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California Library Hall of Fame

Kikue Ukai Fujii (1903-1978)

Kikue Ukai Fujii was a pioneer in California libraries in several ways. Working at the Oakland Public Library in the late 1920s and 1930s, she was among the earliest ethnic and disabled library employees in the state. Kikue Ukai was born in Oakland, California, in 1903 to florist Eiya Ukai and his wife Tsune. In her youth, she was injured in a roller-skating accident that left her deaf and blind in one eye. She attended the California School for the Deaf and Blind, graduating in 1922. Two years later she entered Gallaudet College for the deaf, one of the first Japanese Americans to do so.

Kikue Ukai began working at the Oakland Public Library in 1928 or 1929, and, according to news reports, she was the first Japanese American to be employed in a Pacific Coast public library. In 1930, she became a catalog typist, her primary position throughout her career. After librarianship became part of Oakland’s civil service system, Kikue Ukai took the catalog-typist exam in 1937, earning the highest score on the test. The New World Sun, a San Francisco-based Japanese American newspaper, lauded her achievement and stated that she was the first Japanese American on the West Coast to pass the exam. She also translated a small collection of 6 Japanese-language children’s books during her time at the Oakland Public Library. According to The New World Sun, this was the first such collection in a US public library. During her library career, Kikue Ukai regularly contributed literary columns and poetry to the Sun as well as to other Japanese American newspapers, which earned her the moniker of “Nisei Poetess.”

In 1940, Kikue Ukai married journalist Shuji Fujii and moved to Los Angeles, where she assisted her husband in the publication of his anti-fascist newspaper, Doho. As a consequence of Japan’s bombing of Pearl Harbor, in April 1942 she and her husband were imprisoned at the Santa Anita Assembly Center in Los Angeles County. They stayed there for three months before relocating to New York City, where they both worked for the Office of War Information. They remained in New York after the war, and Kikue Ukai Fujii passed away there in 1978.

Kikue Ukai Fujii was inducted into the California Hall of Fame in 2023

Sources “Japanese Books Given Library,” New World Sun, Aug. 19, 1939, p.7.

“Kikue Passes Exam for Librarians,” New World Sun, Aug. 21, 1937, p.7.

Schaufler, Elsie. Oakland Public Library, Oakland, California, Statistical Information for the Years July 1, 1926 – June 30, 1943 (Oakland, CA.: The Order Department, c1944).

Van Harmelen, Jonathan. “The Other Side of Doho: Kikue Ukai, Groundbreaking Deaf Writer and Editor,” Discover Nikkei (Aug. 10, 2021). https://discovernikkei.org/en/journal/2021/8/10/kikue-ukai