador, the former administrator of J-Sei Home, spoke to KQED about a week after J-Sei announced the home’s closure. He expressed concern about the future care of the residents. He said that at J-Sei Home, the caregiver-to-resident ratio was almost one-to-one.

“It’s just sad when you see a specialty facility like this close down. It affects the whole community,” Salvador told KQED in October. “We’re worried about [the residents] because they became a family here.”

J-Sei assisted residents as they searched for new facilities and navigated moving logistics. By January, most of them had moved into traditional assisted living facilities.

At 101, Kazue Granich was J-Sei Home’s oldest resident and lived there for over seven years. Though she was mostly quiet, she was known for being the loudest karaoke singer. She relocated to RN3 Loving Care Homes, a senior assisted living facility in the El Cerrito hills.

While visiting her mother’s new home from out of town, Granich’s daughter, Sandy Granich, told a KQED reporter that Granich appeared to be skinnier and not as talkative as she used to be. One of her brothers, who is local and visits more often, had warned Sandy that their mother had grown quieter and more listless since leaving J-Sei Home.

When asked how the facility compared to J-Sei Home, Sandy Granich said, “I feel like there was more camaraderie over there,” as she scanned RN3’s living room where other nearby residents sat quietly and alone.

A niche in the world of senior care

On a recent morning in San Francisco, a dozen seniors — most of them in their 90s — played a bean bag toss game, cheering for one another as part of their daily 10 a.m. activity at Kimochi Home’s Japantown location. The Japanese senior care facility opened in 1983, about a decade before J-Sei Home.

The seniors sat in a circle, and one by one — with the help of staff members and a volunteer — they shuffled or pushed their walkers to the center of the circle to play.

“Rooting each other on during the activities and building that sense of community … that’s really important and the foundation of what Kimochi Home wanted to be,” said Linda Ishii, the home’s director of residential services.

Ishii is a San Francisco Japantown native who has worked with Kimochi for over two decades. She said the seniors at Kimochi Home are mostly Nisei, or second generation, and Shin-Issei, Japanese immigrants who arrived in the U.S. after World War II. The oldest Kimochi resident is 106.

The two-story building is cozy and light-filled. There is a dedicated space for activities and exercise, TV lounges play Japanese-language programming and the walls are adorned with traditional Japanese decorations.

Most of the residents are Japanese, but Ishii said Kimochi occasionally has residents who are Black, Latino, Filipino and other races and ethnicities. Though the focus of Kimochi Home is providing care for Japanese and Japanese Americans, Ishii said any senior can benefit from their care.

“That is our niche in the whole world of senior care,” Ishii said. “It is focused on the care their loved one is receiving and if they’re going to feel comfortable within the space.”

She said she was saddened to learn of J-Sei Home’s recent closure and provided tours to a few of the families looking for a new home for their seniors.

“It’s always a loss to the community as a whole to have such a well-established home close,” Ishii said.

After their morning activity, the seniors transitioned to chair exercises, where they watched Radio Taiso, a Japanese exercise program on TV. The residents alternated between seated stretches and raising their arms in unison until it was time for lunch.

The residents slowly made their way to the dining room, shuffling down a hallway in a line, some with their walkers, as staff members waited patiently nearby to assist as needed.

“Nothing moves fast around here,” Ishii said with a laugh. “There will come a time when they can no longer do it, so it takes them a while to get down the hall, but they’re doing it. That’s the most important thing, to let them have the ability to know that they can do it.”

Like J-Sei Home, Kimochi Home also faces rising costs and staffing challenges that were accelerated during the pandemic. She said keeping the home afloat is a balancing act because the facility is dedicated to keeping rates low to remain accessible to the community. Costs are out-of-pocket at Kimochi Home, as they were for J-Sei Home.

Ishii said that she still fields calls daily from families who are looking for a place for their Japanese elders. There are dozens of people on waitlists for both Kimochi Home locations.

Ishii remains committed to her work, which she said is her way of giving back to elders who “paved the way for us to be here.”

She considers it her responsibility.

“If we see that we’re not getting contacted by families and seniors anymore, then it’s time to look at something else or try to transform to a different program … but I’m hoping that’s many, many, many years down the road.”

Photographer Juliana Yamada contributed to this story.