Rites Held for Bradley Aide Mas Kojima

Masamori (Mas) Kojima, a longtime civil rights activist who was Mayor Tom Bradley’s chief representative to Los Angeles’ Asian communities, was eulogized by his former boss Sunday as a friend still willing to work for the mayor’s reelection while he was on his deathbed.

“I think I’m going to die,” Bradley quoted his longtime aide in a conversation several days before Kojima died Dec. 10 of a heart condition at age 66. But in the next breath, Bradley recalled, Kojima got to the point:

“What can we do about the campaign?”

About 100 people, sporting buttons that read “I knew Masamori. Did you?” attended a memorial service for Kojima at the Japanese American Cultural and Community Center in the city’s Little Tokyo district.

According to several friends, Kojima planned Sunday’s service in the weeks before his death, inviting several of his friends, including Bradley, to speak. But he imposed only one rule--they could only speak for three minutes.

The speakers, however, ignored the admonition as they spoke of Kojima, whose activism dated back to 1939 when he was student body president at Roosevelt High School in Boyle Heights.

Asian community leader and retired businessman Togo Tanaka, for example, recalled how he and Kojima in the early 1960s edited a magazine called Scene in English, Japanese and Portuguese that caught the eye of an American admiral who fought in some of the Pacific’s bloodiest battles.

“We were losing money in what for us was dreadful amounts,” Tanaka recalled. “A letter arrived from a reader in Berkeley--(retired Navy admiral) Chester Nimitz.

“ ‘Keep up the good work,’ he wrote. ‘If we had more efforts like Scene before Pearl Harbor, perhaps we need not have fought a war.’ So we kept on publishing and losing our shirts.”

Former Deputy Mayor Maurice Weiner called Kojima a true “coalitionist,” praising the sometimes editor of several Japanese community newspaper for his ability to forge alliances with other ethnic groups. Kojima, he said, helped form a statewide group for liberal political policies.