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Yoshi's celebrates 40th year
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Monday August 20, 2012
San Francisco Chronicle
Yoshi’s celebrates 40th year
by Lee Hildebrand
Jazz was not on the agenda when Kaz Kajimura and Yoshie Akiba, both immigrants from Japan, decided to open a modest 32-seat Japanese restaurant a block from the UC Berkeley campus 40 years ago this month. She waited tables while Hiro Hori, their original third partner, did the cooking. Kajimura would stop by after his job as a reporter at United Press International – a wire service for which he now admits he rewrote stories from The Chronicle, Examiner and other local newspapers and sent them directly to radio stations in “my broken English” – to bus tables and wash dishes. He also did the plumbing and carpentry work.
Akiba had fallen in love with jazz as a child while visiting a U.S. naval base near the Japanese orphanage where she was raised – her father had died in a Russian prisoner-of-war camp in Siberia, and her mother died of tuberculosis – but Kajimura knew nothing about the music. He would prove to be a quick learner, however.
The couple, who married in 1976 and divorced 11 years later, are today equal partners in two of the world’s most renowned jazz nightclubs, one at 510 Embarcadero West near Jack London Square in Oakland, the other at 1330 Fillmore St. in San Francisco. Both are named Yoshi’s, in honor of Akiba, whose first name is pronounced “yo-she-eh.” Kajimura handles the day-to-day business, usually working from 9 a.m. to 1 p.m. in Oakland and from 2 to 10 or 11 p.m. in San Francisco. She drops by the Oakland club from time to time, especially to dance if there’s a Latin jazz band playing.
“Her dancing reminded me of the Summer of Love-type of thing,” says Latin-jazz percussionist John Santos, who first played the club in the early 1980s when it was a 40-by-40-foot bar above the restaurant’s second location on Claremont Avenue in North Oakland. “She just floats out there by herself and does her thing, still to this day.”
Over the past 32 years, the Oakland musician has played in all four locations of Yoshi’s music venues: upstairs on Claremont, downstairs at the 200-seat showroom that Kajimura helped construct in 1985, at the current 350-seat Oakland club that opened in 1997 and at the 400-capacity San Francisco club that opened in 2007. (Oakland has a 220-seat restaurant and San Francisco a 180-seat restaurant and a 100-seat lounge.) Santos’ sextet, with Cuban percussionist Orestes Vilato and guest vocalist Kenny Washington, will headline a free outdoor festival celebrating the business’ 40th anniversary from noon to 5 p.m. August 26 on the Jack London Square waterfront.
Read the full article here
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